By Jesse Arm
Monday, September 21, 2026
In August, when the New York Post profiled Grace
Ryan—a 25-year-old NYU graduate, chocolate heiress, and socialist activist
known online as “Lulu Lenin”—it supplied her critics with an irresistible
caricature. Ryan had displayed the expensive clothes and vacations of a young
woman born to wealth even as she was championing a movement devoted to
dismantling class privilege. Confronted with the contradiction, she offered a
defense more suited to an Edwardian drawing room than a Democratic Socialists
of America meeting: “Y’all never heard of noblesse oblige?”
Ludicrous and unknowing as Ryan’s remark was, it was
revelatory nonetheless about something very real. The DSA attracts people who
have benefited from capitalism but feel cheated by it. It provides them with a
moral vocabulary that gives them room to reinterpret personal disappointment as
systemic injustice. And, most important, it gives them somewhere to go on a
lonely Tuesday night, just as, for thousands of years, religion provided a
social basis for Mormons on a Monday, Muslims on a Friday, Jews on a Saturday,
and Christians on a Sunday.
More than merely an organization with a platform, the DSA
is an entire social world, just as a faith tradition is. It supplies friends,
status, identity, rituals, instruction, practical obligations, and a story that
situates the individual inside a world-historical struggle. For young people
whose jobs feel precarious or pointless, or whose expensive educations have not
produced the lives they expected, or whose families and religious institutions
no longer provide a thick sense of belonging—or a combination of two or all
three—the DSA is the answer to a prayer. Perhaps literally.
The trajectory of New York DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo
is an almost too perfect example. A Yale-educated artist living in a $1.5
million townhouse purchased by his wealthy father, who he falsely claimed was
an immigrant from Peru, Gordillo cultivated a public identity as a union
electrician even after being dismissed from his apprenticeship for prolonged
absence. The extensive renovation of his family-funded home was reportedly
performed with nonunion labor, and Gordillo was sued for unpaid rent on a separate
apartment while the $1.4 million renovation was underway. He later persuaded
DSA members to make his chairmanship a $95,000 salaried position. The
organization had given him what the conventional elite economy had not: a
vocation, status, and a constituency.
Members who derive that much from a movement will give
much in return. That helps explain why the DSA’s political influence exceeds
its raw numbers. A conventional interest group can produce a scorecard or buy
an advertisement. A community can produce an army. DSA chapters train members
to canvass, raise small dollars, run meetings, master ballot rules, and endure
the tedium of local politics. Their activists can be deployed across the
country to knock doors for a favored candidate, then return home with sharper
skills and deeper loyalty. They become cadres.
No one has benefited more from that infrastructure than
Zohran Mamdani. His importance to the movement extends far beyond whatever he
can accomplish as mayor of New York. Governing will force compromises and
expose contradictions. But his symbolic purpose is to strip “socialism” of its
stigma and make a once-marginal ideology seem youthful, convivial, and
inevitable.
Elsewhere, candidates can adapt the movement’s agenda and
rhetoric to local conditions. A swing-state politician such as Michigan’s Abdul
El-Sayed can disingenuously disclaim the socialist label while benefiting from
the same activist ecosystem. In more conservative territory, candidates such as
Nebraska “independent” Dan Osborn can embrace nearly all aspects of the
movement’s domestic agenda, along with its anti-Western foreign policy, while
trading the conspicuous cultural aesthetics of Brooklyn’s purple-haired they/them
left for a prairie-populist affect. The immediate objective is to win
elections. The longer project is to build an infrastructure capable of moving
the boundaries of ordinary politics.
Who joins that infrastructure? The statistician Nate
Silver recently used more than 400,000 responses from the Cooperative Election
Study to identify the most Democratic-voting educational and income group in
America: people with postgraduate degrees but with relatively low household
incomes, between $30,000 and $60,000. This is also close to the DSA sweet spot.
In the organization’s 2021 membership survey, more than 80 percent of members
25 and older held at least a bachelor’s degree, while 45 percent of all members
reported household incomes below $60,000. Teachers, nonprofit employees, social
workers, academics, health-care workers, and public employees were heavily
represented.
These people are the opposite of classic proletarians.
Nor are they necessarily poor. They are better understood through the political
scientist Peter Turchin’s theory of “elite overproduction.” A society can mint
more people with shiny credentials and expectations than it has prestigious,
well-compensated roles for them to fill. Those who lose the competition do not
feel like ordinary members of the middle class, who know they will face ups and
downs and struggles on a long path to stability and success. These
left-behinders feel as if the high towers of the academic and cultural elite
guaranteed them continued standing that they no longer possess. Their education
has furnished them with the language and confidence to challenge the social
order, while their frustration gives them the motive. Some become what Turchin
calls counter-elites: ambitious organizers who mobilize popular resentment
against the system that denied them the standing they believe they’ve earned.
Reihan Salam (who runs the think tank where I work) has
shown how neatly Mamdani fits this pattern. Mamdani grew up amid extraordinary
cultural achievement; his mother is a celebrated filmmaker, his father a
prominent Columbia professor. Matching their success would have been difficult
for anyone, and he spent his 20s getting nowhere, toying equally with hip hop
and radical politics and speaking in different accents as he did so. His story
resonates with a generation for whom the promise of automatic upward mobility
has weakened. Among Americans born in 1940, 92 percent earned more than their
parents had at the same age. Among those born in 1984, only half did.
