The lens of history can clarify the present. Emzari Gelashvili in a Washington Examiner op-ed compared New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pied-a-terre list to Stalin’s list of kulaks, which preceded Holodomor. The history of proscription lists is long, and the pattern is sharp: Proscription lists of targeted individuals historically have appeared when democracies were in the process of being transformed into dictatorships.

The reason is that the rule of law requires government to apply general rules impartially. Publicly identifying individual citizens because they belong to an unpopular economic class pushes politics away from that ideal. 

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Consider ancient Athens. In 404, Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War and then forced it to replace its democracy with an oligarchy, the Thirty Tyrants, who restricted political participation to an approved list of........

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