His Parents Escaped It. He's Building It Here.
A DSA leader’s family escaped Peru’s collapse. His story reveals why a generation raised without history is reaching for the policies that caused it.
On Friday evening, the co-chair of New York City’s Democratic Socialists of America sat across from Martha MacCallum on Fox News and said something admirably honest.
Asked about the city’s plan to spend $30 million building a government-run grocery store, and whether it might crush the bodegas nearby, Gustavo Gordillo replied: “If one publicly owned grocery store that brings prices down is enough to put someone out of business, then maybe they shouldn’t have been in that business in the first place.”
A municipal government commanding the tax revenue of 8.5 million people, including the taxes paid by the bodega owner himself, will open a store across the street from him, undercut his prices with his own money, and if he goes under, well, he had it coming.
More astonishingly, this is offered as a philosophy of fairness by a movement that claims to champion the little guy. The bodega owner is the little guy. And he is being told that his life’s work was a mistake that the state is now correcting.
So who is Gustavo Gordillo? Here the story turns from absurd to tragic. His family emigrated from Peru when he was a child, and he grew up outside Miami before making his way, apparently, to Yale and then to New York’s art world. Consider what his parents fled. Peru at the close of the 1980s was Alan García’s socialist catastrophe: populist spending, nationalizations, price controls, shortages in the shops, and an inflation so violent that prices could double in weeks. Stalking the countryside was the Shining Path, Maoist guerrillas who massacred peasants in the name of the people. The market reforms that later stabilized Peru, the austerity and privatization known as the Fujishock, had barely begun when families like the Gordillos boarded planes. They fled a left-wing collapse in its purest form.
His parents crossed hemispheres, took whatever jobs they could find, and lifted their son into the American middle class. And when MacCallum asked him why his family came here, he explained that Peru’s misery was caused by “the imposition of capitalism and American imperialism.”
Pause. Process that. He said his parents fled to America (and its still-somewhat-capitalist system) because of… America and its capitalism? “That doesn’t make much sense,” his host rightly pointed out.
It makes no sense as history. But it makes perfect sense as strategy.
Gordillo is an intelligent man, and intelligent men can see where power pools in our culture. There is little cultural power today in gratitude, in thanking the country that sheltered your family, in telling the unfashionable truth that socialism wrecked your homeland. There is, by contrast, enormous power in grievance. The mantle of the oppressed confers moral authority, media attention, and now, in New York, actual political office. He has made his choice, and he is counting on the rest of us to respond the way comfortable majorities usually do: with a shrug.
The shrug would be a mistake, because Gordillo is a symptom rather than an aberration. A 2025 poll found that 62 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 hold a favorable view of socialism. A third of them view communism favorably. These are the voters who powered Zohran Mamdani into City Hall on promises that include the aforementioned grocery stores and a freeze on rents for a million apartments.
More pointedly, as I wrote in Reason the day after the election, it was those with college degrees who supported Mamdani the most. Young Americans are seduced by socialism, and more so those who spent years on a college campus swarming with its adherents and activists.
Lest anyone conclude that these delusions live only on the left, consider what happens when government hands subsidies, bailouts, and sweetheart contracts to favored corporations: the same sin Gordillo proposes, with better-dressed beneficiaries. The TARP bank bailouts. Subsidies for farmers and film crews alike. Tax incentives lavished on sports stadiums and data centers. The Export–Import Bank, quietly guaranteeing loans for politically connected exporters. Each is socialism in a different flavor, the state picking winners and losers with other people's money. Conservatives can be outraged all they want at a radical DSA member like Gordillo, but their preferred party is guilty, in differing degrees, of the same anti-competitive market interference that Mamdani is advocating with his grocery store idea.
Young people who watched banks get rescued while their parents lost homes drew the reasonable conclusion that the game was rigged. So did the teenagers who watched governors order the family diner closed as "nonessential" while the big-box stores, blessed with lobbyists, stayed open and posted record profits. So do the twenty-somethings who follow accounts tracking congressional stock portfolios, wondering how lawmakers so reliably beat the market they regulate.
They are right about the rigging and wrong about the remedy. All of this is capitalism corrupted, wealth flowing to the politically connected rather than to those who earn it by creating value for customers. The answer to government favoritism toward the rich or well-connected cannot be government favoritism run by different people. It is government favoritism toward no one.