Yet, as Salam notes, Millennials as a whole are not an
immiserated generation. Their median household income at a comparable stage of
life is higher than Generation X’s was in the 1990s, and their median wealth
has risen quickly. The discontent is more culturally specific. It is
concentrated among educated urbanites who compare themselves not with the
country at large but with their parents and peers. They may earn far more than
the median American and still be unable to buy an apartment in the neighborhood
where they believe people like them are supposed to live. Their hardship is
often less a real form of material deprivation than it is the expression of
frustrated expectation.
In an article entitled “Why Do Rich Kids Love
Socialism?,” Tyler Austin Harper argues that dwelling on the contradictions
inherent in his title distracts from a more interesting question: Why have so
many members of the educated professional class lost faith in capitalism?
There is something to this. You can think the way these
people think without being a hypocrite or a spoiled brat, if your set of
convictions is consistent and serious. Affluent people can sincerely support
socialism, and beneficiaries of capitalism can legitimately criticize its
failures. An heir may sincerely favor higher taxes on inheritances. A
professional who has prospered within the existing economic system may still
believe that a different one would serve the country better. Political
arguments should be judged on their merits rather than the speaker’s pedigree.
But this acknowledgment that such opinions might
genuinely derive from serious consideration and deep study actually requires a
demonstration of that seriousness and studiousness. Without it, what we’re left
with is people whose personal behavior is not only unserious but often
contemptible. The criticism of Gordillo centers on how he assumed the garb of
working-class authenticity, misrepresented his own record, and believed himself
justified in stiffing ordinary people to whom he owed money—even as he lectured
others about greed and privilege. Anyone may work within a system while seeking
to reform it. But if you are going to traffic in moralistic denunciations, you
bear an additional obligation. The person issuing them should accept the same
rules he seeks to impose on everyone else.
More broadly, many affluent socialists engage in what
Jonah Goldberg calls a “prolier-than-thou” performance. They pose as authentic
tribunes of the working class, speak of wealth and profit in moralistic terms,
and treat their own upper-class conceptions of false consciousness as evidence
that ordinary people require political reeducation. Their money presents
no inherent problem. Their eagerness to stigmatize others for pursuing
prosperity while shedding remarkably little of their own creates the
contradiction.
***
Capitalism is neither sinless nor a complete moral order.
Mammon is, indeed, a false god.
But so is politics.
The danger of a religion substitute is not that its
adherents believe in something. Human beings need belief, obligation, and
belonging. The danger is that it takes a limited human enterprise and makes it
absolute. A political movement that becomes a church develops a creed that
explains all suffering, a doctrine of sin that divides oppressor from
oppressed, rituals that certify righteousness, and heretics whose arguments
need not be answered because their moral corruption has already been
established. It offers redemption not through repentance or grace but through
power.
This is why the Jewish condemnation of idolatry offers a
key to understanding our present moment. The temptation to idolatry extends far
beyond the primitive act of bowing before a statue. It arises whenever human
beings take something partial—wealth, nation, appetite, ideology—and grant it
ultimate authority. An idol is attractive precisely because it is tangible. It
tells us whom to blame, what to do, and with whom we belong. Because it is made
by human hands, it reflects human vanity and demands human sacrifice.
Judaism answers that temptation through theology and a
dense architecture of life: study, prayer, meals, mourning, celebration,
obligation, peoplehood, history, and ritual. These practices give ordinary
people what radical movements promise—community, identity, purpose, a calendar,
a moral vocabulary—while freeing politics from the burden of salvation.
Consider the Sabbath. It is a rebuke to the workaholic
striver culture that has left many young Americans exhausted and spiritually
thin. For one day each week, production stops. The phone goes dark. Families
and friends eat together. Human worth is detached from output. The commandment
extends rest beyond the powerful to workers, strangers, and even animals. It
imposes a limit on the market without pretending that the state can perfect
mankind.
This insight now travels well beyond traditional Judaism.
Ezra Klein, a secular man of the left, has spoken on his New York Times podcast
about Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Sabbath as a radical critique of the speed
and acquisitiveness of modern life. Charlie Kirk, a devout Christian of the
right, devoted his final book to the same subject, describing Sabbath
observance as an answer to anxiety, distraction, and the barrenness of constant
work. Their convergence is instructive. People across the political spectrum
recognize that a life organized solely around labor, consumption, and online
combat is insufficient.
The answer to the DSA, then, cannot be another thin
political identity, much less a sanctification of capitalism. It must include
stronger communities that meet the human needs the DSA has learned to meet.
This is why Jewish parents should ground their children in the substance of
Jewish civilization: its faith, certainly, but also its language, nation,
history, life cycle, rituals, texts, and obligations. Belief in God cannot be
transmuted into a social policy; this connection to the divine goes beyond such
temporal concerns, and true faith is all but impossible for many people to
achieve. But institutions can teach young people that they are heirs to
something older than the discourse of the moment and that they’re members of
communities whose bonds transcend political agreement.
A lonely society will manufacture gods. A generation
denied durable sources of meaning will find them in movements that promise
total explanations and instant fellowship. The Democratic Socialists of America
get this better than most of its opponents, and that is why the movement is a
force to be reckoned with—even if some of its leading voices make fools of
themselves trying to justify their own resentments and weaknesses.
