Suppose socialism came to New York City for the long term. What would life look like under a leadership wholly committed to that vision?
I acknowledge that this will likely never happen. Too many legal and political obstacles stand in the way. Property rights remain sacrosanct and propertied interests too powerful to dislodge, and cities aren’t autonomous political bodies. The human material may also be lacking: any elected leader could prove an incompetent lightweight, unable to translate ideological commitment into practical governance.
But let’s wave all that aside and conduct a thought experiment. Imagine, in some parallel universe, a brilliant and effective socialist mayor who sweeps into office in a landslide—and discovers, to his amazement, that no higher authority, local or national, stands in his way. We don’t need to strain our imaginations: socialism has been tried before, and sharper minds than mine have analyzed the results. The recommended guide through this purgatory remains Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.
What follows is a tale told in the future tense, an attempt to imagine how the “unconstrained vision” of socialism might play out in an unconstrained New York. It’s speculative fiction, not prophecy. No actual socialists were harmed in the making of this experiment.
What is socialism, truly and really? Allow me to begin with that basic question. The constitution of the Democratic Socialists of America defines it as “a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial equality, and non-oppressive relationships.” The weightiest words here are “equitable” and “planning.” Every form of socialism known to history has fixated on absolute equality as the political end—achieved through scientific planning and enforced by the rational application of state power.
Our imaginary new mayor is a proud member of the Democratic Socialists. His first order of business, upon taking office, will be to turn the organization’s ideas into reality. Profit-making, for example, will be deemed criminal. Property will be regulated so thoroughly that it will, in effect, belong to the city. A new planning body—staffed by experts and technocrats—will be established under the mayor’s office. Let’s give it an evocative name: the Central Planning Authority, or CPA. Its mission will be to craft the practical blueprint for socialism with a New York face.
Almost immediately, we run into a contradiction. Socialism promises to place resources under “popular control”—so that, for example, tenants rather than landlords take charge of the buildings they occupy. Yet implementing a “planned economy” requires concentrating immense power in the hands of a small group of government specialists. The two approaches are incompatible. So which path leads to equality?
This contradiction is an intellectual phantom that vanishes in a puff of smoke on first contact with reality. “The public” is an amorphous entity, incapable of organizing anything. Socialism has always been a top-down system, in which a far-seeing vanguard, acting on the public’s behalf, commands the resources needed to achieve the proper degree of equality. The mayor and his planners will embody this new class of visionary leaders. Their mandates will fill the vacuum left by the abolition of the private economy. Tenants who once dreamed of ownership will find that they’ve traded their landlord for a political commissar.
The CPA will set out to control the means of production; it’s the first commandment of socialism. But the means will quickly overwhelm the ends. You can’t control New York’s material resources without also controlling the direction of its 8.5 million private lives. Individual goals and plans must be suppressed. Individualism is hateful to the socialist because it breeds inequality. So if you dreamed of opening a little bodega in Washington Heights, the mayor will say, “Sorry, no.” And if you already own one, you’ll be made, in effect, an employee of the CPA.
Resistance is expected and even welcomed. It will flush capitalist grifters into the open, where they can be preached at and admonished into extinction. Inevitably, a certain amount of conflict will accompany the equalizing process, as hordes of homeless individuals invade formerly private homes and the poor appropriate the goods they need. Violent criminals, the existence of whom the mayor has dismissed as a “capitalist construct,” will seek to settle scores, no doubt through a series of Socratic dialogues with the police.
“Socialists exhibit a remarkable indifference to the supply side of the economy. They seem to assume that production will continue as before, only better.”
The economic logic of socialism tends toward the dictatorship of the new class. That dictatorship, in turn, rejects fixed rules—after all, different people must be treated differently to achieve equal outcomes. Old ideals will undergo strange mutations. Freedom will no longer mean the absence of coercion; it will come to signify the absence of material want. The vaunted democracy of the Democratic Socialists will turn out to be anti-majoritarian and obsessed with juggling the right proportion of “race, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability status, age, religion, and national origin.”
In this spirit, the mayor will amend the city’s ranked-choice voting system so that persons of color will count as 1.58 votes—the exact ratio of income disparity with whites. “New York’s democracy,” he will boast, “has today reached mathematical perfection.”
The eternal recurrence of socialism, despite its historic failures, has a simple explanation, according to economist Tyler Cowen: “People like free stuff.” If that’s true, our mayor is on the right track. He won election by promising all kinds of free goods and services: mass transportation, child care, gender transitions, rent control, and food giveaways—organic, meatless, and locally produced—for poor neighborhoods. And that’s just the beginning. Once the CPA gets to work, the entire economy of New York City will be manipulated to humble the mighty and exalt the marginalized.
Socialists love redistribution. They take from one and give to another—that’s what they were born to do. But what of production? How, in a planned economy, is the wealth created to pay for all the free stuff? After all, the city bus system costs more than $800 million a year to maintain. Money must come from somewhere to keep it running.
Socialists exhibit a remarkable indifference to the supply side of the economy. They seem to assume that production will continue as before, only better. Workers, now liberated from drudgery and placed in charge of their own shops, will supposedly feel inspired to boost both the quantity and quality of their output, thereby growing the city’s wealth. But this assumption rests on a fallacy. Control of the economy will lie with the planners, not the workers. Production quotas will likely be assigned by the CPA, much like teachers assign homework. Drudgery will persist—and once salaries are equalized, productivity will plummet.
