George Will, a man who used to be a conservative before Trump broke him, still has occasional flashes of insight. I think he had one the other night on Bill Maher’s show, when he essentially said (paraphrasing both Will and H.L. Mencken), that the common people of New York know what they want—socialism—and deserve to get it good and hard. Even some conservatives don’t agree, but believe some lessons need to be learned the hard way. Zohran Mamdani’s election would be the safest way for America at large to learn that lesson.
Here’s Will:
George Will on Zorhan Mamdani: "I want him to win. I think every 20 years or so, we need a conspicuous, confined experiment with socialism so we can crack it up again."
— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) August 9, 2025
pic.twitter.com/CRAJXm8HDv
Many conservatives were perturbed. An X user named Parallel Spock wrote a longish essay that was popular, although (as I’ll point out at greater length below), his facts are a little off:
I disagree with this proposition and don’t find it logical.
— Parallel Spock (@RussLarson) August 9, 2025
Should we vote in a fascist like Hitler a few years after Mamdani’s socialism isn’t getting the results he’s promising (that it inevitably won’t get)? That’s what they did in Germany. Hitler rose because the country…
Picking up where the visible part of the tweet left off:
...had turned to socialism and it wasn’t driving toward success so Hitler convinced everyone that he could tweak it just the right amount…
We don’t need micro-experiments in socialisms to refute socialism. I admired Mr. Will in the 1980s and 1990s as more conservative than his peers but somewhere along the way, logic fled his rationalization process.
Let me just summarize what will happen in a socialist experiment:
Price controls → shortages
Rent controls → housing crisis
Minimum wage → unemployment
“Free” healthcare → rationing
Prices are signals—containing knowledge about supply, demand, scarcity, and preferences that no one brain can hold. Central planners can’t replicate this. Not even close.
I suggest that Mr. Will (and anyone who agrees that maybe we need a micro-experiment in socialism) read (or re-read) “The Road to Serfdom” by F A Hayek.
It’s short and it’s infallible.
Likewise, Nick Arama, a Red State writer I enjoy reading, also protested Will’s take:
The problem is that if Mamdani wins, it means a lot of suffering, and not just for the people in New York. Because of New York's importance, it's going to lead to more leftism infecting and hurting people. And it's silly to think it would be "confined." It's like a virus - if you let it live, it spreads.
We don't need another example of socialism's failure - we already have had plenty of examples. When it fails again and they don't give up power, then what? It's real people, it's not just an esoteric "experiment" without consequences. Mamdani and others would argue away the bad results as the fault of someone else, just as we saw Biden do. People on the left will believe it, just as they fall for whatever pablum the left pushes now.
Another writer I admire, Miranda Devine, also wasn’t happy with Will’s take:
Idiotic. Obviously doesn't live in New York. https://t.co/7NxKFj29Uk
— Miranda Devine (@mirandadevine) August 9, 2025
I disagree with all of them, because a Mandami mayoralty would have the virtue of being a controlled experiment at a local level, rather than a socialist turn at the national level.
An uncontrolled experiment would have been to put Bernie Sanders in the White House in 2016, so that he could bring his Soviet-style socialism to all of America. That would make an accurate Hitler analogy, since Hitler’s first and only political office with executive power was as Germany’s Chancellor, a position he achieved with less than 30% of the national vote. (In other words, the people didn’t actually elect Hitler; the political system gave him power.)
In 1930s Germany, there was no “A/B” testing. There was just insta-Nazi for the whole country. Likewise, Britain started with socialism at the top when (as Will reminds us), it elected Aneurin Bevin. In the same way, had Bernie won the presidency, America as a whole would have headed down the hardcore socialist path with Venezuela-like speed. There would have been nowhere to go and no way out.
But in this case, it’s just one city, which does make for “A/B” testing. If Mamdani wins in a winner-take-all election, that victory will be because the majority of voters in New York City (unlike most Germans in 1932) wanted him to win. You’ll notice that I said, “the majority of voters,” not “the majority of New Yorkers.” That’s because around 70%-75% of New York City residents don’t bother to vote for their mayors. If that pattern holds, only around 30% of New Yorkers—the same percentage that voted for Hitler—will decide New York’s fate.
If the city quickly goes to hell in a handbasket, that will allow the rest of America to see how unconstrained socialism, not the pretty kind taught I college classrooms, works in real life. The whole fiasco, in the words of Montessori educators, will be a “natural consequence.” The brilliant Maria Montessori always thought those were the best lessons.
Meanwhile, the rest of America can watch the experiment play out. When it comes to disastrous socialist governments, they’ll have another huge data point to add to the already existing examples of places such as Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, D.C., Philadelphia, etc. And New York, being America’s largest city and the one that seems to loom largest in the American psyche, may be the best lesson of all.
After that, if Americans don’t learn that socialism leads to collapse, well, we’ll have failed the Maria Montessori test and the H.L. Mencken test, and we’ll deserve everything that happens to us after that.
And yes, those of us who fought against all this madness will be forced to experience the lesson, too, but that’s one of life’s incredibly ugly realities. The evil and crazy people, if they attain enough power, sink the ship of state, and all the innocents are forced to sink along with it.
Image: X screen grab.