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Understanding Lefty Love for Failing Collectivism
What is it with these lefties thinking it is cool to show their support for the Cuban dictatorship by taking 20 tons of supplies to the island on the Nuestra América Convoy for the rulers to distribute collectively?
Never mind. Our mission, if we accept it, is not to judge our lefty friends but to understand them. Or to understand Neville Roy Singham and his support for CODEPINK: Women for Peace and its leader Medea Benjamin who is on the trip.
Let us start with Google AI’s analysis of NYC Mayor Mamdani’s inaugural speech:
In his 2026 inaugural address, NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani pledged to replace “rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism,” advocating for a shift toward community solidarity, shared responsibility, and social ownership. This vision emphasizes public enterprises, worker cooperatives, and mutual support over isolated self-reliance, aiming for a more compassionate city.
Let us unpack the memes:
Community solidarity. But if it’s financed or mandated by the government it isn’t really community solidarity but state compulsion.
Shared responsibility. But if it is mandated by the government it isn’t responsibility but simple subordination.
Social ownership. But if it is managed through the government it isn’t social, it’s state ownership.
Public enterprises. You mean like the Post Office and the DMV?
Worker cooperatives. You mean like Brook Farm in the 1840s? But who owns it and who provides the capital? Politicians? Activists? Bureaucrats?
Mutual support. Oh, you mean restore the world of mutual-aid organizations that were crowded out by the welfare state? Or just gubmint social programs?
Compassionate city. With whose money?
The point, as Vladimir Lenin once said, is not the wonderful words but “who, whom.” Who gets to have the power to do what to whom?
We humans have been conducting an astonishing social experiment for the last 500 years, in which the traditional world of the village and the hierarchical world of feudalism has been transformed by the market economy.
Is individualism rugged? Yes, as rugged as you want it to be. Or you can go to work for wages or salary and become part of a collective that we call a company or business. Let us be clear. Working for wages means that your income is not directly dependent on your employer making a profit. You exchange risk for a fixed income.
Is collectivism warm? Yes, if it is conducted without compulsion, as in the mutual-aid societies and fraternal organizations that flourished in the 19th century. But when collectivism is co-opted by the state it becomes frigid and cruel. As we know from the history of the 20th century.
But why do our liberal friends long for the warmth of collectivism and worship at the shrines of collectivist regimes? I think it is an instinctive longing for the world before the modern state. And even before the agricultural era, when humans lived in small bands, where the women lived and worked together in community and the men sat around sharpening their weapons. Experts say that agriculture is only 10,000 to 12,000 years old. Before the invention of the plow about 7,000 years ago agriculture was conducted as horticulture almost entirely by women. But women suffered miscarriages from plowing, so men had to be put to work.
But 12,000 years is the blink of an eye, so we humans are still programmed for pre-agricultural life.
Let me be the first to say that we really don’t know how or why the economy works or came to be. Just as we don’t really know how or why life, in its three forms of plants, animals, and fungi, works or came to be.
All we know, about the human economy and about life, that it works in incredible hidden complexity and remarkable visible simplicity. Explain that, if you can!
We humans, we still instinctively yearn for the olden time, and feel the tug of instincts that made human social life work for hundreds of thousands of years before the present.
| Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:07:18 GMT |
Understanding BLUE STATE FRAUD
In my American Thinker article published today I wrote about the rampant BLUE STATE FRAUD that young kids like Nick Shirley are bringing to our attention. Only AT decided to italicize BLUE STATE FRAUD as Blue State Fraud. What an insult!
But you and I, as we view the coming and goings with our characteristic philosophical detachment, we wonder. Why this? Why now?
First of all is the definitive word from Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt that politics is all and only about Friend vs. Enemy. As in:
There is no politics without an enemy — Curtis Yarvin
There is no politics without a handout — Christopher Chantrill
So the point of the BLUE STATE FRAUD is simply that the politicians are rewarding their friends with a handout. That is all.
But there is more. It seems that our Democratic friends are in the middle of a BLUE STATE TAX FRENZY, with California proposing a 5% tax on billionaire assets, with Washington State proposing a state income tax even though it is banned in the state constitution, with New York State proposing to raise the state and local income tax to a max of 15.9%, with NYC Mayor Mamdani proposing to increase the estate tax from 16% to 50%.
And there is more. In Seattle, Mayor Katie Wilson is proposing a vacancy tax on office buildings.
How are we to understand this?
My go-to on the Democratic Party moderate-to-extremist lurch comes from Crane Brinton’s The Anatomy of Revolution. His take is that revolutions start with the moderates, as in the French Revolution. Then, as the revolution fails to transform the world and eliminate injustice, the extremists can’t take it any more and they capture the revolution and burn the place down.
Of course, the extremists, as in Jacobins and Bolsheviks and our own DSA types, fail even worse than the moderates. And the reason is simple. Politics is war on the enemy, a total social mobilization that puts normal life on hold while we defeat the enemy that threatens us. And that is all.
We normies may wonder why our liberal friends have totally mobilized against the Trumpian enemy and are determined to defeat him and his billionaire friends with taxes and regulations and anything else they can think of. Because there is no politics without an enemy.
But there is more. Remember when your liberal woman friend was telling you at lunch back in 2009 how pleased she was that the US had just elected its First Black President?
(I voted for Obama, not because he was black, but because I believe fervently that, to keep the peace, you need to change parties after two consecutive terms.)
But just think what it is like for a liberal that thought we had entered a new world of peace and justice after the election of Barack Obama. It started to go wrong almost at once. Remember what happened in 2010? The Republicans flipped 64 seats in the House and we had the first Republican Congress since 1952. And then it got worse with the election of Donald Trump in 2016 instead of the First Woman President.
If you are an Alinsky believing liberal, you start looking under rocks. Or blaming it all on Russian collusion. Just like back in the day when, for Republicans after five consecutive Democrat presidential terms, it was Commies in the State Department.
Now, what is BLUE STATE FRAUD about, mostly? It seems to be about rewarding the street operatives that help get the immigrant vote out for Democrats. Clearly that’s what is was about in Minnesota. And Democrats are desperate, because the ordinary American middle class has been deserting them for the last generation. That’s what the immigration surge in the Biden administration was about: creating new Democrat voters. That’s what mail-in voting is about. That’s what Motor Voter registration is about. That’s what resisting the SAVE Act is about.
Democrats feel that political power is slipping away, and they can’t understand it. They are the good guys: they are fighting the oppressors for the oppressed; they are fighting the racist-sexist-homophobes; they are saving the climate. How could they be losing to a monster like Trump?
I know. Where do I start? But, to make it Real Simple, dear liberal friends, know that politics is always and only about the fight against the enemy. But 97.2% of the time there is no enemy coming over the horizon, and thus no need for politics. So the politicians have to make it up.
But Democracy! But Human Rights! But Climate Change!
I know. Bless their hearts.
| Mon, 23 Mar 2026 21:20:56 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Fascism is the idiocy you get when the usual idiots have screwed up.
Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger. — Eisenhower
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Experiencing the Financial Panic of 2008
