When New York’s new mayor vowed to replace rugged individualism with collectivism, he echoed an ideology history has already tested—and buried. Ayn Rand warned us what happens when societies punish excellence. In 2026, New York chose to learn the lesson anyway.

On January 1, 2026, in his inaugural address as Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani stated it plainly: “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” This was not a flourish or a metaphor gone astray. It was a governing declaration—delivered from the seat of American commerce and offered as the philosophical blueprint for how the nation’s largest city would now be run—Socialist (cough, cough—Communist). 

History has heard this language before—and it has always ended the same way.

Ayn Rand handed us the playbook so we would recognize communism before it arrived in polite language—but New York shrugged, closed the book, and installed it as Mayor on January 1, 2026.

Rand, a Russian-born American novelist and philosopher who fled Bolshevik Russia, published Atlas Shrugged in 1957, less than four decades after the Russian Revolution destroyed the country she escaped. She did not write from theory. She wrote from memory. She had watched “collectivism” move from slogan to policy to ruin—ambition criminalized, excellence punished, entire societies reduced to fear, queues, and silence.

Atlas Shrugged was not speculative fiction. It was diagnosis. And it was a warning. 

Individualism Is Not Frigid—It Is Generative

New York City was not built by committees or centralized planners. It was built by individuals—often abrasive, frequently difficult, relentlessly driven—who took risks, built enterprises, and refused to wait for permission.

From Cornelius Vanderbilt to Estée Lauder. From immigrant garment workers who became manufacturers to financiers who pulled the city back from bankruptcy in the 1970s. From artists........

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