Stop Calling Them 'Socialists.' They're Over-Credentialed White Gentrifiers Driven by Resentment Ousting Working-Class Candidates
We're not seeing a multi-racial working-class uprising. We're seeing privileged white gentrifiers organizing a politics of resentment driven by a hatred of America.
The Democratic Socialists of America won big this week. Three candidates endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani—Brad Lander, Claire Valdez, and Darializa Chevalier—won their primaries in New York City, two against incumbents. Socialism is on the march! cry both the people distressed by and the people over-joyed by these victories.
It’s nonsense.
It was a gentrification election and it was the white gentrifiers who carried the day against the candidates chosen by actual working class voters.
On the Right, they’re blaming mass migration for the DSA’s victory. Big influencers in conservative circles believe that it’s the influx of immigrants from the Third World driving this anti-capitalist trend. “Import the Third World, become the Third World,” is the meme that’s circulating to explain New York falling to these candidates.
On the Left, they’re selling Tuesday’s results as an uprising of the multi-racial working class. “I’ve been clear time and time again that I believe the only majority in our country is that of the working class. And what we saw is that a focus on the working class,” Mamdani told MSNOW when he was asked about turning on people who supported him and endorsing their challengers.
Both narratives are wrong.
It wasn’t “the working class” that voted in this slate of “socialists” and it wasn’t “socialism” they were running on. It was a hatred of this country, a hatred of Israel and the Americans who support it, and and a deeply-embedded resentment that their vanity pursuits haven’t resulted in the riches they were promised in their fancy schools.
All of Mamdani’s endorsees won with the over-credentialed white progressives who make up Mamdani’s base, the multiple-degreed, downwardly mobile, deeply resentful children of privilege who were promised the world and who now have to settle for the knowledge that their degrees will not make them much richer than the working class they pretend to represent.
Chevalier, who won a district that includes the Bronx, actually lost the Bronx part of the district by 30 points.
She also lost predominantly Black and Hispanic areas, and she lost lower income areas by 10 points. She won with young voters and higher income voters, and won majority college educated areas by 20 points.
Chevalier is herself exactly the kind of person who voted for her.
She has been a student for the last 14 years. She has chosen to stay in school for “Middle Eastern studies” and “sociology.” Chevalier is in the seventh year of her PhD program at CUNY in NYC, per the Daily Wire, yet for some reason expects the government to subsidize her endless career as a student, complaining that she has been “deeply abandoned” by the establishment, because she’s “someone who has had to live with the question of whether I can even afford to stay in the city I love.”
Has she ever considered . . . getting a job?
Maybe if she had, she would understand why it’s her fellow grad students who voted for her, not the people who actually struggle with affordability while working.
Chevalier’s politics aren’t driven by affordability. They are driven by resentment. She hates America. She wiped her dirty hands on the American flag. She called America a “fucking disgrace.” She doesn’t believe in prisons. She believes illegal immigrants who commit murder should be allowed to stay. She is a founder of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, whose stated goal is to “undermine and eradicate America,” through the use of “violence in America.”
Where is the socialism?
Another Mamdani-endorsed winner for State Senate said 9/11 was America's fault because of our "system of capitalism, racism, white supremacy and islamophobia."
This is not working-class politics. It’s the politics of resentful gentrifiers, as Attorney General Letitia James, once a Mamdani fan, pointed out to CNN. “Some of the candidates that he has supported are individuals who do not understand the politics of New York City, the cultural differences from district to district, who have not been part of the history and the struggle of some of these districts, and are relatively new to the body politic.”
As Eleanor McArthur pointed out on Twitter, this will only encourage far-Left politicians to abandon labor further and embrace gentrification. It’s a political winner for them.
None of this is to deny the affordability problems in New York City.
Nor is it to deny that Democrats are leaning towards socialism. A Gallup poll last year found Democrats favor socialism over capitalism by 66% to 42%, the widest gap on record, Axios pointed out.
The system is broken. Many people who work hard feel they can’t get ahead. They deserve to have both parties fighting for their votes, fighting to put policy before them to bring down the cost of housing, groceries, insurance, education, and health care.
That’s not what the DSA is doing, sadly. They’ve turned the resentment of a downwardly mobile elite into their only politics, using their hatred of America and their hatred of Israel as a beard to cover up the fact that their candidates ousted the candidates chosen by the actual working class they pretend to fight for.
Your analysis is spot on. But isn’t this the historical pattern for Marxist revolution? Next comes the recruitment of the so-called working class, convincing its individual members that their personal disappointments are the result of huge external forces—capitalists, conservatives,Jews—that can only be overcome by radical, collective action. Unfortunately, arguments contrary to this siren song are weak and diffused.
This new Squad will be God’s gift to Republican fundraising and meme creators everywhere. Fetterman is the ONLY dem talking any sense whatsoever.