Every instance of socialism in practice has cannibalized the capitalist economy down to the bone—until a crisis hits. Declining productivity means fewer goods and services on offer. Price controls ensure that the entire population is chasing a shrinking supply. The inevitable result is a demand crunch of epic proportions, a dizzying shift from abundance to scarcity. Picture aisles of empty shelves, long queues outside stores, and pitched battles when some essential product, like toilet paper, makes a brief appearance.
For our mayor and his fellow socialists, who embrace an almost monkish austerity, the collapse is less a crisis than an ideal. The great question becomes how to plan for equality in an economy that is rapidly shrinking. From postwar Britain to present-day Cuba, the socialist answer has always been the same: the ration card. The allocation of goods and services will complete the city government’s chokehold on daily life. The CPA will decide who gets what, where, and for which bureaucratic reasons. When it comes to medical care and access to hospital rooms, it will decide who lives and who dies. To simplify planning, mobility in jobs and housing will be discouraged. Investment in innovation and new technology will be frowned upon as too disruptive.
Socialism, we will learn, is immediately radical but ultimately conservative, even reactionary, in spirit: it dreams of a perfect, unchanging, immobile society. By order of the CPA, New York City will be frozen in time and space.
From one perspective, socialism seems devoid of morality: all traditional notions of right and wrong must yield to the categorical imperative of equality. But rightly understood, that is the socialist morality. If equality is the highest human good, then anything that stands in its way—your Wall Street job, your overeducated family, your big brownstone—must be sacrificed on the altar of the leveling god.
The mayor, being a socialist, must in principle embrace lies and violence if they advance the cause. In fact, it will be his sacred duty to do so. If the usual pattern holds, he will increasingly surround himself with individuals of stern character and few scruples—those temperamentally suited to dictate, in minute detail, how New Yorkers should pursue egalitarian lives. Members of the city government who lack the stomach for such work—possibly including the mayor himself—will be pushed aside. The attractive idealists who won power will be devoured by those who know how to wield it.
The city’s information campaigns will discard the capitalist fetish that separates truth from falsehood. The government’s most mundane accomplishments will be heralded as Napoleonic triumphs; when no achievements can be found, they’ll be invented for the edification of the masses. A compliant media, nudged along by zealous commissars, will play its part.
Standards will be abolished to create the illusion of radical progress. All students, regardless of effort, will graduate with A-plus averages. Every IQ test administered in the city will identify a genius.
Because their ideology has failed consistently in the past, socialists have perfected the art of assigning blame. Even in a scarcity economy, they can produce an endless supply of scapegoats. New York, as a global financial hub, offers a natural target in Big Capital—except capitalism today is a pale shadow of its old exploitative self, more United Colors of Benetton than bloodsucking vampire. A cruder, more easily hated, stereotype will be needed.
Of course, that can only mean the Jews. Or, if you will, the “Zionists,” a category that includes the 84 percent of American Jews who feel an attachment to Israel. One thing socialists reliably enjoy is donning keffiyehs and pushing Zionists around. Our mayor is no exception. He regards Israel as a uniquely genocidal nation and harbors a righteous urge to punish those who refuse to accept that premise. We’ll know when one of his policies has collapsed because at that exact moment, he’ll launch a blame campaign, targeting subversive Zionists, the Mossad, the IDF, Benjamin Netanyahu, West Bank settlers, and—why not?—those ever-handy capitalist spiders, the Rothschilds.
In place of Columbus Day, now banned for glorifying the original colonialist, the mayor will introduce Palestine Victory Day. “Go out and celebrate this new holiday,” he will say with a wink, “with whatever activities you think are most fitting.”
So ends the thought experiment. Some may find it overly harsh—but my conscience is clear. Socialism has followed a predictable historical trajectory, and the pronouncements of the Democratic Socialists cling monotonously to those of the old-time religion. Their rhetoric reads like the work of time travelers newly arrived from the year 1900. To expect a novel outcome from the same archaic policies borders on insanity.
There’s a fundamental reason socialism fails: the pursuit of equality exacts a price. On the spectrum of democratic values, freedom and equality stand at opposite ends: the more of one, the less of the other. Total freedom is the state of nature, where the big fish swallows the small. Total equality, however defined, requires total control to compensate for the vast diversity of human experience. Tyranny is the inevitable result.
A lingering puzzle is why such a failed ideal remains popular with certain voters. I disagree with Cowen on this point—the cost of free stuff is way too high for most people, even in New York. The answer, I think, lies elsewhere.
I believe that many Americans now inhabit a spiritual desert. We have lost faith in God, family and community. Some of us aren’t even sure whether we are men or women. The deep sources of meaning have dried up, leaving us shriveled and desperate for sustenance.
As a secular heresy, socialism offers submission and sacrifice in service of a political Eden, where the lion lies down with the lamb. It’s spiritual fool’s gold, but at least it’s something. If you are young and eager, or old and regretful, you might well follow the Democratic Socialists to the mountaintop—and over the cliff.
Martin Gurri is a former CIA analyst and the author of The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.
