The sweeping success of progressive candidates this election season and the rapid growth of the group with which many of them are aligned—the Democratic Socialists of America—has triggered a spate of recent articles that range from sympathetic handwringing over these political upstarts to thinly veiled suggestions of hypocrisy.
Journalists at The New York Times stalked Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of New York’s DSA chapter, to figure out whether he actually lived in the million-dollar rowhouse owned by his wealthy father, explaining that the “question was relevant, in part, because many of the high-profile activists are the offspring of affluent parents who have not experienced working class life and basic financial pressures, like paying rent.” The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang, meanwhile, has penned two essays this month attempting to explain the rise of the “Subaru socialists,” and last week The Atlantic’s Tyler Austin Harper elucidated why “rich kids love socialism.” The New Republic, too, has weighed in on the “problem of middle-class socialism,” with Vinnie Rotondaro raising “concern” that the DSA “simply is not a working-class organization.” (Conservative media, of course, has been much more withering, such as this New York Post editorial on Monday: “Are they Democrat socialists or just deadbeat scammers?”)
Attacks on the privilege of American democratic socialists emerge from a long history of epithets: champagne socialist, cashmere communist, Bollinger Bolsheviks, Neiman Marxists, gauche caviar, or more recently, Lulu Lenins. Critics have derided Senator Bernie Sanders for owning three homes and cast aspersions on Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for spending $250 on her hair. Whether these charges of hypocrisy come from liberals or conservatives, the idea is that middle-class activists can’t possibly represent the interests of the working class because they don’t share their economic circumstances.
This is silly. Why would you have to be poor to hate poverty? It’s like saying you must have cancer before you’re allowed to want it cured. People of all political persuasions care about the welfare of others. Even staunch anti-socialists like Friedrich Hayek agreed that there should be some basic level of social protection for workers: “some minimum of food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health” and “a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.”
More important is the rational belief that life might be better for everyone, including the wealthy, if our society’s vast resources were shared in a more egalitarian manner. One of the most prominent philosophical defenders of liberty, John Stuart Mill, declared himself a socialist on utilitarian grounds. The sum total of well-being, he believed, would be greater after a fairer distribution of wealth. Just because you are at the front of the rat race doesn’t change the fact that it is a rat race.
The middle-class origins of prominent leftist leaders is not at all unique to the United States. Political activists have debated Vladimir Lenin’s theory of vanguardism against Antonio Gramsci’s theory of the “organic intellectual” for over a century. But from its very roots, the fight to end exploitation relied heavily on the leadership and resources of those most privileged by the system they hoped to overthrow. Friedrich Engels, co-author of The Communist Manifesto, was the educated son of a wealthy German textile industrialist who bankrolled Karl Marx’s work in England for years. For his 1845 book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels toured cities like Manchester and Liverpool, where the earnest 24-year-old witnessed atrocious living standards. Cramped quarters and lack of basic sanitation meant that workers died from cholera, typhus, and smallpox at four times the rate as people in the surrounding countryside, potentially unleashing epidemics that affected all members of society.
In imperial Russia, the abuses of the despotic Romanov Dynasty grew unbearable by the early twentieth century. Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) hailed from a comfortable middle-class family with aristocratic roots. Largely apolitical in youth, Lenin was only radicalized after the Tsar’s regime executed his older brother at the age of 21. The polyglot Alexandra Kollontai, the first Bolshevik Commissar of Social Welfare and later Soviet ambassador to Norway, Mexico, and Sweden, was the daughter of a Ukrainian nobleman who traced his lineage back to the thirteenth century. Her own fervent embrace of socialism followed the tour of a textile mill in Narva where she found children playing around a dead baby on the floor in the workers’ dormitory.
Closer to our time, Fulgencio Batista was the military dictator of Cuba who tortured and murdered his own people to maintain power between 1952 and 1959. Fidel and Raul Castro were the sons of a wealthy Spanish farmer. Fidel was studying law at the University of Havana before he became a student activist. Che Guevara was the scion of a high-status Argentine family studying to be a doctor. Vilma Espín, a revolutionary leader and later president of the Federation of Cuban Women, studied chemical engineering and sang soprano in the university choir in Santiago de Cuba. Her wealthy father even sent her north to MIT for a year in a futile bid to dissuade her socialist sympathies.
Over in Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, one of the fathers of African socialism, was the son of a tribal chief. He worked as a schoolteacher and attended university in Scotland before returning to lead his country’s struggle for national independence against the continued brutalities of British colonial rule. And in Social Democratic Sweden, the long-serving, left-wing prime minister, Olof Palme, came from an upper-class, conservative Lutheran family with deep ties to Scandinavian royalty. He attributed his own radicalization to his time as a student at Kenyon College in Ohio, where he wrote an honors thesis on the United Auto Workers union. He despised the deep American class divide and abhorred the racism he witnessed against Black people.
Whatever your opinion of previous experiments with different varieties of socialism, their leaders all fought against corrupt, unjust, and violent systems of oppression that eventually crumbled in the face of popular resistance. When judging the merits of economic and political systems, it helps to have time and energy. It also helps to know about the past, which often means having a good university education.
For fifteen years, I taught courses on these complicated histories at Zohran Mamdani’s alma mater, Bowdoin College, which is one of those idyllic “potted Ivies” of the northeast where professors get to know their students. I also once served as the faculty liaison to our campus affiliate of the Young Democratic Socialists of America—which has been racking up off-campus victories of late—and later worked with other progressive clubs. Although I never had Mamdani in class, I’ve engaged with students from all socio-economic backgrounds, and witnessed firsthand how harsh economic realities sometimes erode political conviction.
My working-class students—smart, industrious, and making the most out of generous financial aid packages—loved learning about progressive history but often didn’t have the luxury of sustained activism after graduation. I’ve sat across many a first-generation or immigrant student explaining their resigned choice to go into banking, consulting, or finance. One student needed to help his younger sister get through college. Another wanted to earn a big salary to help pay for her uninsured mother’s medical care.
It was usually the more privileged students who chose the life of non-profit work or grassroots organizing. Rather than just cosplaying at socialism, many remain deeply committed activists who practice cross-class solidarity. They are well-educated about the past successes and failures of different socialist policies in different international contexts. They have studied political strategy and have the social capital necessary to maneuver within the duplicitous corridors of power. They enjoy a safety net which allows them to take chances, to pursue their ideals of making this country a place where everyone enjoys some level of basic security.
Demanding that fighters for the working class should only come from their ranks is a disingenuous way to shut down necessary discussions about severe economic inequality. Rather than debating whether these activists and politicians are hypocrites, we should admire their resolve to fight against their own comfortable status quo.
