If we learned (or confirmed) something in 2025, it’s that the president and his cabinet believe in US tariff policy as the solution to every conceivable problem. Hence, 2026 will almost certainly bring more (fantastical) proposals for funding new federal programs and policies through tariff revenue.
“Collectivism” is not a slip of the tongue or a vague moral appeal to kindness. It is a loaded ideological term with a long, well-documented pedigree and an even longer rap sheet.
By collectivism, political theorists and its own champions have meant a social order in which the claims of the group—often defined and enforced by the state—override individual choice, property rights, and voluntary exchange. Production and distribution are guided not by prices and consent but by political priorities, and individual autonomy is tolerated only insofar as it serves collective ends. That is not a caricature; it is the standard definition of what’s espoused in fascist, socialist, and communist literature.
The word’s lineage matters. Zohran Mamdani is consciously drawing on a tradition that stretches from Karl Marx, who rejected “bourgeois individualism” in favor of collective ownership, through Vladimir Lenin, who implemented it via one-party rule, to Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, who enforced it at colossal human cost. Even outside the communist tradition, collectivism was proudly embraced by Benito Mussolini, who defined fascism as the negation of individualism in favor of the state as an ethical whole, and by strongmen such as Idi Amin, who expelled ethnic minorities and appropriated their land in the name of the national good.
The historical record is not ambiguous. Where collectivism has moved from rhetoric to reality, the results have been grim. The Soviet Union’s collectivized agriculture led to chronic shortages and mass famine through both disastrous economic policies and by design to suppress dissent. China’s Great Leap Forward killed tens of millions. Cambodia’s agrarian collectivism under Pol Pot destroyed a quarter of the population, resulting in the “killing fields” and perhaps the most brutal regime in modern history. In each case, politics replaced price signals, error correction was treated as dissent, and individuals weren’t free to exit the collective.
Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn is correct:
In the understatement of the year, the [New York] Times admitted that the Democratic Socialists’ biggest challenge may have nothing to do with Donald Trump or Zohran Mamdani but with socialism itself: “Some of its policies,” says the paper, “even if pursued, may not work.”
Telling officers not to obey illegal orders is a truism, not a “seditious” statement. As a sitting Senator, Mr. Kelly deserves particular leeway on political speech notwithstanding his continuing military status.
GMU alum Tom Savidge explains that “Medicaid’s structure actually invites waste and fraud.”
