Spare America from the ‘Noblesse Oblige’ of This DSA Duchess

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, August 26, 2026

 

Grace Ryan is a rich-girl devotee of the Democratic Socialists of America who has for some reason decided to spend the better part of her 20s dressing up as Pierre-Marc-Gaston de Lévis. “Everyone’s trying to dunk on me for being a progressive from a privileged background,” Ryan said recently, after she was criticized for being a stereotypical Lulu Lenin, “but like have y’all never heard of noblesse oblige?”

 

Ah, there it is.

 

Ryan’s argument has become rather popular among DSA types of late. Chafed by the realization that their enemies’ characterizations are true, the group’s leading lights have begun to embrace the critique and insist that they have no choice but to help the peons: Oui, je suis un gosse de riche, mais je t’aiderai volontiers du haut de mon perchoir! After all: What, besides smash up the system that conferred their privilege, is a decent privileged person supposed to do?

 

Well, I’ll tell you: Go away. Scram. Quietly ride off to the summer house. Grace Ryan asks whether I have heard of noblesse oblige? Yes, I’ve heard of noblesse oblige. But I don’t want noblesse oblige, because I don’t want . . . well, noblesse. Noblesse is French for “nobility.” Screw that! I daresay that Grace Ryan would enjoy sitting on the noblesse side of that equation, while the undifferentiated mass of subordonnés takes a vow never to fall too low or to rise too high. But I, for one, want no part of it. I am for ambition, for movement, for risk. I am for innovation and for making mistakes. I am for Going West, young man. I am a free American, and I want the chance to improve myself, not to be rewarded for my inertia by the suffocating stewardship of Grace Ryan and her buddies. When I was a teenager in England, my father told me that he had always been confused by the people who assumed that, because he had grown up working-class, he ought to have disliked Margaret Thatcher. “Dislike her?” he asked. “She was the first politician who talked as if I could make it in life without being helped at every stage by the government.” “Margaret Thatcher,” he said, “was the first politician who talked as if I had free will.”

 

Naturally, having been a young adult in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, my father also didn’t believe that the government could help him make it in life. Which meant that, in practice, he thought that those who favored socialism were effectively pulling the ladder up behind them. Are they not? Grace Ryan’s father became wealthy by buying up a struggling chocolate company and turning it into a viable business. That was a capitalist act, achieved by a capitalist, within a capitalist system. For his daughter to propose that capitalism isn’t working — and, worse still, that it should be abolished! — is not only absurd, but unconscionably selfish. “I have a moral obligation,” insists Grace Ryan, “to use my advantages to help those who are struggling.” And perhaps she does. But if so, she ought to use her advantages to achieve this, rather than use the government to wreck the method by which those advantages were accrued. It seems that Ryan’s parents gave her a nice car. If she sold it and replaced it with a Camry, she could buy an awful lot of books.

 

Were Grace Ryan’s approach to prevail, the cultural consequences would be catastrophic. Invariably, figures such as Ryan fail to understand the link between hard work and success, because, invariably, figures such as Ryan were not the ones who did the hard work that led to that success. At one level, I suppose I can’t blame them. Grace Ryan is a useless person, but she’s also very rich. Of course she thinks that the economy is a lottery. For her it was! She did nothing of value — indeed, she has never done anything of value; she lives the life of Riley, nevertheless; ergo, life must be a game of chance.

 

There are, alas, many such people among America’s radicals. Consider the difference in outlook between Abigail Disney and Walt Disney. Compare the approaches taken by Ro Khanna — another thoroughly useless person, who did nothing to obtain his fortune and who has done nothing directly to grow it — and Mark Cuban. Contrast the presumptions of your average DSA-affiliated heiress and the guy who runs your local plumbing firm. Their views are irreconcilable, and for good reason: One is building Rome, the other is staring at the columns and complaining that they didn’t sprout from the ground evenly across the city.