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Today is not only Remembrance Sunday, but also the 36th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The latter event holds a special place in the hearts of many classical liberals, because, while we should not project our own political views into the anti-regime protesters of that period, it is not at all unreasonable to interpret it as an epic victory of liberalism over socialism.
A few weeks before the fall of the wall, Francis Fukuyama had famously declared the ‘end of history’. By ‘history’, he meant ideological battles between proponents of completely different ways of organising society. In Fukuyama’s reading, the 20th century was essentially an ideological tournament in which liberalism defeated three formidable foes in succession: first, the remnants of the feudalist ancien regimes, then fascism, and finally, socialism. Fukuyama did not predict the fall of the Berlin Wall. He even cautioned against overoptimistic interpretations of the changes that were taking place on the other side of the Iron Curtain. But he nonetheless saw socialism as a bruised and battered foe, not in the sense that it was about to disappear, but in the sense that the socialists had lost their ideological self-confidence, and no longer really believed in their own project. Socialists of earlier decades had been genuinely convinced that history was inevitably marching towards a predetermined endpoint, and that their final victory could only be delayed, not averted. By the end of the 1980s, that conviction was gone. Socialists had reached a disillusioned who-are-we-kidding stage.
How the tables have turned. This week, a self-described socialist, Zohran Mamdani, won a landslide victory in the mayoral election in New York, one of the economic and cultural centres of liberal capitalism. He did not just win as a lesser-evil candidate against uninspiring competition, but with enthusiastic support, especially among the young. Electoral turnout in this mayoral election was considerably higher than in the five preceding ones, and among the under-30s, Mamdani won a two-thirds majority.
36 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, socialism is back again – and the socialists are winning.
I am sure some readers will think that the comparison between Zohran Mamdani and the former East German regime is over the top. So let me clarify what I mean by that.
I am not saying that the Mamdani mayoralty is going to be catastrophic for New York. There is a good chance that once the dust has settled, he will end up being more or less a mayor like any other. His rent controls won’t work (they never do), but this is a tightening of an existing programme, not a fundamentally novel one. His state-run grocery stores will be a silly gimmick, but nothing worse than that. His freebies will be expensive, but politicians always like to buy popularity by offering freebies.
More generally, I do not even have a particular problem with socialist politicians at the local or regional level. As it happens, I once used to live in a city that was run by a socialist mayor. That city was called ‘London’, and the mayor was one Ken Livingstone, who was then in his final year in office. London had major problems then, but these were pretty much the same problems it still has now, not the problems of a Socialist People’s Republic. I don’t remember queueing for bread, or having to buy razors on the black market. The one thing that was in extremely short supply was housing, but that is an urban planning problem, not a socialism problem.
There are other examples of socialist mayors. The mayor of the Austrian city of Graz, Elke Kahr, is a member of the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ), and the mayor of the French town of Grigny, Philippe Rio, is a member of the French Communist Party (PCF). Madrid had a socialist mayor in the second half of the 2010s, and the German state of Thuringia had a socialist Minister-President until quite recently. Nothing extraordinary has happened in any of these places. At the local and regional level, a socialist government can be a government like any other.
But this is simply because at that level, the things that make a socialist a socialist do not get a chance to manifest themselves.
There is a qualitative difference between a socialist and, say, a left-wing social democrat: this is not simply a spectrum where you can be a little bit more to this side or a little bit more to that side. A left-wing social democrat is someone who still broadly respects private property rights, the rule of law, freedom of contract, and the price mechanism. A socialist does not respect any of those, because they fundamentally do not believe that there is such a thing as ‘neutral’ rules or ‘neutral’ institutions. They believe that all rules and all institutions serve class interests, so for them, the only question is: are you on the side of the oppressor class, or are you on the side of the oppressed class?
Socialists and left-wing social democrats often sound similar, but we can tell which is which once they have the powers, and the opportunity, to attack private property rights, the rule of law, freedom of contract and/or the price mechanism. The socialist is the one who will do it.
Even in decentralised systems, political decision-makers at the local or regional level do not have those powers. Under those circumstances, the socialist and the left-wing social democrat will end up behaving in the same way, and we will only know which is which if they tell us so. Ken Livingstone never expropriated anyone, but with his glowing endorsements for Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro, and Fidel Castro, he told us where his real sympathies lie.
How about Zohran Mamdani?
Mamdani is not an especially theory-heavy person. There is no manifesto of ‘Mamdani-ism’, where he spells out exactly what kind of political-economic system he wants to see. But he is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who are clearer on this:
“Capitalism is a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit. We must replace it with democratic socialism […]
Our vision pushes further than historic social democracy […]
We want to collectively own the key economic drivers that dominate our lives”.
Mamdani himself has said that his “end goal” was “seizing the means of production”, and he writes for the Marxist magazine Jacobin, who very much see him as one of their own. So do socialist influencers like Hasan Piker, which, given the Left’s tendency for purity-policing and factionalism, tells us something.
And therein lies the real victory for socialists. It is not that Mamdani will socialise the New York Stock Exchange, convert Central Park into a Gulag camp, or build a Berlin Wall (a New York Wall?) to stop people from escaping to Newark. He will be far too busy jogging from a meeting discussing the restructuring of the Landmarks Preservation Commission to a meeting discussing the budget of the New York City Transit Authority. New York is a big place, but the mayor of New York is still a mayor, whose role is different in scale, but not in principle, from that of the mayor of West Yorkshire or the mayor of Düsseldorf.
Except, of course, that the mayors of West Yorkshire and Düsseldorf are not cultural influencers in their own right. Nobody cares which social media streamers these people are allied with, or which magazines they read. The mayor of New York has an exalted position of cultural influence, which Mamdani will undoubtedly use to boost the socialist cause. In this way, Mamdaniism is really just a continuation of the ‘Millennial Socialism’ hype that started in 2015 around Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, which recently seemed to be abating a little, and which is now, once again, in full swing.
As mentioned, for Fukuyama, ‘the end of history’ did not necessarily mean socialists losing political power. It meant socialists losing their self-confidence. If this also holds in reverse, then socialists do not need to regain political power for history to recommence: they just need to regain their self-confidence, and that, they undoubtedly have.
Today’s socialists are bursting with self-confidence, more precisely, with that easy self-confidence that comes from knowing that your opinions are fashionable, and that the cultural momentum is on your side. If ‘history’ is a battle of ideas between people who believe in completely different ways of organising a society, then history is well and truly back. Those of us on the other side of that battle better act like it.

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