Right-Wingers Are Actually Fake Individualists
The contrived outrage at Zohran Mamdani's use of "solidarity" is just performative politics
The inauguration of Zohran Mamdani as the 111th mayor of New York City on January 1, 2026, was always going to be a spectacle. It was the ascension of the first Muslim mayor of America’s largest city, a democratic socialist who took his oath on the Quran in a decommissioned subway station before a crowd shivering in the January chill. But the true spectacle was not the ceremony itself, nor even Mamdani’s unabashedly radical speech. The real show was the immediate, hysterical, and philosophically bankrupt reaction from the American Right.
Almost before Mamdani had finished speaking, the conservative media ecosystem began to convulse. They did not attack his plans to freeze rents or his promise of universal childcare with serious economic arguments. They did not engage with his critique of the market. Instead, they retreated to the fever swamps of conspiracy and character assassination. Viral clips circulated on X (formerly Twitter), sped up and decontextualized, accusing the new mayor of performing a “Nazi salute”—a desperate fabrication that mirrored previous bad-faith attacks on other public figures, but with a particularly venomous, xenophobic edge reserved for a man of Mamdani’s background. Trump himself, the newly inaugurated 47th President, had already branded Mamdani a “communist lunatic,” setting the tone for a discourse that refused to rise above the level of a playground taunt.
This reaction is instructive. It is a tell. The Right’s inability to engage with Mamdani’s actual arguments reveals a terrifying insecurity at the heart of modern conservatism. For decades, the American Right has claimed a monopoly on the concept of “individualism.” They have successfully branded themselves as the guardians of personal liberty, the champions of the rugged individual standing tall against the gray, homogenizing tide of the collective. They paint socialism, and indeed, any robust form of government action, as a machine that grinds the individual down into a faceless cog.
But Mamdani’s inauguration speech, and the philosophy that undergirds it, exposed this posture for the fraud that it is. In calling to replace the “frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism,” Mamdani was not declaring war on the individual. He was declaring war on the myth that has kept the individual in chains. The Right’s panic over his mayoralty proves that they are not interested in individualism at all. They are interested in atomization. They are fake individualists who worship a system that strips people of their agency, their time, and their dignity, and they are terrified of a politics that might actually give those things back.
To understand why the Right is so threatened by Mamdani, we must first dismantle their definition of individualism. To the modern conservative, “individualism” is a negative concept. It is defined almost exclusively by what is absent: the absence of taxes, the absence of regulation, the absence of the state in one’s commercial affairs. It is the freedom of the wolf in the sheepfold. In this worldview, you are an “individual” only insofar as you are a participant in the market. Your worth is your net worth; your agency is your purchasing power.
This version of individualism is inextricably linked to the concept of “ruggedness” and the idea that one must go it alone, sink or swim, without a lifeline. If you fail, it is a moral failing of your individual character. If you are poor, it is because you lacked drive. If you are sick and cannot afford care, it is because you failed to plan. This philosophy sounds seductive in an Ayn Rand novel, but in the crushing reality of 21st-century capitalism, it is a recipe for servitude.
True individualism, that is, the ability of a human being to self-actualize, to pursue their unique passions, to create art, to raise a family with joy rather than anxiety, to participate in their community, requires a material base. You cannot be a rugged individual if you are exhausted. You cannot be a free thinker if you are terrified of losing your health insurance. You cannot be the captain of your soul if you are a debt peon to a landlord who raises your rent 20% every year.
This is the paradox that Mamdani’s platform addresses, and it is the paradox the Right refuses to acknowledge: Collectivism is the necessary infrastructure of individualism.
Let’s consider Mamdani’s proposal for “fast and free” buses. To a conservative like Trump or the pundits on Fox News, this is “socialism.” It is a handout. It is the state interfering in the natural order of the market. But look at what it actually does for the individual. A free bus system means a single mother in the Bronx is not confined to her immediate neighborhood for employment. It means a student can travel to a library or a museum across the city without calculating the cost of the fare against their grocery budget. It removes a friction, a barrier that limits human potential. By pooling resources collectively (taxes) to provide a universal servic, the city expands the effective liberty of millions of people. It gives them the freedom of movement, which is a prerequisite for any other kind of freedom.
