By Raleigh Adams
Monday, September 07, 2026
The revolution will not be televised, perhaps, but it
will most certainly have a really good résumé.
Contemporary American socialism is primarily embodied in
the national cultural imagination by the Democratic Socialists of America, and
its highly educated quality is often treated as evidence of hypocrisy: These
revolutionaries attended such elite institutions as Bowdoin, Yale, Columbia,
and so on. But the educational pedigree of the DSA’s leaders may reveal
something more consequential. America has produced a large class of educated,
ambitious young people whose credentials promise status and influence that the
economy often fails to deliver, at least for them. The DSA offers frustrated
young elites something enormous to build.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani graduated from Bowdoin, a selective liberal arts college, with a degree in
Africana studies in 2014. New York State Senator Jabari Brisport earned his undergraduate degree from New York University (NYU)
and his graduate degree in fine arts from Yale. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attended Boston University
for international relations and economics.
The academic accolades of the DSA’s members extend to its
younger ranks as well. Grace Ryan, infamously known as “Lulu Lenin,” graduated from NYU in 2025 before emerging as
a recognizable DSA activist. Gustavo Gordillo, already a New York City DSA
co-chair, earned an undergraduate degree and a master’s degree from Yale. A
cultivated group of young people is rising through the ranks behind them. The
DSA is actively advertising itself as a pipeline to political action for
ambitious students by hosting workshops such as “How YDSA Can Run a Zohran on Your Campus.”
An obvious explanation for why young elites are flocking
to the DSA is that socialism is “simply a game for rich young boys to play.” There is, of
course, something inherently comedic about a collection of NYU, Yale, and
Bowdoin graduates rallying for the proletariat. The charge of “champagne socialist” practically writes itself, and
conservatives have been more than happy to make it. But hypocrisy, however
amusing, does not explain the DSA’s political appeal.
In fact, these are young people who have been selected by
elite institutions. They have been educated to think seriously about politics
and society and encouraged to imagine themselves as capable of shaping both.
Whether or not the economy has actually failed them, they have been conditioned
to expect their lives to carry a certain degree of consequence.
In other words, the most interesting question at play is
not why people with elite educations become socialists despite their privilege.
It is what will happen when a society becomes extraordinarily good at producing
educated, politically literate, and ambitious young people — and considerably
less certain of what to do with all that ambition.
In his work, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political
Disintegration, the social scientist Peter Turchin offers the metaphor
of musical chairs to explain the overproduction of “aspiring elites.” Society
has rapidly increased the number of credentialed young people — the players in
musical chairs. But the amount of perceived elite positions and jobs — the
chairs that can be claimed when the music stops — has not expanded
proportionally. Thus, competition for status, prestige, influence, and
desirable professional positions has intensified, and frustrated aspirants have
become a source of political instability.
The signs of elite overproduction are not particularly
difficult to spot. America produces an ever-growing number of people with
college and graduate degrees, funneling them into brutally competitive fields
such as academia, journalism, law, politics, the nonprofit sector, and the
arts. But the number of positions offering genuine institutional authority
remains relatively small. Many of those professions then concentrate their
employees in extraordinarily expensive cities, where even respectable salaries
increasingly struggle to deliver the homeownership, family formation, and
material stability that they expected professional success to make possible. These
people are hardly poor. Today’s graduates of elite universities can be
objectively comfortable and nevertheless discover that the life of influence,
status, and autonomy they expected is exceedingly difficult to obtain. The
strange problem is that America has become very good at educating people to
expect status, influence, and consequence while producing far fewer chairs for them to securely occupy.
But the musical chairs metaphor can only take us so far.
A chair is ultimately a position to occupy, and elites often seek more than
that. They want influence, distinction, and the opportunity to leave some mark
on the institutions they enter. The problem, then, is not merely what happens
when there are too few prestigious jobs for too many qualified people. It is
what happens when a society produces an abundance of people who expect to
matter but not enough opportunities for them to feel that they do.
Nearly two centuries before Turchin gave a sociological
account of that problem, a young Abraham Lincoln approached it as an issue of
political ambition. In his address before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Lincoln looked upon a
generation that had been born just slightly too late. The great acts of
the American founding had already been accomplished. Independence had been won,
the Constitution written, and the republic established. Lincoln was left facing
a generation of Americans who — unlike the Founders before them, who had been
fortunate enough to find an object for their ambition in the creation of a
republic — were faced with a different temptation: If there is nothing left to
build, distinction may be found in tearing down what has been built.
Lincoln was under no illusion that the most ambitious of
the men before him would be content simply to tend what their fathers had
built. “Towering genius disdains a beaten path,” he warned. “It seeks regions
hitherto unexplored.” Someone of such ambition sees little glory in “adding
story to story upon the monuments of fame erected to the memory of others.” He
wants not merely to serve beneath a great man but to become one himself. He
“thirsts and burns for distinction,” and he “will have it,” Lincoln warned,
whether through “emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen.”
There is, then, a deeper American anthropology behind the
DSA’s connection to college campuses. The movement has recognized something
real about the young people our institutions produce. They want to exercise
influence. They want their education to amount to more than a credential and
their lives to be defined by more than professional advancement. Most of all,
they want something consequential to do. In light of the Founding, these
are deeply American impulses if harnessed and fostered well.
Socialism has an obvious advantage in satisfying that
desire. It can offer the ambitious young person something that an old order
always struggles to provide: the exhilaration of founding something new. The
graduate entering finance can hope someday to become a portfolio manager; the
young lawyer can hope to make partner; the political staffer can climb the
ladder of an established party. These are perfectly respectable ambitions, but
they are examples of what Lincoln described as “adding story to story” upon
monuments erected by others. Those who pursue them will still recognize that
they are standing on the shoulders of giants. The potential socialist is
offered a grander project. Capitalism itself can be replaced. Existing
institutions can be remade. The young activist need not merely inherit the
world; she can participate in creating whatever comes next.
This does not mean that every wannabe Zohran Mamdani or
Grace Ryan is secretly motivated by such a thirst for glory. Rather, radical
movements have an enduring advantage in the competition for ambitious young
people: They give them direction, people to organize alongside,
responsibilities to take on, and the promise that their work is building toward
something. The DSA seems to understand this. Its campus organizations do not
merely hand students a reading list and hope that they vote correctly in November.
They invite young people into a movement where their work is meant to culminate
in something larger.
Conservatives should be considerably less amused by the
glitzy résumés of socialists.
To steer ambitious young Americans away from this path,
we cannot simply tell them that their expectations are excessive, that their
degrees were foolish, or that they should be grateful to inherit institutions
built by “better men.” Nor is it enough to offer a politics almost entirely in
the language of preservation: of the Constitution, the family, the free market,
Western civilization. Those aims are worthy and important and must remain at
the core of conservatism, but preservation alone can be a difficult summons for
the young person who is desperate to create.
Conservatives need to compete with the socialist left not
merely for young people’s votes, but for their ambition. And they must follow
Lincoln’s instruction by channeling that ambition toward a worthy object. That
means offering a formative vision of political life in which young Americans
can become authors rather than merely custodians: Give them institutions in
which they can exercise real responsibility; communities they can help govern;
and businesses, publications, schools, churches, and associations they can
build.
The DSA’s rising generation is being told that history
remains unfinished and that they can change the institutions around them.
Conservatives can laugh at the Ivy League degrees and the revolutionary
affectations of these privileged radicals. But when the joke is over, the DSA’s
activists will remain ambitious.
The question for conservatives is not how to teach an
ambitious generation to want less. It is how we can offer them something better
to build than the DSA’s destructive and hoped-for creations.
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