Everett Piper | July 1, 2025
(The Washington Times) — In 1924, G.K. Chesterton wrote, “Why is it that for the last two or three centuries, the educated have been generally wrong and the uneducated relatively right? … What the educated man has generally done was to ram down everybody’s throat some premature and priggish theory which he himself afterward discovered to be wrong; so wrong that he himself generally recoiled from it and went staggering to the opposite extreme.”
These days, it seems we can hardly watch anything coming out of the Democratic Party without concluding that Chesterton, the man dubbed the “Prince of Paradox,” was also a modern-day prophet.
Whether it be the science-denying misogyny of transgender sports, the historical dishonesty of Nikole Hannah-Jones, the constitutional ignorance of Rep. Jasmine Crockett, the borderline criminality of Dr. Anthony Fauci or the unmitigated dopiness of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, we see it over and over again: The left simply can’t help itself. There seems to be no “priggish theory” that is too dumb for these people to parrot in their quest for power.
Consider last week’s poster child of such hubris: Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old failed rapper and trust fund child who just won the Democratic primary to become the next mayor of New York City.
Mr. Mamdani coasted to victory in Tuesday’s primary by promising government-run community grocery stores and mandating that all landlords and property owners freeze rent. He also offered an endless menu of government goodies, such as free child care and free public transportation. In other words, Zohran Mamdani is an unapologetic communist.
Herein lies the prescience of Chesterton.
By all measures, Mr. Mamdani’s worldview is a failed ideology. Despite its promises of happiness for all and the brotherhood of man, communism always implodes upon itself with corruption, greed and endless human suffering.
Or, in the words of Art Carden, writing for The Daily Economy, “Experiments with communism have a distressing tendency to descend into mass murder.” Why? Because the very nature of communism seeks to redefine not only economics but also man.
Mr. Carden cites Lord Acton’s seminal thesis that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” This, says Mr. Carden, explains the endemic failures of communism. “People [may have] meant well when they got started,” he says, “but having so much power derails them.” Or, to paraphrase Friedrich Hayek: “The worst always seems to rise to the top.”
In other words, power attracts and power corrupts. People crave it, and as a result, evil men end up in positions of power. Hence, you have the horrors of the Killing Fields and Holodomor.
Mr. Carden goes on. “Communist regimes [always] move quickly into oppression and mass murder [because] communism is ‘born bad’ and “ultimately cannot be attained without imposing its ‘ideal of totalitarianism.’”
Thus, the one indisputable lesson of history is that the bad idea of communism always ends badly.
The Soviet Union, for example, was the world’s first official communist state, and it failed miserably. In the end, at least 20 million people died at the hands of Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin, who, through collectivization, centralized control and wealth redistribution, plunged their nation into stagnation, failure and famine.
Maoist China is another example. Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward was a catastrophic disaster. His march against capitalism and traditional values resulted in unimaginable suffering for the Chinese people. Businessmen, teachers and perceived political enemies were targeted and purged. Social chaos and economic disruption ensued. At least 70 million people were killed under his banner of social justice and free stuff for all.
Then we have the modern-day case study of North Korea, which represents one of the most extreme examples of the horrific consequences of centralized planning and government overreach. Kim Jong-un’s control of all aspects of business and private life has resulted in devastating food shortages, lack of basic infrastructure and widespread poverty across the nation.
The examples could go on and on — Cuba, Cambodia, Venezuela, Vietnam — as the failures of every communist movement ever tried highlight the consequences of implementing a system that leads only to economic inefficiency, political repression and human suffering. Although the ideology promises equity, lack of want and imaginations of John Lennon’s utopia, the practical outcomes are always decline, despair, dystopia and death.
King Solomon once said, “As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool returns to his folly.” The political philosopher George Santayana echoed the same when he wrote, “He who doesn’t learn the lessons of history is doomed to repeat them.”
The voters of New York are about to learn the hard way that Solomon, Santayana and Chesterton were all right if they actually vote for Zohran Mamdani to be their mayor in November.
