Mamdani’s Irrepressible Conflict with Capitalism

Letter to Romans: It’s not as if capitalism hasn’t clashed with socialism before … but with the recent rise of the AOCs & now Mamani, are we reaching a point of “irreconcilable conflict” like the House Divided Lincoln confronted leading up to the Civil War?

If you’ll recall, the still fledgling US had devolved into a perpetual state of moral turpitude over the issue of slavery. The Northerners generally thought the South’s peculiar institution was an unacceptably hypocritical take on the Declaration of Independence & Southerners mostly countered that they wouldn’t have signed the Constitution if they thought they couldn’t be as hypocritical as they wanted & for all time to come. The threat of war hung over the country for nearly 60 years. At one point, a Senator & future Secretary of State, William Seward, warned that the US was divided by two “incompatible” political & economic systems, the free labor aka capitalism and the slave labor aka that era’s cousin to communism. While the two co-existed for decades, he conceded, a catastrophic “collision” was fast becoming inevitable. Argued Seward: “They who think that it is accidental, unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical agitators … mistake the case altogether. It is an IRREPRESIBLE CONFLICT between opposing & enduring forces and it means the US must & will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.”

Then Representative Abraham Lincoln agreed with Seward in his House Divided speech. You know the rest. And, you know the similarities with today’s unbending Marxist vs Capitalists viewpoints. The question, then, might be, is the US destined to become all Marxist or all Capitalist? Mamdani says the former. What say ye?

Davd Soul