The day before the Trump administration captured and extradited Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, many on the right (including yours truly) had a field day mocking something the newly minted mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, said during his inaugural address.
The proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America proclaimed: “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”
The phrase “warmth of collectivism” offended many of us because “collectivism” is widely understood as a generic label for extreme left-wing political systems.
Understandably, the following night’s big news — the socialist dictator of Venezuela, itself a shining example of “warm collectivism,” being removed at the point of a gun(boat) — quieted the ideological brouhaha.
But I think it’s worth returning to something else Mamdani said in his inaugural address, and in that same sentence: “rugged individualism.”
The term “rugged individualism” was coined by President Hoover in 1928. But we have Democrats to thank for its immortality because Democrats — and democratic socialists — have been running against it, and against Hoover, ever since. FDR campaigned in 1932 by denouncing Hoover’s “doctrine of American individualism” and never really stopped suggesting that Hoover and his party were fanatically anti-government, favoring “devil take the hindmost” capitalism.
The attacks on Hoover and conservatives generally as libertarian zealots remain ingrained in the popular, journalistic and academic imagination to this day. And they were unfair from the start. A progressive Republican who’d served in the Wilson administration, Hoover was never the heartless advocate of do-nothing austerity his opponents painted. Indeed, government spending during Hoover’s four years in office nearly doubled in real terms (and, yes, Republicans controlled Congress).
For generations the hard left has framed every debate as between frigid rapacious capitalism and nurturing, warm government help. The right often offers the mirror image of the American dream and free enterprise versus sinister un-American collectivism in one form or another.
This framing fuels political dysfunction and popular distrust because it renders political combatants blind to the reality of the status quo: America is neither a free market utopia nor a free market dystopia. Indeed, as an actual free market fanboy myself, I cringe when people call Trump a champion of unfettered capitalism. State capitalism, maybe. But protectionism and industrial policy is not the capitalism of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek.
The suggestion that capitalism in America has no fetters is hard to square with the existence of a vast apparatus of regulatory agencies — FCC, SEC, EPA, OSHA, FHA, etc. — or the fact that roughly half of all federal spending goes to entitlement programs, chiefly Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
It is flatly preposterous to look at New York City in 2026 — or in 1986, or even 1936 — and see devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism at work. The city budget Mamdani inherited spends $19.26 billion on public assistance. That money sits atop billions more in state and federal spending. There is a vast network of social workers, health and safety inspectors, sanitation workers and educators among its more than 300,000 employees. Maybe they don’t have enough. But that’s not a regime of “rugged individualism” either.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, who spoke at the Mamdani ceremony last week, repeated his refrain about the need for the rich to pay their “fair share.” In 2022, millionaires in NYC made up less than 1% of tax filers, yet they paid 40% of city income taxes. Is that a “fair share”? People can disagree, but it ain’t nothing.
Maybe it’s bad that the top 10% of American tax filers make nearly half of the income in America — and provide three-quarters of the income tax revenues. Maybe it’s good that the average wage earner will receive more in entitlements than they paid in. Maybe it’s right that the poorest 20% of Americans receive roughly $6 from the government for every dollar they pay in taxes. Perhaps we should be ashamed that we spend less than France on social welfare programs but more than Switzerland and the Netherlands. Reasonable people will differ.
But that’s the point. Talking about an America that doesn’t exist is unreasonable. It makes it harder to offer reasonable proposals for government action in any ideological direction. If people believe that the status quo is wild west capitalism, then even attempts to cut red tape or reform public assistance sound cruel and unnecessary. And if the existing safety net counts as “rugged individualism” to politicians like Mamdani, you can’t — or at least I can’t — blame critics for fearing his vision of “warm collectivism.”
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.