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.
