One Man’s ‘Warmth of Collectivism’ Is Another’s Inferno

By Noah Rothman

Friday, January 02, 2026

 

Those New Yorkers who didn’t cast a ballot for Zohran Mamdani in the city’s mayoral primary race — which is hardly a modest constituency — might have taken some solace from the new mayor’s inaugural address.

 

That speech was no overture toward Mamdani’s skeptics. Just the opposite, in fact: The mayor repeatedly insisted that he would not yield in his efforts to advance the revolution in rising expectations among the city’s supposed proletarians, among other prospective revolutions. Those declarations were festooned with cloying metaphors and turns of phrase that should embarrass the cursorily literate. Throughout the address, Mamdani exerted himself in his pursuit of transcendent prose, swinging for the rafters at the end of every other paragraph.

 

The mayor dismissed the winter weather, noting that he and his listeners were “warmed against the January chill by the resurgent flame of hope.” He eschewed gentility and courtesy. “For too long, those fluent in the good grammar of civility have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty,” read one of Mamdani’s more labored constructions. He secured the online virality he clearly sought, albeit for all the wrong reasons, when he extolled the virtues of socialism as a remedy to the primacy of the individual. “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism,” Mamdani declared.

 

The nauseating draft managed to marry the gauzy romanticism of America’s aged flower children with the monomania of the Red Guards. It is a small comfort that the authors of that speech appear to genuinely believe true socialism has never been tried or else they would not have exhumed from their deserving graves so many threadbare socialist nostrums that reached their sell-by date on December 26, 1991. It’s not unreasonable to expect that this collection will prove to be about as good at governing as they are at speechwriting. Indeed, Mamdani himself tended with care to the trap he and his speechwriters set for his administration.

 

In his address, the mayor chided the unnamed doubters who said that he should manage the sky-high expectations he himself had set. “The only expectation I seek to reset is that of small expectations,” Mamdani declared. “Beginning today, we will govern expansively and audaciously.” He would make New York City into a place where “there is no need too small to be met, no person too sick to be made healthy.” Indeed, in pledging to “govern without shame,” Mamdani made perhaps the only promise that he is all but certain to fulfill.

 

His messianism notwithstanding, Mamdani has already compromised. He threw the anti-police reformers in his camp under the bus by retaining Jessica Tisch as police commissioner, and he bucked the teachers’ unions by abandoning his plan to surrender mayoral control of the city’s schools. There will be more compromises to come.

 

As each of Mamdani’s predecessors, from at least Fernando Wood on, gleaned through bitter experience, New York City politics revolve around cops and commerce. Those interests dictate terms to Gracie Mansion, not the other way around. Whatever other expectations Mamdani seeks to inculcate in his voters, city residents want the boroughs to be a place where they can safely prosper. All the myriad city services Mamdani expects Albany to pay for won’t paper over the city’s discontent if public safety and economic opportunity are sacrificed by a utopian project in a hurry.

 

But while Mamdani has compromised a lot and will compromise further still, it has been clear for some time that he will not countenance an accommodation with Israel and American Zionists.

 

In a flurry of executive activity following his swearing in, the new mayor invalidated all of former Mayor Eric Adams’s executive orders issued after September 26, 2024 — the day on which Adams was indicted on a variety of corruption charges. That may sound like an exercise in good governance, but it just so happened to capture a variety of initiatives aimed at combating antisemitism. Among them, the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism (generally regarded as the international standard) as the city’s legal lodestar.

 

That may seem insignificant, but it contributes to a troubling trend. Mamdani’s executive order reverses the proscription that prevented city officials from boycotting goods and services produced inside the Jewish State. The move coincided with the Mamdani office’s decision to scrub the mayor’s city-owned social media account of Adams-era statements relating to the creation of the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism. The office itself has not been mothballed, but its director, Rabbi Moshe Davis, has so far heard nothing from Mamdani’s team that indicates he will be retained in his role.

 

Ominous stuff. But it is in keeping with the mayor’s dedication to his anti-Zionist mission, to which he has shown far more commitment than he has to nebulous collectivism. He spent his time on the campaign trail promoting discredited falsehoods about genocide in Gaza and apartheid in Israel. He could not bring himself to endorse a legislative resolution condemning the Holocaust lest it ratify the legitimacy of Israel’s existence. He glutted his transition team with outright bigots whose bigotry leans conspicuously in one particular direction.

 

It’s hard to think of a locale with a history, social covenant, and commercial culture more inimical to socialism than New York City. Mamdani and his cadre of fellow travelers will encounter one immovable obstacle after another in their quest to engineer a revolution from above. The city’s Jewish population has no such assurances. Their experience has been a torment that is bound to get worse as the rabble in the streets take heart in the belief that one of their own is in charge now.

 

The warmth Mamdani imagines from collectivism’s embrace is recalled less fondly by more historically grounded New Yorkers. To them, it is the warmth generated by torchlit marches, book burnings, and crematoria. Mamdani will encounter soon enough a challenge from the anti-Israel left that will test his commitment to the safety of all New Yorkers. So far, Mamdani has provided every indication that he will side with the former over the latter.