Or take the proposal for universal childcare, funded by taxing the wealthiest few. The Right frames this as theft, a violation of the property rights of the rich. But what of the rights of the parents? Under the current system of “rugged individualism,” having a child is a financial catastrophe for the working class. Parents who are disproportionately mothers, are forced to drop out of the workforce or take substandard jobs just to manage the logistics of care. Their individual potential is strangled by the sheer cost of reproduction. Mamdani’s “collectivist” solution liberates these individuals. It gives them back their time and their careers. It allows them to be more than just caretakers; it allows them to be full participants in society.
The most contentious of Mamdani’s pillars, the rent freeze, is perhaps the clearest example. The Right views rent control as an assault on the freedom of the landlord. But the landlord’s freedom is the tenant’s tyranny. When housing is treated purely as a speculative asset, the tenant lives in a state of permanent precarity. They cannot put down roots. They cannot invest in their community because they might be priced out next month. They are interchangeable units of revenue, not citizens. By stabilizing housing, Mamdani is proposing to give people the security they need to build a distinct, individual life. He is prioritizing the human right to a home over the property right to infinite profit.
The Right hates this because their version of individualism is a zero-sum game. For the landlord to be a “rugged individual,” the tenant must be a serf. For the billionaire to be a “Titan of Industry,” the worker must be a cost to be minimized. Their individualism is hierarchical; it is the freedom of the master, which necessitates the subjugation of the servant.
Mamdani’s “warmth of collectivism” threatens to flatten this hierarchy. It suggests that freedom is not a finite resource to be hoarded by the strong, but a public good to be cultivated by the many. When Mamdani says, “No longer will City Hall hesitate to use its power to improve New Yorkers’ lives,” he is reclaiming the state as an instrument of human liberation, rather than a mere enforcer of contracts.
The ferocity of the Right’s response, and the immediate pivot to “Nazi” comparisons and “communist” slurs really betrays their inability to fight on this terrain. They cannot argue that a mother is “freer” when she is bankrupt from childcare costs. They cannot argue that a commuter is “more of an individual” when they are stranded by a broken, expensive subway system. So, they must pretend that Mamdani’s collectivism is about gray jumpsuits and breadlines. They rather desperately conjure the specter of the Soviet Union and McCarthyist scare tactics because they cannot defend the reality of the United States.
Furthermore, the Right’s individualism is revealed as “fake” by their own cultural politics. The modern MAGA movement, which now controls the White House and much of the federal apparatus, is one of the most stiflingly conformist political projects in American history. While they preach economic libertarianism, they demand rigid adherence to social norms. They ban books. They police gender expression. They demand that school curriculums conform to a nationalist mythos. They view dissent not as an expression of individuality, but as treason.
A true individualist would celebrate the kaleidoscope of human identity. They would want a society where a trans kid, a Muslim immigrant, a steelworker, and an artist are all equally free to define themselves. But the Right does not want this. They want economic anarchy and cultural tyranny. They want the market to run wild, but the people to stay in line.
Mamdani’s coalition, by contrast, is a pluralistic collective. It brings together the very “rugged” workers the Right claims to represent—the delivery drivers, the nurses, the teachers—and unites them not to erase their differences, but to secure the common conditions that allow their differences to flourish. The “warmth” Mamdani speaks of is the solidarity of people who realize that they are stronger together than they are apart. It is the understanding that I cannot be truly free if my neighbor is in chains.
The “Nazi salute” smear against Mamdani is particularly ironic, given the Right’s flirtation with actual authoritarianism. Fascism is, at its core, the ultimate negation of the individual. It subsumes the person entirely into the State and the Race. It is the “collectivism” of the graveyard. Mamdani’s democratic socialism is the exact opposite. It uses the tools of the collective (democratic governance, public goods) to enhance the life of the person. It is about using the power of the many to break the stranglehold of the few.
