The Scholar Who Saw Zohran Mamdani Coming in 2003

Socialism has never been held accountable for its tyranny and slaughter, Alan Charles Kors noted.

Why has socialism remained resilient as a political ideal? How can a socialist candidate be the front-runner in the race for mayor of America’s largest and ostensibly most capitalist city? Other candidates across the country have embraced the label, often softened by a soothing “democratic” prefix. What was once a disqualifying ideological association in the U.S. can make a candidate seem cool to many voters, especially young ones.

New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani in New York, July 30.

More than two decades ago, a historian of political thought predicted that, notwithstanding the triumph of free enterprise, “it will not be difficult . . . for socialism to change its now quaint name a bit” and revive government economic control into a newly compelling “political, economic, and ultimately cultural agenda.”

Since American children and college students weren’t being taught what happened under actual socialist regimes, it was only a matter of time before simplistic slogans attacking private property, billionaires and “profits before people,” would be successfully revived by a smooth-talking demagogue.

In a 2002 paper and a 2003 speech for the Atlas Society, Alan Charles Kors, now an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania, foretold how and why this could happen.

Mr. Kors lamented that socialism had yet to be held accountable for the scale of its crimes: “No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents and more orphans than socialism with power.” The failure to acknowledge and come to terms with this reality in the West, he believed, eventually would allow socialism to resuscitate itself, even with millions of skeletons hiding in plain view.

Zohran Mamdani, the New York Democratic mayoral nominee, has proposed government-run grocery stores as a hallmark of his campaign. This is a perplexing platform because, as Mr. Kors reminded us in his paper, socialism’s “collectivization of agriculture alone led to untold suffering” and the starvation of millions.

Is Mr. Mamdani proposing a takeover of farming and the establishment of gulags as the Soviets did in Ukraine in the 1930s? No, the mayor has no such power. But the embrace of even an innocuous-sounding, half-baked program of government-controlled food distribution—“keeping prices low, not making a profit,” his campaign website says—is disturbing for what it reveals about Mr. Mamdani’s knowledge and mindset.

As Mr. Kors noted, wherever socialism was implemented, “its vision of the abolition of private property, economic inequality, and the allocation of capital and goods by free markets, culminated in the crushing of individual, economic, religious, associational, and political liberty.”

Mr. Mamdani’s lack of embarrassment at identifying himself as a socialist speaks volumes. Mr. Kors cited an incontrovertible lesson of history, which is that adding marketing adjectives to socialism’s label doesn’t change its inherent character: “Whatever the ideals, whatever the initial intentions, whatever the source of early socialist conviction . . . socialism will always lead to serfdom and the sacrifice of multitudes.” No shame is evident in Mr. Mamdani’s choice to associate with this history—whether a product of ignorance or political commitment. He and his fellow travelers seem adept at what Mr. Kors described as the “intellectual and political art form” of “denial or minimization of Communist crimes.”

Given the Soviet, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian and other disasters in socialist experimentation that were collapsing or being revealed in the 1980s and ’90s, it might have seemed unimaginable in the early 2000s that the catch phrases of this ideology would have popular resonance 20 years later. But memories fade, and education matters. When Mr. Kors warned that “our children do not know what happened, in any domain, under socialism in power,” Mr. Mamdani was 12, a student in elite New York schools.

Long before Mr. Mamdani was at Bowdoin College majoring in Africana studies, Mr. Kors wrote that “the humanities in general have become schools of ‘oppression studies’ in the very societies that have extended more freedom, choice and bounty than humanity has ever known. Everyone who cares about this should take one afternoon to wander the aisles of required reading at a local college bookstore and to examine college syllabi. It is far, far worse than you surely think, even if you are a pessimist.”

Mr. Kors’s warnings about education have proved, if anything, understated. No wonder free rent and profitless prosperity resonate with a generation that knows little of collectivist calamities, or of what made unprecedented social and economic progress in capitalistic societies possible.

Ultimately, Mr. Kors wrote, the failure to study, teach and embrace liberal society, voluntary exchange, and free markets—the things which “produced the greatest alleviation of suffering, the greatest liberation from want, ignorance, and superstition, and the greatest increase of bounty and opportunity in the history of all human life”—would open a path that future Mamdanis could exploit.

One of Mr. Kors’s observations does seem dated today. In contrast to the lack of reckoning accorded to socialism’s history, he noted how, “in the wake of the Holocaust and the ruins of Nazism, anti-Semitism lay low a bit, embarrassed by its worst manifestation, its actual exercise of state dominion.” Mr. Mamdani and others have shown that is no longer true.

Mr. Shuchman is a New York investor.