Recently, New York City’s first socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani called to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism,” in his inaugural address. This sentence has been one of the most talked about lines from his speech.
Jonah Goldberg from the National Review chimed in on a viral clip mocking the phrase. He figured it was probably just “a mixture of terrible speech writing and youthful historical ignorance,” though he added he didn’t find it charming at all.
But Venezuelan refugee and Columbia University-trained economist Daniel Di Martino of the Manhattan Institute countered, “No Jonah, Mamdani chose his words carefully. He is a well educated Marxist. He knows what he is saying. Do not be deceived. It is bad.”
There is a temptation among certain commentators to treat radical rhetoric as accidental—an unfortunate turn of phrase, a bit of overwrought idealism, the harmless excess of youth. Jonah Goldberg’s reaction to Zohran Mamdani’s call to replace “the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism” fits comfortably within that instinct.
Surely, the thinking goes, this is just bad speechwriting mixed with youthful ignorance.
Daniel Di Martino refuses that comforting illusion, and he is right to do so.
Mamdani’s language is not careless. It is ideological. And more importantly, it is strategic. By framing individualism as something cold, sterile, and morally deficient, while portraying collectivism as humane and compassionate, Mamdani is not proposing a policy preference—he is issuing a moral verdict. Individual liberty is not something to be debated or balanced, it is something to be replaced.
Those who have studied Marxist movements—or lived under them—recognize this move immediately. Collectivism is never introduced as a tradeoff with costs and limits. It is sold as a moral awakening. Once that framing takes hold, dissent ceases to be principled disagreement and becomes selfishness. Resistance becomes cruelty. The individual is no longer a citizen with rights, but an obstacle to communal “warmth.”
Di Martino understands this not as an abstraction, but as a pattern. In societies that embraced collectivist ideals, the rhetoric of solidarity always came first. It was followed by economic control, political repression, and the steady erosion of personal autonomy. The language was always gentle. The results never were.
This dynamic was captured powerfully by 1984. Popular culture remembers Orwell’s novel primarily as a story about constant surveillance, but that was only part of the regime’s power. More insidious was the state’s manipulation of language itself.
Through Newspeak, the government did not merely police behavior—it narrowed the range of thought by eliminating words that made individual judgment, dissent, and moral independence possible. The individual was not abolished outright; he was linguistically diminished until resistance became nearly unthinkable.
That is why Mamdani’s rhetoric matters. When political leaders describe individualism not as a value to be balanced but as a moral defect to be replaced, they are not merely offering a different policy vision. They are reshaping the moral vocabulary of public life.
And as Di Martino warns, once the language shifts, the politics inevitably follow.