When conservative pundits mock Mamdani’s “audacity,” they are mocking the idea that politics can be anything other than damage control. They want us to believe that the current state of affairs where the subway crumbles while the stock market soars is natural, inevitable, and unchangeable. They want us to accept “small expectations.” Why? Because small expectations make for docile subjects. If you believe that you are on your own, that no help is coming, that the government is your enemy, you will scrap for crumbs and thank the job creators for the privilege. You will be too busy surviving to demand more.
Mamdani’s speech was dangerous to the Right because it broke this spell. It reset the baseline. It said: You deserve more. You deserve a city that works for you. And you have the power to take it.
This is why they call him a fake individualist, a communist, a tyrant. They are projecting. It is the Right that demands we sacrifice our lives to the economy. It is the Right that demands we sacrifice our lungs to pollution and our children to gun violence in the name of “freedom.” They are the ones who treat human beings as fuel for the machine.
The “fake individualism” of the Right is a luxury good. It is easy to be a “rugged individual” when you have a trust fund. It is easy to disdain the “nanny state” when you can hire a private nanny. But for the vast majority of New Yorkers and Americans, the Right’s individualism is a cold, lonely lie. It is the freedom to freeze to death on a park bench. It is the freedom to go bankrupt from cancer.
As the Mamdani administration begins its work, the attacks will only intensify. The Right will sabotage his funding, sue his agencies, and slander his supporters. They will do this because they know that if he succeeds, if he proves that a major American city can provide high-quality public goods, protect tenants, and tax the rich without the sky falling, their entire ideological edifice will crumble. They have to destroy him, because he exposes the great lie of American conservatism: that we are safer alone than we are together.
In the end, the battle between Zohran Mamdani vision of democratic socialism and the Right is not a battle between collectivism and individualism. It is a battle between two definitions of freedom. On one side is the freedom of the enclave, the gated community, the offshore account. On the other is the freedom of the public square, the library, the park. The Right wants a world of “individuals” who are really just consumers, defined by what they buy. Mamdani wants a world of citizens, defined by what they build together.
The “warmth of collectivism” is not a trap. It is a foundation. And it is only by standing on that foundation that we can ever hope to reach the heights of true, unfettered individualism.
As a Canadian entrepreneur I am not afraid of socialism like Americans. I was able to quit my job 40 years ago and start a business because I didn’t fear losing my healthcare. I could then hire employees because I didn’t have to pay for their healthcare. The modest safety nets we have in Canada has helped fuel small business in Canada. Americans had been fed a lot of nonsense about socialism by people who have a vested interest in opposing simple and modest public cooperation. Americans are brainwashed.
Just two comments here, apart from congratulating you on a very focused article.
One comment homes in on your "wolves" allusion, and is taken from the commentary to the DVD I have of "The Making of 'Out of Africa'", a 1985 movie about Africa:
"Denys [Finch Hatton] deeply admired the unique qualities of the Maasai and he tried to help them when the colonial government took away their spears and shields, robbing them not only of their ability to fight, and thus stop lions from raiding their herds, but also of their identity. The British plutocrats condemned because they could not comprehend a race that did not define itself by its economic utility."
The British took away the Maasai's spears so that the British themselves could be wolves in the Maasai's sheepfold. They took them in order to remove the Maasai's identity. But it is the last sentence that is most telling: the colonial overlords could not understand a race that would put compassion and humanity above economic extraction.
And the second comment relates to the assertion that funding reforms through taxation of the wealthy constitutes theft. I refer of course to your Constitution, the fifth amendment, I believe: "No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."
I firmly believe that every right portends an obligation. Therefore while it is right that the rich should not be dispossessed of their assets without due process (and I'm sure Mr Mamdani knows this), nor should any be possessed of property without said due process. If you can't lose it without due process, you can't gain it without due process. Because your gain is someone else's loss, whether you extract it under duress, or steal it, or find it or gouge it, or putatively contract for it using unfair terms, if you don't acquire property by due process, it's not yours to lose in the first place.
In a world where cheating has become the norm for commercial enterprises, where the antitrust legislation often lies in tatters by the wayside, where price gouging is rife and anticompetitive behaviour, theft of copyright material and abuse of data collection commonplace, let us first look to whether their property was in fact acquired according to due process of law before anyone accuses anyone else of depriving them of it without same.