Socialism

Is the United States a capitalist country, where bosses exploit workers, or is it a great empire, where colonists exploit subject peoples? American socialists and social democrats were never quite able to decide. “There are people who are very big into diversity but whose views end up being not particularly sympathetic to working people, whether they’re white or black or Latino,” Bernie Sanders told GQ magazine in 2019. Yet he would also say that: “When you're white, you don't know what it's like to be living in a ghetto. You don't know what it's like to be poor. You don't know what it's like to be hassled when you walk down the street.” In 2026 Sanders is an emeritus figure, and the “imperial” idea has won out.

The philosopher David Hume warned us not to mistake “constant conjunction” for causation. It’s good advice, though it is not the sort of universal disturbance in the force that some philosophers, eager to jettison old certitudes, believe it to be. Hume himself eventually rejected that “pretended skepticism” as a juvenile affectation. Like the rest of us, he recognized that reasoning from induction, from observed realities, introduces us to that great guide in the cognitive adventure of life – probability. Don’t let the appearance of a black swan down under disturb you: good mental hygiene and faith in the soundness of inductive reasoning go together. I indulge in this preliminary expectoration (apologies to Søren Kierkegaard) because I arrived in London on June 22.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed three fellow socialists in the New York City Democratic Congressional primaries and all three won last night. Democratic incumbent Dan Goldman lost to Brad Lander, who was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America until 2023. DSA Member Claire Valdez won nomination for a Brooklyn House seat. But the eyepopper is the victory of Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old DSA member and PhD graduate student, in East Harlem and the Bronx. She defeated Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and will easily become the most radical House member since Vito Marcantonio of the American Labor Party represented the same area in the 1940s.

“Woke is officially DEAD,” Donald Trump announced last summer. That has been a common refrain since the 2024 election: the anti-western, anti-white, pro-transgender ideology is over. The excesses of left-wing radicalism have been rejected. Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth. We’re all still living under the yoke of woke. Just look at Chicago. Over the Memorial Day weekend, 38 people were injured by gunfire and two were shot dead. Five police officers were hurt when a car drove into a crowd amid widespread disorder. This happened in a city where the Democratic mayor, Brandon Johnson, promised to defund the police.

One of the things I admire about Zohran Mamdani is his candor. You know where you stand with him. Mamdani, who was sworn in a few days ago by Senator Bernie Sanders as New York’s first Muslim mayor and also its first avowedly socialist mayor, makes no bones about his ambitions. He was elected as a “democratic socialist,” he said, and he intends to govern as one. “We will,” he said in the most commented upon phrase from his inauguration speech, “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” “The warmth of collectivism.” If you are not a political simpleton or a conniving totalitarian (or, as often happens, both), that phrase should send a shiver down your spine.

William F. Buckley Jr. once quipped that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. New York City is about to be governed by the Columbia University student body. A city that used to think of itself as grown up has just elected a mayor who seems the very embodiment of the American college student: uninformed, entitled and self-important, enjoying a regal quality of life that depends parasitically upon a civilization about which he knows nothing, yet for which he has nothing but scorn. American college students regularly act out little psychodramas of oppression before an appreciative audience of diversity deanlets and associate vice-provosts of inclusion and belonging.

After nearly two decades of reign over Bolivia, the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party was banished at the ballot box on August 17. Its fall is a dramatic political realignment to the right for Bolivians, and a rare opportunity for the United States to reform relations with a geopolitically critical nation. As one expert, Leonardo Coutinho, told us, “The Trump administration can not only contribute to the restoration of democracy but also play a central role in dismantling a fully functioning narco-state.” Despite its 25 percent inflation rate and a 93 percent debt-to-GDP ratio, Bolivia is rich in natural resources, boasting some of the world’s largest lithium reserves, making it an attractive target for both American and Chinese grand strategies.

Zohran Mamdani’s presumptive victory will make history: if elected in November, he will become New York’s first Muslim and first Indian-American mayor. Powering his win in the Democratic primaries was a massive surge of young, urban, progressive voters changing the city’s political future. But beneath the energy and hope lies something more troubling: a generational embrace of a politics of entitlement, poised to undermine not only the city’s finances but also the values that have historically bound together American civic life. The city’s youth voting base turned out in force: voters aged 18–29 gave Mamdani the win.

Bolivia is to be treated to a nail-biting run-off this autumn between two conservatives in the race to be the next president after the spectacular collapse of the socialist movement that has dominated the landlocked state for the past twenty years. A presidential race between two right-wingers is unusual in Latin America whose countries in recent years has been largely run by democratically elected leftists after the fall of the brutal military dictatorships that ruled so many states in the 1970s and 1980s. The second round of Bolivia’s presidential race will be decided on October 19th between the veteran former President Jorge "Tuto" Quiroga, 65, who gained 26 percent of the poll, and his center-right rival Rodrigo Paz Pereira, 57.

From college campuses to the media, socialism is increasingly getting repackaged as a solution to every problem: homelessness, housing, policing and education. For a generation grappling with high rent, student debt and political distrust, the collectivist utopia may sound like the moral, modern choice. But it isn't – and this year’s Socialism 2025 conference in Chicago proved just why it is doomed to failure. The conference brought together scholars, activists and self-styled revolutionaries to sketch out what a “just” society might look like. The vision was as radical as it was impractical.

It should come as no surprise that Zohran Mamdani’s surprise victory in last week’s Democratic primary for mayor of New York was celebrated so vociferously by the French far left. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI) regard the 33-year-old Socialist as a chip off the old block. In a post on X Mélenchon delighted in Mamdani’s defeat of Andrew Cuomo, saying: "Opposed to the genocide of the Palestinians, he is obviously already accused of anti-Semitism. He won against a figurehead of the centre-left backed by the local leaders of the cheating Democratic party." As in France, continued Mélenchon, the "traditional" left no longer speaks to the people; it is the radical left.