The Unwelcome Return of Sentimental Socialism

By Christine Rosen

Saturday, August 08, 2026

 

There are many ways of looking at the recent political successes of the Democratic Socialists of America. Thoughtful analysts have compared the DSA to the earlier Tea Party movement and the later rise of President Trump’s MAGA movement — groups that moved the GOP more firmly to the right, as the DSA is moving the Democratic Party to the left. Others have viewed young Americans’ positive views of socialism as a legitimate expression of concern about economic opportunity and social mobility that DSA candidates have cannily capitalized upon. Still others have noted the DSA’s skill in turning itself into a political movement with a very broad tent, where haters of Israel and haters of landlords can all peacefully coexist at the same hip pool parties and where embittered graduate students can mingle with content creators and children of wealth and privilege such as far-left streamer Hasan Piker, all while discussing the evils of late-stage capitalism.

 

But one aspect of the DSA’s appeal has been too often overlooked, particularly by conservative critics: its appeal as a form of instant community for a generation that often lacks one. DSA supporters are a highly homogenous group: 85 percent of DSA members are white, and 80 percent of them have college degrees. But it turns out that one of the things this knowledge-class proletariat is seeking (besides the abolition of prisons and the end of landlords) is . . . friends?

 

Reporting from the recent DSA summit, the New York Times noted that “for many of its members, the DSA is both a political and a social home.” One DSA leader told the paper that “the DSA fills the same social function for him that the Catholic Church played for his parents when they were in their 30s.” Another young DSA leader echoed the sentiment: “Our generation is so alienated — when you go to a canvas [canvassing for a political campaign], it’s a huge social affair.”

 

The Times found similar positive social impacts during Zohran Mamdani’s run for New York City mayor last year, describing Mamdani campaign events (which included organized scavenger hunts, board game nights, singles meetups, and crafting sessions where devotees made beaded bracelets spelling out “Zohran for NYC”) as “a salve” for young people suffering from anxiety. “It’s honestly what I would prescribe for the loneliness epidemic,” one Mamdani supporter said.

 

Socialism as a cure for loneliness might seem farcical (the jokes write themselves: You’re never alone in a bread line! etc., etc.). But paired with the DSA’s youthful and ironically hip aesthetic, it’s no wonder it’s proved to be an intoxicating brew for a population of young people grown weary of both established political parties. During the DSA summit, at a nearby dive bar, DSA acolytes “punched their fists in the air” and “formed a sea of sweatshirts that read ‘Red Hot Socialist Summer’” while a nearby socialist merch table hawked copies of The Communist Manifesto (which sold out).

 

Self-aware DSA types in the media often downplay the fact that DSA members are a rather privileged group. A recent piece in the New Yorker acknowledged that “they are indeed ‘privileged’ in the boring sense of that word,” as if being college-educated, living in gentrified neighborhoods in blue cities, and being economically not “particularly worse off than their boomer parents were at the same point in their lives” were irrelevant facts; Marx and Engels came from great wealth and privilege, after all. And so we are meant also to sympathize with the revolutionary tendencies of what the New Yorker describes as “a college-educated voter in her early thirties who isn’t making as much as she thought she would.” Why? Because “what matters isn’t so much the specific policies but rather the promise of upheaval.”

 

This would not be the first generation of youth to revel in such abstractions. The current iteration of socialism resembles an earlier movement: sentimental socialism. Described by British socialist Ernest Belfort Bax in 1884 as adherents of a type of “unscientific” socialism, 19th-century sentimental socialists share some similarities with their modern counterparts. Bax described them as “the young people of the well-to-do middle class” who “think human nature susceptible of higher aims than the current ones, and meet in drawing rooms for the apparent purpose of passing resolutions to that effect.” He found that “the sentimental Socialist desires above all things to be broad and comprehensive.”

 

Like today’s DSA supporters, sentimental socialists were motivated not by concerns for the working class, but by their own ennui: “The young men and women of our blasé middle-class civilization require a stimulus; this stimulus may be aesthetic, philanthropic, or social,” Bax noted. “It may consist in languishing vapouring on art, on improved dwellings, on social reconstruction.” Bax was a bit impatient with their navel-gazing complaints: “The whole movement is born of the morbid self-consciousness of our Christian and Bourgeois civilisation run to seed.”

 

Like sentimental socialists of old, the current crop of socialist youth, surrounded by others exactly like themselves and marinating in resentment about their circumstances, risks falling prey to what William James called the “sentimentalist fallacy,” or the tendency to “shed tears over abstract justice and generosity, beauty, etc. and never to know these qualities when you meet them in the street.” His example was “the weeping of the Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside.” Today’s equivalent might be the Sey Coffee barista with a Ph.D. in post-colonial studies who is invested in seeing herself as downtrodden (while ignoring the genuinely struggling working-class people who surround her).

 

Writing in the Wall Street Journal recently, former Democratic congressman Daniel Lipinski tried to calm fears of a radical takeover of the Democratic Party by the DSA. He claimed “it is best to understand what is happening inside the Democratic Party today not as a widespread endorsement of the DSA platform, but more broadly as a protest by those fearful about the future and feeling betrayed by the perceived fecklessness of party leaders. Such emotions make fertile ground for demagogues.”

 

Today’s DSA demagogues-in-training already know this; the question is when their young followers, busy with their communal political gatherings and reveling in sentimental abstractions, will see how deeply cynical — and harmful to a free society — the political program they are supporting really is.