This will be a consequential year. Americans will celebrate the 250th birthday of the country, commemorate the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and decide who should represent us in Congress, a contest that will kickstart the 2028 presidential race in earnest.
As the year opens, the question about socialism in America has taken on heightened importance. On Jan. 1, New York City and Seattle inaugurated socialist mayors. One day later, the United States captured the socialist dictator of Venezuela, who hollowed out a once-ascendant regional economy. Americans must now decide whether socialism is in fact a path worthy of our next chapter.
Few ideas are as distinctly American, or as consistently misunderstood, as rugged individualism. It is often caricatured as selfishness or social indifference. In reality, it is the moral engine that powered the American Century, delivering unprecedented gains in life expectancy, prosperity, innovation, and opportunities for people across all races, classes, and creeds.
From the early 20th century to the present, societies organized around individual liberty, private enterprise, and voluntary cooperation have produced outcomes unmatched in human history. In 1900, the average life expectancy in the United States hovered around 47 years. Today it exceeds 75. Extreme poverty collapsed. Literacy became universal. Technological innovation, from antibiotics to air travel to the internet, transformed daily life not through central planning, but through competition, entrepreneurship, and personal initiative.
These gains were not accidental. They emerged because individuals were free to take risks, challenge orthodoxies, start businesses, and keep the rewards of their labor. When millions pursue their own advancement under the rule of law, society advances with them.
That record stands in stark contrast to the outcomes produced by collectivist ideologies over the past century. Socialist and communist regimes promised equality, security, and “warmth.” What they delivered, repeatedly and predictably, were shortages, stagnation, repression, and mass death. From the Soviet Union to Maoist China, from Cuba to Venezuela, systems that subordinated the individual to the collective destroyed incentives, crushed dissent, and impoverished their citizens.
Even where these regimes avoided outright famine or terrorism, they failed to generate durable prosperity. Innovation slowed. Corruption flourished. Poverty grew. Opportunity narrowed to those closest to power. The historical ledger is not ambiguous. Societies that suppress individual agency in favor of enforced collectivism do not become more humane; they become more coercive.
It is against this backdrop that rhetoric from the New York City mayor deserves scrutiny. When Zohran Mamdani invokes “the warmth of collectivism” as an alternative to American individualism, he echoes a familiar, and historically dangerous, romanticism. Collectivism always sounds compassionate in theory. In practice, it requires someone to decide whose needs come first, whose ambitions are permitted, and whose dissent must be silenced for the “greater good.”
America’s success did not come from forcing people into sameness. It came from allowing them to be different — unequal in outcomes, yes, but equal in rights and opportunity. Over time, that freedom became the greatest engine of upward mobility ever devised. Immigrants arrived with nothing and built lives of dignity. Workers became owners. Ideas born in garages reshaped the world.
To be sure, a social safety net and public investment for the neediest are worthy objectives. But there is a profound difference between a society that supports individuals and one that subordinates them. The former preserves dignity and agency. The latter erodes both.
SOME BLACK NEW YORKERS WORRIED THAT MAMDANI’S SOCIALIST POLICIES WOULD HARM THEM THE MOST
The American Century was not perfect. But measured against every alternative, it stands as a moral and material triumph. To abandon rugged individualism for the false comfort of collectivist “warmth” is not progress. It is historical amnesia. It is, in fact, the path of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and other destroyers of human hope and ambition.
If we care about human flourishing, innovation, and genuine equality of opportunity, the lesson is clear: Free individuals build better societies than centralized systems ever have. And they always will.
Gentry Collins is the CEO of the American Free Enterprise Chamber of Commerce and the former national political director at both the Republican Governors Association and the Republican National Committee.