by Jacob G. Hornberger

November 11, 2025

While American progressives celebrate the electoral triumph of self-labeled socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City, American conservatives are lamenting his victory of socialism over right-wing “capitalism.”

But the discomforting reality is that although conservatives are loathe to acknowledge the reality of their own mindsets, they are, in principle, as committed to socialism as Mamdani. When it comes to socialism, the difference between Mamdani and conservatives is one of degree, not one of principle. Mamdani simply takes socialism further than conservatives do.

Thus, when one sees right-wingers fighting with left-wingers, their fight isn’t one of principle, it is one of degree. Progressives want more socialism — even total socialism — while conservatives want less socialism. But what’s important to note about this is reality — both right-wingers and left-wingers are deeply committed to socialism.

Let’s examine some examples of right-wing (and left-wing) support of socialism.

1. Public (i.e., government) schooling. It would be difficult to find a better example of a socialist program than public schooling. The government, at the national, state, and local levels, plans, in a top-down, command-and-control, manner the education of millions of children. The government establishes the curriculum and selects the textbooks. It hires the teachers. It determines what is to be taught to the students.

Financing is through the coercion of taxation. Customers are acquired through compulsory school-attendance laws, which are enforced against parents through imprisonment and fines.

The system is based on regimentation, conformity, obedience to orders, deference to authority, and, of course, indoctrination. Public-schooling is, for all practical purposes, Army-lite. Here is where people’s minds are molded into becoming good, little, loyal, deferential, and patriotic supporters of the national-security state  —and where they are taught that American socialism is “freedom.”

The indoctrination, as we can easily see, oftentimes lasts a lifetime. At public events, American grown-ups, especially conservatives, immediately hop to their feet and loyally and patriotically recite the Pledge of Allegiance, which was drilled into their minds every single day for 12 long years — “with liberty (under socialism) and justice for all (including those people who are deported to a brutal dictatorship in El Salvador without due process of law as well as those people in the Caribbean who are having their lives snuffed out under the rubric of enforcing America’s decades-old, never-ending, and perpetual deadly, destructive, and corrupt drug-war racket).” I wonder how many right-wingers realize that their beloved Pledge of Allegiance was written by a socialist. I doubt many of them would care.

Of course, conservatives have convinced themselves that they’re different from progressives because they endorse school vouchers — as a “competitive” way to improve public schooling. What they fail to acknowledge is that vouchers are just another socialist reform measure, one that uses the coercive apparatus of the state to take money from people to whom it belongs in order to give it to people to whom it does not belong.

In words that describe perfectly the plight of the American people, especially conservatives, Johann Goethe expressed it best: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

2. Social Security and Medicare. These are the two crown jewels of American welfare-state socialism. In fact, both of them originated among socialists in Germany and were later imported into the United States, replacing the system of free markets, free will, and voluntary charity that our American ancestors had adopted. The government uses its power of taxation to take money from those to whom it belongs (e.g., people’s children and grandchildren) in order to give it to people to whom it does not belong (e.g., seniors). Both conservatives and progressives have convinced themselves that their system of welfare-state socialism constitutes “care and compassion,” but the reality is that it is the exact opposite. Genuine care and compassion do not come with coercion but rather through the voluntary choices of a free people.

3. Immigration controls. America’s decades-old system of immigration controls, to which conservatives are deeply wedded, is based on the socialist principle of central planning. The government plans, in a top-down, command-and-control, manner the number of immigrants that will be permitted to enter the United States from each nation and their qualifications and credentials. As the libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises pointed out, socialist central planning brings “planned chaos.” As I ask in my new book The Case for Open Borders: A Primer, what better term to describe the decades-long, ongoing, never-ending, perpetual crisis and chaos along the border, along with the massive death, suffering, and immigration police state that is now busting out of the borderlands and encompassing the entire United States?

When you were a kid, did you ever think you’d be living in a country were troops were occupying American cities and where masked Gestapo-like government agents in civilian clothes were terrorizing the nation with official state-sanctioned kidnappings, disappearances, horrific detention centers, and the due-process-free deportations of people to brutal dictatorial regimes to be indefinitely incarcerated and tortured? No wonder so many Americans are looking to socialism to ostensibly save themselves from the immigration fascism that is now enveloping America — under the rubric of keeping us “safe” of course.

I could go on with more examples, but the point is simply this: Socialism — both right-wing and left-wing — is not the way to go. As we have seen in countries like Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela, and others, socialism brings impoverishment, death, suffering, conflict, dysfunctionality, envy, covetousness, a police state, cynicism, hopeless dependency on governmental largess, and, of course, the destruction of liberty. To achieve ever-rising standards of living, peace, life, harmony, and liberty for our nation, it is necessary to cast socialism, both left-wing and right-wing, into the dustbin of history and embrace economic liberty, free will, free markets, and voluntary charity.