CIJR | Canadian Institute for Jewish Research
L'institut Canadien de Recherches sur le Judaisme

Analysis

The Scholar Who Saw Zohran Mamdani Coming in 2003

Der Demokrat Zohran Mamdani gewann überraschend die Vorwahlen für das Bürgermeisteramt in New York City. | Heute.at
SOURCE: Heute.at
Der Demokrat Zohran Mamdani gewann überraschend die Vorwahlen für das Bürgermeisteramt in New York City. | Heute.at SOURCE: Heute.at

 

Daniel Shuchman

WSJ, Aug. 5, 2025

“Mr. Kors’s warnings about education have proved, if anything, understated. No wonder free rent and profitless prosperity resonate with a generation that knows little of collectivist calamities, or of what made unprecedented social and economic progress in capitalistic societies possible.”

Why has socialism remained resilient as a political ideal? How can a socialist candidate be the front-runner in the race for mayor of America’s largest and ostensibly most capitalist city? Other candidates across the country have embraced the label, often softened by a soothing “democratic” prefix. What was once a disqualifying ideological association in the U.S. can make a candidate seem cool to many voters, especially young ones.

More than two decades ago, a historian of political thought predicted that, notwithstanding the triumph of free enterprise, “it will not be difficult . . . for socialism to change its now quaint name a bit” and revive government economic control into a newly compelling “political, economic, and ultimately cultural agenda.”

Since American children and college students weren’t being taught what happened under actual socialist regimes, it was only a matter of time before simplistic slogans attacking private property, billionaires and “profits before people,” would be successfully revived by a smooth-talking demagogue.

In a 2002 paper and a 2003 speech for the Atlas Society, Alan Charles Kors, now an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania, foretold how and why this could happen. ….SOURCE

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