Why Do Rich Kids Love Socialism?
· The Atlantic
When the news broke that a co-chair of New York City’s Democratic Socialists of America chapter lives in a $1.5 million Brooklyn townhouse paid for by his father, critics of the DSA had a field day. The New York Post jabbed at Gustavo Gordillo, a 38-year-old former Yale student, for benefiting from his dad’s largesse “while railing against the rich and property ownership.” The condemnation got even louder when the Post reported that Gordillo had dropped out of an electrician apprenticeship and never become fully credentialed. “So, this commie failed out of his apprentice program for not doing the work required,” Katie Pavlich, a host for cable’s NewsNation, wrote on X. Gordillo told me that leaving his electrician training was “a difficult choice” that he’d made so he could devote more time to his DSA role.
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Gordillo is only the most recent prominent leftist to be accused of being a silver-spooned elite masquerading as a working-class radical. Until Graham Platner’s Maine Senate campaign exploded in disgrace, Platner was routinely cast as a son of privilege playing Carhartt dress-up. His grandfather was a famous architect and interior designer, his mom’s restaurant was his oyster farm’s primary customer, and his dad helped set him up with a house, just as Gordillo’s father did. Zohran Mamdani was likewise criticized during his mayoral run for being a socialist despite having been born to Hollywood-film-producing, Ugandan-villa-owning parents.
These charges of hypocrisy have only gotten louder as DSA candidates have won a string of Democratic primaries across the country. Conservative and moderate organs of opinion have described these progressive successes as being driven by white, wealthy, college-educated youngsters.
This observation-slash-accusation is substantiated by both national polling and the DSA’s most recent membership survey, which found that 77 percent of members were white and that more than 80 percent of members 25 years or older held at least an undergraduate degree. If the Democrats are having a Tea Party moment, as The New York Times recently suggested, it is a revolution powered largely by disaffected, college-educated people, many of whom are comparatively well-off. The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang, with whom I co-host a podcast, has called these voters “Subaru socialists”: degree holders who have enough money to afford, say, mid-level cars and meals at nice restaurants but who may not own a home or feel fully secure. Republican Senator John Kennedy prefers the more biting moniker “Lulu Lenins.”
[Read: What Mamdani doesn’t know about tenants]
The aspersions cast at socialists such as Gordillo—who champion radical politics in public while contributing to the gentrification of Brooklyn in private, and whose commitments to being working-class seem dubious—are understandable and often amusing. But focusing on the many contradictions of rich-kid leftists is also a way of ignoring a more interesting and potentially more illuminating question: Why are so many “privileged” Americans drawn to a politics that seeks to dismantle the system that they have benefited from?
In a 1977 essay for the magazine Radical America, Barbara and John Ehrenreich coined a term for America’s growing population of college-educated knowledge workers: the “professional managerial class.” The authors noted that members of the PMC tend to have jobs that create and maintain capitalist culture and its associated values. They have jobs in industries—such as the arts, education, medicine, entertainment, law, advertising, and technology—that could be seen as offering proof of capitalism’s ability to provide Americans with lives that are culturally rich, physically healthy, intellectually stimulating, and filled with technologies that make things easier. (Being a staff writer at The Atlantic is a great example of one such job.)
According to the Ehrenreichs, the 20th-century professional class played a crucial role, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, in maintaining the public’s faith in the economic system. The present growing embrace of leftist politics among the professional class suggests that the PMC is no longer especially enthusiastic about that mission. A CBS News/YouGov poll released this month found that Democrats, who belong to a party dominated by the professional class, were almost twice as likely to view socialism favorably (58 percent) as they were to view capitalism favorably (32 percent). Among college-educated Democrats, support for socialism was 71 percent.
This is not entirely new. In 1977, the Ehrenreichs noted that radicalism and even anti-capitalism could be found among certain educated professionals, particularly those in academia. But the PMC’s current tilt toward the left is unprecedented in American history. Through the mid-2000s, college-educated voters were more likely to be Republicans than Democrats. Bachelor’s-degree holders broke for Ronald Reagan in 1984 at a margin that was higher than 2 to 1.
What is notable about the 21st-century PMC, then, is that the type of people who are tasked with championing capitalism to the public have lost their faith. Many members of today’s professional class are apostates, and this apostasy is worth taking seriously as a sign of an economic order that cannot seem to justify itself to its own public-relations arm. When a middle manager at a tobacco company refuses to smoke cigarettes, or a technology CEO sends his children to screen-free schools, or an employee in the meatpacking industry turns vegetarian, many people understand these choices to be the result not only of hypocrisy but also of insider insight.
According to its own demographic survey, the DSA is filled with people who are employed in or training for traditional PMC labor: teachers and professors, social workers, health-care professionals, government employees. That some people in these industries, including those who are well paid, would look at our economy and seek out other ways of doing things is neither hypocritical nor surprising.
[Read: Two futures for the American left]
A teacher who has to buy his own school supplies, an adjunct professor who works at three universities to make ends meet, a social worker who assists the disadvantaged, a nurse whose hospital was bought by private equity, a federal employee who watches lobbying groups kneecap safety regulations, a data engineer who helps make a product that gives teens suicide advice, a student who takes out burdensome loans to get a degree that is no longer a guaranteed ticket to a middle-class life—what should these people think of capitalism as it currently exists? What do you expect them to think? And why is it considered hypocrisy, rather than a defensible moral position, when some members of the PMC decide that the ugliness they encounter in their workplace, corporate office, and daily life is symptomatic of a system that deserves significant, even systemic, reform?
Some “Subaru socialists,” of course, might be drawn to progressive political movements because that’s what their friends are doing, or because they are bored with their own privilege. But many professional-class socialists are no doubt making an earnest moral judgment, born of firsthand experience, that contemporary capitalism is deeply flawed. Explaining his own reasoning for being part of the DSA, Gordillo told me in a text: “I have experienced economic life in this country from many different vantages so I know that it is often luck that determines whether someone has financial stability. This is wrong.”
A political lesson could be learned from Mamdani, who, with his smart suits and easy eloquence, makes no effort to hide his social position or fancy liberal-arts degree. Rather than elevating leaders who pretend to be working-class, socialists and left-leaning populists might be better off unapologetically presenting themselves as what many of them are: worried, frustrated, and often justifiably angry members of the educated professional class.