Ascent of the Losers

The ranks of the Democratic Socialists of America, like those of the Weatherman Underground of the 1970s, are not children of the working class, but overwhelmingly products of the upper middle class. Progressive activists, surveys show, are wealthier, whiter, and more highly educated that the average American, and three times as likely to have postgraduate degrees.

In a September piece in the Free Press, Rob Henderson, who first coined the term “luxury beliefs” after being lectured about his “white privilege” by his prep school-educated classmates at Yale — for the record, he’s actually half Mexican and half Korean and grew up in a series of foster homes — termed the Mamdani phenomenon “Revolt of the Rich Kids.”

Those rich kids are now discovering that the fancy college education for which their parents paid, or for which they went heavily into debt, is not worth much. Few companies are eager to hire gender studies majors, and even good grades from Harvard signify little to employers when the average grade is “A.”

As Henderson points out, they constitute the first downwardly mobile generation in American history, unlikely to earn as much as their parents. According to numerous recent studies, less than 40 percent of those born to the top quintile of income earners remain there, despite having started with an enormous step up in life, in terms of degrees, contacts, and cultural fluency.