Prolier Than Thou

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, August 26, 2026

 

“Everyone’s trying to dunk on me for being a progressive from a privileged background but like have y’all never heard of noblesse oblige?”

 

– Lulu Lenin

 

I can’t get enough of Lulu Lenin.

 

That’s not my nickname for her. Sen. John Kennedy coined the term, but Grace Ryan, who graduated from college this year, has apparently embraced it.

 

She’s one of the new rich-kid Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members making the news these days (thanks in no small part to the New York Post’s admirably aggressive coverage). The daughter of a wealthy chocolate mogul, she sees no contradiction in posting glamour shots from her relatively lavish lifestyle that is not paid for with her salary as an organizer for democratic socialist Brad Lander (if she’s got a salary at all).

 

Gustavo Gordillo is another one. He’s the 38-year-old co-chair of the NYC DSA, and he lives in a $1.5 million pad his father bought for him. He used to tout how he was an electrician, but it seems that might have been a bit of prolier-than-thou embellishment.

 

The Atlantic’s Tyler Austin Harper, one of my favorite writers these days, has come to the defense of the spoiled socialist scions of capitalism. He concedes that the phenomenon is real. “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.”

 

Harper also concedes that 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, he cautions, “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?”

 

New class redux.

 

We need to pause here for some eggheady nitpicking. OK, we don’t, but I do. If you’re not interested in this stuff, scroll ahead. Harper correctly notes that this isn’t a new phenomenon. But he suggests the observation and the trend being observed are more recent than they are. He writes:

 

“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.”

 

This struck me as … odd. My understanding is that the intellectual most associated with the idea of the managerial class is James Burnham, whose most important book was The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941. George Orwell was obsessed with The Managerial Revolution, and it played no small part in inspiring his own more famous book: 1984. The Ehrenreichs were familiar with The Managerial Revolution. There’s a dissenting reference to it in a footnote, in which the authors insist that “PMC (or the managerial portion of it) has not become a new ruling class (as Berle and Means, Burnham, Galbraith and others have suggested).”

 

As that parenthetical admirably concedes, this is a very old conversation. I had a phase when I was obsessed with various “New Class” theories. We won’t get into the weeds, but if you can get your hands on it, Josh Muravchik’s “Theories of the New Class” is a fantastic survey of all of the different schools on this topic.

 

One of the great debates within this field is whether a “New Class” is an actual new class or merely a faction of elites claiming to represent a new class so it can gain power. Alexis de Tocqueville, anticipating so much of this stuff, offered a theory in The Old Regime and the Revolution for why lawyers and other “men of letters” became the new radical political leaders. They’d been locked out of the ancien régime, and lacking any real experience in the details of governing, gravitated to more and more abstract theories of how to run a society. High intellect with no responsibility is a perfect recipe for radical politics. The irony is that their radical egalitarianism accelerated as France became richer and, well, more egalitarian.

 

But that’s a distinction we can explore another time. The most important, or at least most relevant, thinker in this field is probably Joseph Schumpeter. In his classic Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, he argues that pretty much every system will invite factions getting the short end of the stick to mobilize in one way or another. But capitalism is unique in that it must and always will generate anti-capitalists:

 

“Broadly speaking, conditions favorable to general hostility to a social system or specific attack upon it will in any case tend to call forth groups that will exploit them. But in the case of capitalist society there is a further fact to be noted: unlike any other type of society, capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.”

 

I agree with Jerry Z. Mueller that Schumpeter’s inspiration for this insight was Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory of ressentiment. But wherever he got it, he was right. It’s one of the great ironies of modernity that the children of wealthy, or at least comfortable, people have always been the vanguard of anti-capitalist rebellion. Vladimir Lenin’s father was a relatively prosperous administrator. Leon Trotsky’s dad was a prosperous landowner. Fidel Castro’s dad was a wealthy sugar plantation owner. Che Guevara’s parents weren’t super rich, but they were provincial aristocrats who could afford to send their son to medical school. Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin were from prosperous aristocratic families with large serf holdings. Mao Zedong’s dad wasn’t rich, but he was a prosperous merchant and farmer (ditto Pol Pot’s). Karl Marx’s dad was a successful lawyer and Marx’s co-author, Friedrich Engels, was from a crazy rich textile manufacturing family (which profited from American slavery). That’s why he could afford to subsidize Marx. Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Robert Owen, William Morris, and most of the famous American progressive anti-capitalist reformers and writers—Jane Addams, Lincoln Steffens, Randolph Bourne, Herbert Croly, et al.—came from bourgeois-or-better families. The same goes for many of the members of the terrorist organization Weather Underground. Bill Ayers’ dad was the chairman and CEO of Commonwealth Edison.

