Election of Socialist Zohran Mamdani and Necessity to Abandon Modern American Culture

Last week, the voters of New York City elected Democrat Zohran Mamdani, a self-proclaimed socialist, as mayor of the city. Mamdani’s victory signals a radical pivot toward socialist policies of Democrats on housing, transit, and economic equity yet it also exposes the deepening cultural rift with America’s founding ethos of ordered liberty, where self-restraint yields to unchecked state intervention. His election evidences a flexion point which needs to be addressed in order to avoid crisis and potential civil war, as this urban experiment risks amplifying the national mismatch between our libertarian Constitution and a culture adrift in moral permissiveness. To prevent the tyranny of external coercion over unchecked passions, we must restore society through the revival of virtuous self-governance, thereby bridging the divide and safeguarding the republic for future generations.

American Founding after Cultural Revolution

In order to grasp our present and chart our future, we must first reclaim the cultural and political origins from which we came. As we all learned, or should have learned in elementary and secondary school, our nation was founded after the American Revolutionary War, fought from 1775 to 1783. The Revolutionary War earned its name due to the profound cultural divergences between the American colonies and England, which necessitated a radical break from British rule and the creation of a new governance system. In is work Democracy in America (1862), Alexis de Tocqueville noted America’s distinctive culture of individual liberty and civic engagement, grounded in self-governing townships and a classless spirit that contrasted sharply with England’s hierarchical, aristocratic society dominated by the tyrannical control of an autocracy. This emphasis on organic, community-driven governance is echoed in Edmund Burke’s perspective in his work Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), in which Burke argued that constitutions naturally emerge from a nation’s traditions, customs, and cultural heritage, serving as a codification of its historical and cultural identity rather than an abstract imposition. Burke saw the American Constitution as an organic codification of the colonies’ traditions of local autonomy, developed through decades of self-rule, which conflicted with Britain’s centralized monarchical system. Accordingly, these cultural distinctions between the American colonies and England of self-reliance, republicanism, and resistance to arbitrary authority drove the Revolutionary War and shaped the American Constitution. Thus, we can observe our first axiom – government institutions reflect the evolving cultural values and norms of society. 

Upon What Principles is the American Constitution Based?

The purpose of the American government, as outlined in the Preamble of the Constitution, is to create a unified nation that preserves liberty for current and future generations. The key word in the Preamble is liberty. It is the fundamental founding principle and the unifying force that binds the nation together, but the definition is often elusive to the common American in the 21st century. Though often conflated, freedom and liberty are not synonymous. Freedom is the basic ability to act without any outside interference. On the other hand, liberty is the exercise of the same freedom but restrained internally through self-discipline and moral responsibility. This difference is subtle, but the difference is highlighted again by Edmund Burke. In his Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791) in response to the French Revolution, Burke criticized the radical social equality of the Jacobins as follows:

Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity [greed]; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without…men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

Indeed, Burke argued that true liberty requires self-restraint and not just the absence of external control as with freedom. Burke provides us with our second axiom – without internal moral discipline, external coercion and tyranny become necessary in order to control the “fetters” of “intemperate minds.”

This second axiom is well supported in the thinking of our Founding Fathers who were highly influenced by the Enlightenment ideals of reason over dogma, liberty over tyranny, and equality under the law. Below are a few quotes from the American founders that exemplify the importance of liberty (freedom plus virtuous self-restraint) in America.

“Human rights can only be assured among a virtuous people.” George Washington

“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.” Benjamin Franklin

“To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical [imaginary] idea.” James Madison

“No government can continue good but under the control of the people; and…their minds are to be informed by education what is right and what wrong; to be encouraged in habits of virtue and to be deterred from those of vice…These are the inculcations necessary to render the people a sure basis for the structure and order of government.” Thomas Jefferson 

“Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt.” Samuel Adams 

“A vitiated [impure] state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom.” Patrick Henry

“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” John Adams 

What Happens When the Virtuous Self-Restraint Disappears in a Free Society?

The short answer is extreme instability which inevitably leads to vertiginous collapse. The entire system becomes unstable when restraint and control within a society does not match the constitutional system by which it is governed. This concept is best understood in the extremes. On the left side of the spectrum is a libertarian free society in which the government, if any, is severely limited from controlling the self-restrained and self-governed society. On the extreme right side of the spectrum is a totalitarian society which controls not only the actions and speech of individuals within the society but their very thoughts. As a self-proclaimed free people, the United States was founded on the far left of this spectrum, restrained and balanced collectively by individual virtue rather than external compulsion. However, over the past 250 years, and more particularly since the 1960s, the people of the United States have been led away from their very libertarian traditions, cultural norms, and values which formed the basis of its Constitution. 

