"Collectivism" — he spoke the word, as if a wedding vow.

Mamdani said it, he highlighted it: "We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism." He promised it. He attributed warmth to it.

The link goes to my post yesterday with that quote as the title. In the comments, I wrote: "He's saying the words that have been left unsaid in the past. In that way, he's like Trump."

Who are the other American politicians who might have said "collectivism" — in a positive way, not as a way of criticizing somebody else? Bernie Sanders, who swore in Mamdani, doesn't use that word.

This blog has a 22-year archive, so I did a search to see how "collectivism" has figured into our discourse. I found 14 items, and I don't think any of them count as a positive use of the word in the style of Zoran Mamdami. 

Here are all the past occurrences of "collectivism" on this blog, in chronological order:

February 27, 2008: From the NYT obituary for William F. Buckley: "Mr. Buckley declared war on this liberal order, beginning with his blistering assault on Yale as a traitorous den of atheistic collectivism immediately after his graduation (with honors) from the university."

August 12, 2008: David Brooks, watching the Olympics opening ceremony in China: "We’ve seen displays of mass conformity before, but this was collectivism of the present — a high-tech vision of the harmonious society performed in the context of China’s miraculous growth."

December 7, 2008: Quoting someone: "[T]he pro-car lobby requires abstract arguments... From Hitler to Margaret Thatcher, car advocates have seen them as literal engines of change; vehicles by which to remake society, whether on the basis of individualism or collectivism."

January 11, 2009: Quoting someone: "Sure, I am all for abominating racism like any other form of odious collectivism... but this hypersensitivity to any politically incorrect use of language is really annoying."

August 12, 2009: Camille Paglia, approving of Sarah Palin's use of the term "death panels," wrote: "As a libertarian and refugee from the authoritarian Roman Catholic church of my youth, I simply do not understand the drift of my party toward a soulless collectivism."

August 14, 2012: Quoting Rush Limbaugh: "[The] 'progressive' argument... assumes there must be someone or some few who do have all the knowledge and information. We just have to find, train, and hire them to run the government’s agencies. Friedrich Hayek called this collectivism’s 'fatal conceit.' The idea that a few bureaucrats know what’s best for all of society, or possess more information about human wants and needs than millions of free individuals interacting in a free market is both false and arrogant. It has guided collectivists for two centuries down the road to serfdom -- and the road is littered with their wrecked utopias."

August 28, 2012: Stanley Fish wrote: "America,  [D'Souza] declares, is an 'empire of ideals' — individual rights, freedom of choice, upward mobility limited only by your willingness to work hard.... In contrast, Obama... is influenced by leftist teachers like Edward Said and Roberto Unger, immerses himself in texts by Marxist, feminist and ant-colonialist authors, and thus fleshes out the lineaments of 'his father’s third world collectivism.'"

August 30, 2012: I wrote: "[Salon's Joan Walsh is] saying you didn't build that — the very phrase Obama is straining to disown. You didn't build that, you can't build that, and you're psychotic if you imagine that you can. She's deeply into the collectivism the Democrats don't want to openly embrace. But she doesn't think she's openly embracing it."

July 16, 2014: On the 50th anniversary of Barry Goldwater's presidential nomination, I quoted his speech: "The good Lord raised this mighty Republic to be a home for the brave and to flourish as the land of the free — not to stagnate in the swampland of collectivism, not to cringe before the bully of communism."

September 19, 2015: A quote from The Unabomber Manifesto: "The leftist is anti-individualistic, pro-collectivist. He wants society to solve everyone’s problems for them, satisfy everyone’s needs for them, take care of them. He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs. The leftist is antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser.... His feelings of inferiority are so ingrained that he cannot conceive of himself as individually strong and valuable. Hence the collectivism of the leftist."

August 27, 2017: A Madison columnist says that another Madison columnist is "throwing off the Madison liberal torpor. Renouncing the creed of collectivism. Escaping the Cult of Victimhood" and will therefore "be called a racist" and is "ruined in Madison."

August 21, 2019: I wrote: "What does Ayn Rand say about race? From Rand's 'Virtue of Selfishness': 'Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism....' I'm not going to go any further into the study of whether Beyonce lyrics accord with Randian philosophy! If my head were full of Beyonce lyrics — which maybe they would be if my last 10 years were my teenage years — I might want to.... But my teenage years were in the 60s. My head is full of Dylan lyrics...."

January 22, 2022:  A study purported to detect a "surge of post-truth political argumentation" and a "historical rearrangement of the balance between collectivism and individualism and — inextricably linked — between the rational and the emotional."

December 7, 2024: Something about the Supreme Court case upholding Tennessee law banning puberty blockers and hormones for transgender children led me to read Wikipedia's description of the reaction to Darwinism in the Soviet Union: "Marxists... perceived a fissure between Marxism and Darwinism. Specifically, the issue is that while the 'struggle for survival' in Marxism applies to a social class as a whole (the class struggle), the struggle for survival in Darwinism is decided by individual random mutations. This was deemed a liberal doctrine, against the Marxist framework of 'immutable laws of history' and the spirit of collectivism."

ADDED: Only one of those examples is my own use of the word: "She's deeply into the collectivism the Democrats don't want to openly embrace." Do they want to openly embrace it now? Maybe not, but it wants to embrace them. Like a creepy uncle, Zohran Mamdani stumbles forward, arms outstretched, offering the warmth of his hugs.