Mayor Mamdani told New York that his administration would seek to replace “the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism”.

George Rebane

Today our country is divided among those who believe in the rugged individualism envisioned by our Founders of citizens who would support and maintain the constitutional republic they fashioned for us; and those who believe that big government will provide them with the warmth of collectivism that has yet to be found in the historical annals of governance.  The latter comprise the ignorant citizenry like those of 1917 Russia, 1933 Germany, and 1949 China to usher in the worst tyrannies the world has known.  The common denominator of all these tragedies was the belief that unbridled growth of government would provide the greatest good for all.  Let us attempt to count the ways this horrendous intellectual deficit plays out.

The less you know, …

• The more you believe that an economy is a zero-sum game among its participants.
• The more you believe that high and rising taxes do not stifle entrepreneurship and wealth creation.
• The more you believe that increasing tax rates will always increase government revenues.
• The more you don’t understand that reducing government income and its regulatory umbrella is antithetical to the rise of autocracy.
• The greater your deficit is about the historical record of socialism/communism.
• The more you don’t understand the Democratic Party’s longstanding love affair with collectivism and its gateway socialism.
• The more you believe that we should give socialism a chance in America.
• The more you don’t understand federalism and its role in the governance of the United States.
• The more you believe that our constitution is a dated, calcified, and harmful document that does not provide for its systematic and orderly modification to reflect the times; that it must be abrogated in favor of a new ‘just and equitable’ foundational manifesto.
• The more you believe that America is and has always been, since its founding, an evil nation harmful to its citizens and responsible for most of the world’s ills.
• The less you believe that a married heterosexual couple with children is the foundational social unit in a stable society.
• The more you believe that state-enforced equity (equality of outcomes) yields the most just and stable society.
• The more clueless you are about the Democratic Party as the historical party of pro-slavery, Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, eugenics, segregation, …
• The more clueless you are about the Democratic Party’s promotion of antisemitism in America.
• The more you believe that meritocracy is racist and a white supremacist imposition.
• The more clueless you are about the Democratic Party being the leading proponents of anti-American radical Islam.

The above is a partial list of beliefs that separate Americans, perhaps terminally since no one on either side of the Great Divide can find any common ground to serve as a starting point from which to come together.  Victor Davis Hanson has a comprehensive summary of today’s progress toward separation in his ‘Slouching Toward Fort Sumter?’.