Why, then, is socialism so seductive to the young among us? It is, I believe, a symptom of historical illiteracy, and that illiteracy is manufactured, however unintentionally, by the institution that raises most American children: the government school.
We should not be surprised. Government schools are themselves socialist enterprises, funded by compulsory taxation, insulated from competition, assigned their customers by street address. Everything Gordillo proposes for groceries, voters (including conservatives who profess to reject socialism) long ago accepted for education: a "free" government provider, bankrolled by taxes on the very families it lures away from private alternatives, driving those alternatives out of business in neighborhood after neighborhood.
If a tax-funded grocery store putting the bodega under is tyranny, what shall we call a tax-funded school that did the same to independent schooling generations ago? Conservatives who recoil from Mamdani's supermarkets have spent a century defending Mamdani's model in the classroom, then wonder aloud why the classroom keeps producing Mamdani voters.
That wonder is misplaced. An institution built on the socialist model has no incentive to teach the case against itself, and this shapes what passes for history in its classrooms. Students learn that the Great Depression happened; they don’t learn how FDR’s meddling deepened and prolonged it. They learn that the Soviet Union fell; they don’t learn about the engineered famines, the queues for bread, the informants in every apartment block, or why an economy without prices cannot feed itself. The syllabus will not linger on García's Peru, or Mao's tens of millions starved, or the Venezuelan grocery lines, because every one of those stories is an argument for limiting the very power that signs the teacher's checks.
History arrives, instead, pre-filtered: capitalism's sins itemized, socialism's catastrophes reduced to a paragraph about good intentions gone awry. (Gee golly, surely socialism will work next time!) The predictable result is a generation that can recite the perceived sins of markets but cannot name a single country ruined by the state meddling in them. So the curriculum drifts toward the collective and away from the individual, and children marinate for 13,000 hours in an environment that treats the state's provision of life's necessities (including education and even groceries) as the natural order of things. They graduate fluent in grievance and ignorant of economics, and then we act astonished when 62 percent of them like the sound of socialism.
None of this would matter if parents had kept the duty of formation for themselves, but most surrendered it decades ago, assuming the state’s schools would transmit ideas and values it is incentivized to ignore. A civilization that assumes its children will absorb its values by osmosis has written its own obituary. Liberty is an inheritance, and inheritances must be deliberately transmitted, or else they are lost in a single generation. That transmission is now (and always was!) a family responsibility because nearly every other societal institution has grown indifferent or adversarial to the values of individual freedom. Michael Novak understood this, in a line I once turned into a book-length treatment:
Between the omnipotent State and the naked individual looms the first line of defense against totalitarianism: the economically and politically independent family, protecting the space within which free and independent individuals may receive the necessary years of nurture.
This conviction is why I have spent years writing the Tuttle Twins books, which have put the ideas of free markets and individual rights into the hands of millions of children whose schools will never mention them. But no book series, mine included, is sufficient to the scale of the emergency. Ideas compete for the young the way merchants compete for customers, and for decades, the socialists have been showing up to the market. They are selling envy dressed as justice, and to a generation that was never told the price, it looks free. Parents need to realize the red-level crisis that this actually is.
Gordillo’s parents understood something their son has unlearned: that the difference between Lima in 1990 and Miami in 1995 was liberty, and that the difference was worth crossing the world for. Somewhere between their sacrifice and his socialist seminar rooms, the story broke down. No one handed it down, so ideology rushed into the vacuum. A young Gordillo heard the socialist siren song from Bernie Sanders, and now he, Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others are assimilating young people, Borg-like, each convert wired to recruit the next.
Every American family now faces a humbler version of the choice Gordillo's parents faced. They crossed the world to give their son liberty; we need only cross the living room to explain it. Hand down the story, deliberately and early, or watch someone else hand down a different one. The bodega owner already knows which future he is living in. The question is whether the rest of us will notice before our children inform us, with perfect sincerity, that we “shouldn’t have been in business in the first place.”
Very well done. Loved it and passed it on to a friend who has another friend with kids in NYC.
Connor,
Kudo's to you and others that are making a difference. It's just such a minority and does not address the real problem. School choice in your arena, government or immoral government is a bigger problem. Another reason to support socialism. Ignorance.