The Constitution presupposes an American citizenry who master their passions, yet most of our modern population has abandoned such mastery in favor of a culture dominated by instant gratification. 

The Constitution presupposes a vibrant American population of creators who forge purposeful lives through family, faith, and free enterprise, yet modern America has abandoned this noble calling for a nation of takers numbed by entitlement and the wrongful claiming of public benefits. 

The Constitution presupposes a public morality shaped by Judeo-Christian ethics, yet modern America has abandoned such norms in favor of the hollow creed of secular neutrality that has eroded virtue by severing duty from accountability, replacing self-restraint with state coercion, and leaving citizens adrift in moral relativism. 

The Constitution presupposes that families, not the state, would educate our youth in academics and classical virtue in order to prepare them for an intellectual future and virtuous civic life, yet modern America has abandoned this mission in favor of failing compulsory government schools obsessed with ideological social indoctrination over true learning. 

The Constitution presupposes elections will be secure, one-day affairs limited to verified citizens, yet modern America has abandoned that standard for universal mail-in ballots, month-long voting windows, and the importation of illegal immigrants to inflate voter rolls, all to favor convenience and lock in permanent power over honest elections. 

The Constitution presupposes that ambition and speech would be tempered by honor, civility, and self-restraint, yet modern America has abandoned personal reputation in favor of anonymous online outrage, cancel culture, deplatforming, and the normalization of political violence and assassinations. 

The Constitution presupposes that power would stay close to the people through state sovereignty and that posterity would be prized over present consumption, yet modern America has abandoned both local rule and intergenerational duty in favor of centralized federal bureaucracies, deficit spending, and cultural amnesia. 

The Constitution presupposes an American citizenry that would fund government through minimal, consensual taxes paid in honest currency while personally caring for the needy through voluntary charity, yet modern America has abandoned fiscal restraint, sound money, and private virtue for confiscatory taxes, endless fiat printing, hidden inflation, and entitlement programs that crowd out charitable generosity. 

The Constitution presupposes that war would require congressional declaration and serve clear national interests, yet modern America has abandoned this restraint in favor of perpetual executive military adventures that meddle in foreign nations’ domestic affairs, deplete our treasury, and sacrifice our young men and women without any recognizable benefit to the American people at large. 

The Constitution presupposes that immigration would admit only those eager to assimilate into America’s founding principles and cultural mores, yet modern America has abandoned that standard for uncontrolled illegal immigration that floods the nation with people who may not share our constitutional ideals or societal norms further destabilizing the republic.

In short, the Constitution is not the problem in modern America – we are. We, the people, have forsaken virtue and moral responsibility, embracing collectivism and a freedom untethered from personal accountability and trust in one another.

How Do We Regain Stability in Modern America

Unless virtuous self-restraint is restored to American culture, the constitutional order will continue to be unstable and inevitably collapse. In recent decades, the Constitution and modern cultural mores have grown so profoundly mismatched that the entire political system teeters on the brink of collapse. With virtuous self-restraint replaced by a boundless ethos of moral permissiveness, and the founding principles of liberty abandoned, modern American culture no longer sustains the constitutional order it once reflected. The result is a chasm between left and right so wide that compromise has become impossible. Two paths now lie before us. The first is to discard the Constitution and our republican institutions entirely, erecting an authoritarian regime whose external controls match a society incapable of internal discipline which is precisely the tyranny Burke warned would befall “men of intemperate minds.” The second path which is faithful to the American founding is to revive the culture’s original virtues, thereby realigning society with the Constitution’s requirement of ordered liberty and ensuring that self-government may once again endure. 

The election of Zohran Mamdani in New York City is not an isolated anomaly but a stark symptom of a nationwide cultural decay that has severed modern American culture from its founding commitment to ordered liberty. To preserve the republic, we must reject the path of authoritarian coercion that inevitably follows unchecked passions and instead reclaim the virtues of self-restraint, moral responsibility, and civic faith that once sustained our Constitution. Only by abandoning the hollow idols of instant gratification, entitlement, and moral relativism can we restore the cultural foundation required for self-government to endure. The choice is ours: revive the soul of America, or watch the republic collapse under the “fetters” of its “intemperate minds.”