Recently I’ve written several articles critical of the socialist fad in America, explaining how “democratic” socialism leads to totalitarian tyranny, pinning down the oft-disputed meaning of the terms “capitalism” and “socialism,” and analyzing why anyone would still take socialism seriously in spite of its well-demonstrated shortcomings. Some critics might think that my criticisms are attacking a straw man; the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), after all, claim they want to leave behind authoritarian visions of socialism by making democracy the building block of their system. So how does the leading DSA politician in America, Mayor of New York City Zohran Mamdani, characterize socialism?
On October 2, popular podcaster Theo Von interviewed the Mayor and asked him to define socialism. Mamdani replied:
Socialism to me, it means that you will have whatever you need to live a dignified life and that it is the government’s job to deliver on that. It’s a belief that we shouldn’t live in a place where all you can do is pick your own leaders. You should also be able to have that power in the rest of your life, right? People talk about it as the extension of democracy from the ballot box to the rest of your life. What do people mean by the “rest of your life”? They mean your workplace, your home, things like that. So when people say “dignity” I want to be very clear; we’re talking about the things that allow you to take a breath: housing, child care, public transit. No one should be priced out of these things. These are non-negotiables. You need these to live. . . . The struggles of affordability apply to a lot more people than people typically think. To me as a socialist, what I’m fighting for is that nobody is priced out of dignity. There is just a comfort right now with living in a country where the market gets to determine everything, not just luxury but dignity too.
In this depiction of socialism, the government doesn’t simply promise everyone free rations of food, shelter, child care, etc. to address the affordability problem. Workplaces, houses, retail outlets, etc. will all be governed according to the principle of majority rule, in theory extending democratic governance to all social institutions. The point of this is to take political power away from remote oligarchs who prefer concentrating wealth into their own hands at the expense of the poor.
Apart from the traditional objection that centralizing control over an economy diminishes the production of goods, it must also be observed that extending democracy to everything is not compatible with living a dignified life.
Being free to cast just one trifling vote among thousands or millions of votes for deciding how to run the breadline, how to assign living quarters, etc. is not some magical “power” that gives you any meaningful control over your own life. Quite to the contrary, it’s the commissars and their enforcers (secret police, neighborhood watch committees, people’s tribunals, etc.) who would exercise a terrifying arbitrary power of life and death over all voters, rendering their voting rights irrelevant and any dignified life under their rule impossible.
Ordinary comrades wouldn’t be permitted the luxury of disobeying the nomenklatura. Political opponents would be exiled to the gulag or to the killing fields. A few incautious Democratic politicians (even Hillary Clinton) have already said the quiet part out loud and advocated sending Trump supporters to re-education or death camps, so it’s not hard to visualize how DSA radicals might try to consolidate their power over Americans.
Mamdani’s portrayal of democracy—where everybody will supposedly get to vote about everything important in their life at a local level and not just about picking leaders for traditional political offices—is meant to oppose the status quo situation where a handful of oligarchs have rigged the present economic and political system to their own advantage. He is trying to create the illusion of a populist resistance to oligarchy by reviving the anti-authoritarian romanticism of the 1960s New Left movement, where democracy is to be brought into homes and workplaces so that ordinary people can get involved and supposedly combat domination by remote elites.
Direct participation in small-scale collective governance might seem like a clever way to empower ordinary people against elites, but can it actually work? Murray Rothbard offered a sharp critique of this New Left ideology. Rothbard cited an “iron law of oligarchy” formulated by sociologist Robert Michels to explain how there is always a tendency to concentrate an organization’s decision-making into a small subset of its membership in spite of any democratic governance. The New Left viewed this “iron law” tendency as leading to an unacceptable authoritarianism by an organization’s leaders, so it proposed as a remedy participatory democracy where all members of an organization must participate in making all decisions. It is this New Left ideological legacy that the DSA is appealing to when it claims to oppose authoritarianism with democracy.
Rothbard spelled out the absurdity of the New Left’s participatory version of democratic governance:
While the would-be participatory democrats have made keen criticisms of bureaucratic rule in our society, the concept itself, when applied, runs rapidly against the Iron Law. Thus, anyone who has sat through sessions of any organization engaged in participatory democracy knows the intense boredom and inefficiency that develop rapidly. For if each person must participate equally in all decisions, the time devoted to decision-making must become almost endless, and the processes of the organization become life itself for the participants. This is one of the reasons why many New Left organizations quickly begin to insist that their members live in communes and dedicate their entire lives to the organization — in effect, to merge their lives with the organization. For if they truly live and pursue participatory democracy, they can hardly do anything else. But despite this attempt to salvage the concept, the inevitable gross inefficiency and aggravated boredom ensure that all but the most intensely dedicated will abandon the organization. In short, if it can work at all, participatory democracy can work only in groups so tiny that they are, in effect, the “leaders” shorn of their following.
Rothbard was by no means exaggerating the sheer foolishness of universalized decision-making—just imagine if every minor repair to your home had to be debated and approved by a neighborhood housing committee, or if food co-op members had to argue about what groceries you were allowed take home, or if all the tasks at your workplace could only be assigned after lengthy meetings by a workers committee. Having to vote about every minute detail of your life, however trivial, is the sort of hell implied by Mamdani’s solution to the problem of authoritarian elites.
Even worse though, production has to be coordinated across the whole of the global economy and not just in small groups at the local level, which is what profit-and-loss-driven capitalists can achieve using free market prices without any centralized authority dominating them. Short of forcibly deurbanizing and deindustrializing society and brutally compelling everybody to live in autarkic collective farms (as the Cambodian Communists infamously did), the complexity and scale of industrial economies obliges socialist regimes to resort to the nightmare of tyrannical central planners exerting their own bureaucratic authority on a large scale. As private profits are outlawed, all production and all other aspects of social life have to be conducted on a highly centralized, authoritarian basis.
Also missing in the DSA’s rants against America’s oligarchs is a correct understanding of how they obtained their ill-gotten swag in the first place. It is in fact democratically-legitimized restrictions on liberty and violations of private ownership rights that systematically empowers and enriches the politically well-connected at our expense. The crucial failure of American democracy has not been the existence of constitutional restraints on the will of the majority, but rather the failure of such restraints to thwart oligarchs and special interests from manufacturing consent through manipulation of public opinion for cynically using the democratic process to legitimize their spoliation of the masses.
Unbounded extensions of democracy, in other words, are the problem and not the solution. Mass voting is a great enabler of authoritarian rule whenever individual rights and liberties themselves are subjected to the ballot and thus are put up for grabs. The DSA merely proposes to double down on eliminating whatever constitutional restraints on centralized power still exist, thus elevating the racket of manufacturing consent into the inauguration of a totalitarian dictatorship.
Forced participation in an array of mini-legislatures as imagined by Mamdani would not spare the masses from the abject humiliation of having to bow and scrape before representatives of the People’s Commissars just to secure their daily bread. A dignified life requires the sort of personal autonomy made possible only by private ownership rights, where competent adults take personal responsibility for earning their daily bread instead of receiving it as a gracious favor from a superior.