 

Now this isn’t an iron law or anything. Joseph Stalin grew up legitimately poor (did that make him more noble?). Many of the Weather Underground crew were “red diaper babies” or the like. Some were merely children of the “PMC.” The leaders of the Students for a Democratic Society mostly came from middle-class, highly educated backgrounds. I think the opening line of their Port Huron Statement gets credit for its honesty: “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.”

 

Finally, I should note that a version of all of this was foretold in The Communist Manifesto itself: “Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands.”

 

Democratic Frauds of America.

 

OK, let me pull out of the rabbit hole.

 

Harper’s argument can be summarized: Today’s PMC, and the activists drawn from it, have real gripes about the economic status quo, and we shouldn’t just write them off as hypocrites. He runs through a bunch of defensible examples: “A student who takes out burdensome loans to get a degree that is no longer a guaranteed ticket to a middle-class life”; “A teacher who has to buy his own school supplies,” etc., and then says:

 

“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?”

 

He then concludes:

 

“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.”

 

To which I say, fair enough. I have no problem taking arguments on the merits without trying to discredit them by pointing to wealth, race, or family background of the person making them. I also have no problem with the government trying to solve problems, within the constraints of sound policy and constitutional limits.

 

But hold on.

 

The first thing that comes to mind: A lot of the reformers he’s talking about are literally pros at discrediting arguments based on the person making them. We are now decades into lectures, struggle sessions, and reeducation efforts built entirely on the concept of “privilege.”

 

If you’re white and support race-blind policies, at best you’re simply defending “white privilege” and, at worst, you’re just racist. If you’re wealthy, your defense of capitalism is explained by your greed. And don’t even get me started on what people say to Jews who defend aid to Israel, or even to Ukraine.

 

Vast swaths of socialist argumentation rest on the idea that the most noble thing the proletariat can do is politically organize around their class interests, but anyone else who defends their interests is sinful, or suffering from false consciousness, or simply doesn’t understand their own interests.

 

Then there’s the other problem with Harper’s defense: A lot of the things these self-styled friends of the poor and oppressed want to do are bad for the poor and the “oppressed” or are simply dumb ideas. Rent control is idiotic. Government-owned grocery stores are idiotic. You know who would be hardest hit by defunding the police? Poor people. Black people. “Marginal communities.” The millionaires and billionaires will do fine with private security.  who make up the majority of crime victims. Indeed, there’s never been polling to support the idea that “communities of color”—even a sizable fraction of them—want to abolish the police. The well-fed “Subaru socialists” (Jay Caspian King’s phrase) who defend that policy in the name of a constituency they do not have are not just wrong, they’re frauds.

 

They’re frauds for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that for every Lulu Lenin who admits her privilege, there are a dozen who hide it.

 

But the more relevant example of bad faith—if “fraud” is too harsh for you—is that they don’t argue for their positions based upon their real constituencies. Harper is correct that the base of support for the “Subaru Socialists” isn’t the poor or the working class, but instead aggrieved, often downwardly mobile, middle- and upper-middle class college-educated professionals. But the “Subaru socialists” don’t typically talk that way. They oppose charter schools and school choice in the language of the underprivileged children, when their actual constituency is teachers, education bureaucrats, and public-sector unions.

 

Some of these people talk about—and march against—gentrification as “genocide” and oppose evil corporations and private equity firms getting into housing construction. No doubt there are poor neighborhoods that don’t like gentrification, but the social base fighting for their hipster neighborhoods isn’t the lumpen proletariat.

 

I am sure many believe there are sound arguments for extremely high minimum wages, but the energy behind these pushes often has to do with the fact that unions peg their higher wages to the minimum wage. (We should also note that the original Progressive Era champions of minimum wages at the University of Wisconsin supported the idea precisely because it would freeze out Chinese and black labor by offering a respectable “white wage.”)

 

This crowd also works on a bizarre assumption—even more bizarrely shared by many on the new right—that all of the problems with the status quo, which they define as “capitalism,” are the product of “unfettered capitalism.” Capitalism has a lot of fetters on it, my friends. The problems with the healthcare system are not wholly unrelated to problems with the market, but that market is wildly fettered in too many ways to even list here.

 

I agree with Harper that the new radicals of the Democratic Party should be honest, I’m just not sure they have it in them. They need to see themselves as heroes of the less fortunate, not defenders of their own class interests and status. They need it primarily, in my opinion, for psychological reasons. But they also need it for political reasons. If they told the truth about the interests they are defending—spoiled rich kids, bureaucrats, public-sector unions, academics with useless degrees, and of course PMCs generally—the constituencies they claim to be fighting for would vote for them even less than they already do.