The "frigitity" of collectivism and real sources of warmth

Now New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani pledged to replace “the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” It was a bit surprising that “the Zohran” employed the term “collectivism” instead of the word effusively and loosely employed by political and ministerial do-gooders, “community.”  Perhaps he thought the latter sounded too much like “communism.” 

His political soulmate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, was savvy enough to cloak her government-centered paradise in the image of a “village” -- which in most minds conjures up visions of a largely rural setting with a few hundred homes inhabited by families gathered around the warmth of a fireplace and by individuals who voluntarily assist neighbors that mostly attend three or four different houses of worship, shop at local stores, and are acquainted with the village banker. 

Of course that’s not what HRC really had in mind, her preference being ecologically-dictated, city-centered, government-subsidized apartments with as few “nuclear families” as demographically possible.  Recall the Obama utopia provided in his (and doubtless Hillary’s) “Life of Julia” cartoon.  This “villager” was an independent yuppie who focused first on her career as a web designer, had a single child at 31 (with no husband or father mentioned), later starts her own business, and then retires at 67. Finally, supported by social security and Obamacare, she begins volunteering at a community garden, presumably seeking a little human warmth or perhaps doing penance.  

Mamdani’s tendentious alternatives, of course, mischaracterize both options.  “Rugged individualism” was a characteristic of a few pioneers who acted as Giants in the Earth, but even most of these heroes depended on families for warmth and succor.  What Mamdani disparages, in truth, are folks, largely in families, who are self-sufficient.  Even a “village” that takes care of its own affairs is unwelcome in “the Zohran’s” eyes.  Indeed, it was the prevalence of voluntary associations, not “rugged individualism” that impressed the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville as he traversed America in the age of Jackson. “Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite....  Americans use associations to give fetes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools.”  This communal self-sufficiency is Mamdani’s nightmare.  What he aspires to see is dependence on government and absolute power in his own manicured Red hands.

Unfortunately for America, its habit of communal self-sufficiency is no longer a defining characteristic, as the desire for Washington D.C. to pay for or provide goods and services for lone individuals and favored groups has grown exponentially -- something Tocqueville called the danger of  “democratic despotism” lurking in the nation’s future thanks to a dissolution of its religiously-based moral fiber.  Instead of exhibiting any brand of “rugged individualism,” most Americans are painfully aware that they now exist within a largely corporate techno-culture enervated by mass immigration and slouching toward globalism.  Such a social order, as the politics of Minnesota, California, and New York illustrate, is ripe for the deceptive “warmth” of collectivist rhetoric.  As for the frigid individualism of Mamdani’s fantasies, it now takes the form of Bowling Alone.   

Ayn Rand, who experienced the expropriating “warmth” of Lenin’s collectivist society before moving to America in 1926, observed that “[s]ocialism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.”  “Frigidity” is a term that accurately attaches to that dehumanizing doctrine whose warmth is often obtained only by emaciated bodies huddled together in a Siberian concentration camp.  Less dramatically, one might picture the “frigidity” of an impersonal crowd seated uncomfortably in a large, drab one-room facility waiting for their assigned numbers to be broadcast by a score of bureaucrats assigned duties behind individual windows at the Department of Motor Vehicles.  Without a return to the warmth of personal moral responsibility within the confines of families and local communities, the continued expansion of that DMV experience to our broader “collective” society will likely continue apace while only privileged comrades in Gracie Mansions around the country enjoy the non-collective perk of bidets in their washrooms.