One irony of leftism in the 21st century is that it makes “Big Leftism” of the prior century, the Cold War titans of Soviet Russia, China, and junior partners, such as Cuba, look like bastions of conservative common sense on certain matters, namely, law and order.
These countries’ war on what they called “parasitism,” or more straightforwardly “vagrancy,” was couched in terms of civic pride and national purpose that is anathema to the modern American liberal.
When California‘s Sacramento City Hall is considered a refuge for the homeless and not a special site of political importance that ought to be especially shielded from dilapidation and misuse, something has gone awry in the nexus between state and society.
Zohran Mamdani, the youthful likely next mayor of New York City, wants to make housing a human right. Not unlike the charters of the aforementioned governments, but also unlike them, he deftly avoids the stick portions of the carrot-and-stick playbook. There is seemingly no selfish violation of community norms of civilized behavior that can’t be excused by appeals to a lack of investment in tackling “root causes” of said behavior. Mamdani’s plan to abolish fares for public transportation might be excusable, if not economically advisable, if a strict law-and-order approach to antisocial behavior on the A Train is enforced.
But it won’t be. We know this because Mamdani believes the presence of police makes people less safe, not more. Social outreach and “decarceration” are the answers to crime for him, in a bizarre inversion of the state’s basic function of helping its citizens escape the state of nature. A state’s fundamentals are overlooked, but its bells and whistles are to be rung and blown from every pore of the body politic.
The disconnect between the extension of positive rights “bennies” and a citizen’s obligation to abide by the standards of their more productive neighbors is palpable with this generation of American liberals. But without the latter, the former can’t stand, lest a downwardly spiraling lootfest ensue.
Make no mistake, honest-to-god(less) communism is to the right of Mamdani and pals on this front: For “beggars and vagrants,” Soviet historian Sheila Fitzpatrick wrote in 2011 of midcentury Russian practice, “courts imposed sentences of five years exile with compulsory labor at the place of settlement for able-bodied persons taken into custody for begging who ‘persistently refuse socially-useful work and lead a parasitical way of life,’ as well as those ‘who have no definite occupation and place of residence.'”
In Cuba, the persistently vagrant were considered thieves, along with genuine, object-level thieves, stealing from the collective socialist project. They instinctively knew that a command economy and its concomitant, destructive abolition of the price system would be even more destructive if rudimentary rules against freeloading and rule-breaking, comprehensible even to a band of protohuman hunter-gatherers, were not enforced.
Moving to the Caribbean, beyond the core communist commitment to combating “counter-revolutionary forces,” a 1971 report on Fidel Castro’s speech on the 10th anniversary of Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior noted that “special attention would be given to the struggle against common crimes and antisocial activities,” which work against the “physical integrity” of the people. Even traffic violations made it into Castro’s appeal to petty bourgeois law and order concerns. His enjoining the Cuban public to be proactive on these matters strikes a modern-day reader as very GOP-like: “The prime minister stated that the fight against common crime would not fall exclusively to the officers of public order, but that it would be everybody’s battle” (emphasis mine).
And Cuba’s approach to combating AIDS in the 1980s was infamously well to the right of that decade’s stateside conservative counterparts.
China’s angle of attack on indolence and antisocial activity would make Newt Gingrich wince, to say nothing of a San Francisco liberal. “Homeless people will be able to stay at the shelters for no more than 10 days,” (emphasis mine), says a 2003 report on Beijing’s efforts at tackling homelessness. “Those who have made a career of begging and show no inclination to take up regular employment will not be helped.”
China’s use of the derogatory term “tramp,” which it shared with Soviet Russia, is likewise indicative of a certain conservative baseline in its society that may surprise critics of authoritarian socialism.
None of this is to say that communism is a desirable political system. It certainly is not. But the history of these countries, at least during their postrevolutionary, steady-state years, reveals a commitment to adhering to a bare minimum Hobbesian social contract, the likes of which contemporary Western liberals appear to have little interest in.
As President Donald Trump threatens to take a hard-line approach to crime and disorder in America’s major cities, including Chicago, and Democrats predictably describe such efforts as “fascist,” know that this is primarily indicative of liberals’ steady drift to a novel, infantile form of leftism that is as unrecognizable to an old-school Cuban member of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution as it is to a MAGA partisan.
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“People wanted domestic peace; they wanted to walk down the street without getting murdered, and the Bolsheviks could deliver that,” political philosopher John Gray explained in a 2024 London talk on Russia’s early Soviet period. “They were pretty ruthless, but they could do it.”
America’s social Democrats, not so much.
Dain Fitzgerald is a writer and “podtuber” in Diamond Springs, California, in the beautiful Gold Country of El Dorado County. His Substack is @mupetblast.
