{"id":22223,"date":"2026-01-10T13:24:50","date_gmt":"2026-01-10T18:24:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=22223"},"modified":"2026-01-11T23:09:29","modified_gmt":"2026-01-12T04:09:29","slug":"mayor-mamdanis-collectivist-warmth-is-a-lot-like-chilly-commie-bucharest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/10\/mayor-mamdanis-collectivist-warmth-is-a-lot-like-chilly-commie-bucharest\/","title":{"rendered":"Mayor Mamdani\u2019s collectivist warmth is a lot like chilly Commie Bucharest"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>New York Post, January 10, 2026<\/h3>\n

Mayor Mamdani\u2019s collectivist warmth is a lot like chilly Commie Bucharest<\/a><\/h1>\n

by James Bovard<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

via Wikimedia<\/p><\/div>\n

Mayor Mamdani promised New Yorkers Jan. 1 he would \u201creplace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.\u201d Luckily, psychiatrists have not yet classified \u201crugged individualism\u201d as a mental illness. But Mamdani\u2019s vision of cozy collectivism is tricky to reconcile with what I saw in Communist Romania in November 1987<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I arrived in Bucharest after taking the Orient Express from Budapest, Hungary. In pre-Communist times, that train epitomized capitalist decadence. In the Soviet era, the lavish cuisine was replaced by far more attentive service \u2014 more or less. Armed guards in Transylvania repeatedly searched my cabin and then locked me inside it so my Western ideas would not contaminate any devout Commies.<\/p>\n

The train arrived in Bucharest four or five hours behind schedule. Let\u2019s hope Mamdani is not relying on Romanian refugee planners to fulfill his promise to \u201cmake buses fast and free.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I checked into the only hotel permitted to offer rooms to Westerners, I was practically tackled by a beefy prostitute who was likely also a government spy. She kept nudging to “go upstairs.” She cooed gutturally: “Why are you here in Bucharest?”<\/p>\n

“I\u2019m a tourist,\u201d I said. Actually, I was working as a journalist, but I hadn\u2019t disclosed that on my visa application. OK, technically, I was in Romania illegally, but what are technicalities among friends?<\/p>\n

“But it is so cold outside,\u201d she said. \u201cLet\u2019s stay inside. Aren\u2019t you lonely?”<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Not a chance: this woman radiated \u201choney trap.\u201d Besides, I had a strict rule to never tussle with any woman who had a better mustache than I did.<\/p>\n

The Romanian regime was even more paranoid than Alex Jones. When I asked the ornery hotel concierge for a map of the city, he glared hatefully at me: “We have no maps. If there is some place you want to go, you tell me what it is, and I will tell you how to get there.”<\/p>\n

My hunch was that guy didn\u2019t make a living from tips.<\/p>\n

In his inaugural speech, Mamdani touted an array of new subsidies such as free child care as linchpins for \u201cthe lives we fill with freedom.\u201d But government handouts are often far more expensive than they first appear.<\/p>\n

The Communist regime boasted of providing free health care to Romanians, but women were trapped in a real-life \u201cHandmaid\u2019s Tale.\u201d Because boosting birth rates was part of the Five Year Plan, the government outlawed contraception and abortion. It forced all women between the ages of 18 and 40 to have a monthly gynecological exam to ensure no one robbed the state by terminating a pregnancy. Ten thousand Romanian women died from illegal abortions, and far more were left maimed.<\/p>\n

In Romania, \u201cwarmth\u201d was an abstraction that existed primarily in propaganda campaigns exalting the supreme leader, Nicolae Ceau\u0219escu. To save energy to fulfill the Five Year Plan for factories, the government routinely cut off the electricity to hospitals, causing 1,000 deaths the previous winter. The infant mortality rate was so high, the government refused to register children as being born until they survived their first month.<\/p>\n

On the streets, my bulky Aussie-style canvas hat marked me as a foreigner. People stopped me and pleaded for packs of Kent cigarettes \u2014 the de facto second currency \u2014 they could use to bribe doctors to get health care for their sick children.\u00a0Food shortages caused pervasive gauntness in this former \u201cbreadbasket of Europe.\u201d The government responded to rising hunger with a publicity campaign on the danger of overeating.<\/p>\n

In prior visits to Czechoslovakia and East Germany, I had been hounded by the secret police so I knew not to pull out any notebook to jot down my observations as I walked the streets of Bucharest. Instead, I wrote single words on the palm of my hand I could later use as a fishhook to pull up a string of memories.<\/p>\n

As I was walking across the airport tarmac to catch my Lufthansa flight out of Romania, a guard shouted for me to halt and came running up with his submachine gun bouncing off his ample belly. He grabbed my left arm and, pointing at my palm, demanded to know: “WHAT IS THIS?!?”<\/p>\n

I looked closely at my hand, then I looked at the guard.<\/p>\n

“It\u2019s ink.”<\/p>\n

He paused, squinted, nodded his head knowingly, and then waved me on to the plane.<\/p>\n

A few weeks later, those palm notes appeared in a New York Times piece I wrote headlined \u201cEconomic Collapse: Eastern Europe<\/a>, the New Third World.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ceau\u0219escu and his wife were lined up against a wall and summarily executed roughly two years before Mamdani was born. Ceau\u0219escu\u2019s lofty rhetoric no longer swayed the Romanians he had long oppressed.<\/p>\n

In his victory speech on election night, Mamdani declared his supporters \u201cchose . . . hope over tyranny<\/a>.\u201d But giving boundless power to his own supposed good intentions will be a recipe for ruin for the new mayor. Will Mamdani speedily turbo-charge the cynicism that he boasted of vanquishing?<\/p>\n

James Bovard is the author of 11 books, including \u201c<\/em>Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty.<\/em><\/a>\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Here’s that 1987 New York Times piece and a link to the text of the article<\/strong><\/a> –<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New York Post, January 10, 2026 Mayor Mamdani\u2019s collectivist warmth is a lot like chilly Commie Bucharest by James Bovard Mayor Mamdani promised New Yorkers Jan. 1 he would \u201creplace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.\u201d Luckily, psychiatrists have not yet classified \u201crugged individualism\u201d as a mental illness. But Mamdani\u2019s vision […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22225,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1834,4745,1070,1198,4742,4654,761,1256,1230,4743,1159,4744],"class_list":["post-22223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bucharest","tag-ceausescu","tag-communism","tag-east-germany","tag-honey-trap","tag-mamdani","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-times","tag-orient-express","tag-prostitute","tag-romania","tag-zechoslovakia"],"yoast_head":"\nMayor Mamdani\u2019s collectivist warmth is a lot like chilly Commie Bucharest - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"NYC Mayor Mamdani touts "collectivist warmth" but that was not what I saw in communist Romania in 1987\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/10\/mayor-mamdanis-collectivist-warmth-is-a-lot-like-chilly-commie-bucharest\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Mayor Mamdani\u2019s collectivist warmth is a lot like chilly Commie Bucharest - 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22223"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22223\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22228,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22223\/revisions\/22228"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}