I think this is absolutely spot on and has huge implications for the Democratic Party.
I also think another powerful element driving DSA support is the wild amount of money in big coastal cities like NYC, LA, Boston, San Francisco, etc. The PERCEPTION of being "downwardly mobile" and/or economically insecure even among relatively high earning households should not be overlooked.
Take a hypothetical married couple with 1 or 2 kids living in my solidly Commie Corridor brownstone Brooklyn neighborhood. Lets say you have a NYC public school teach with a masters and 8 or 9 years of experience making around $100K and a not-for-profit executive with 10-12 years of experience making around $140K. That household is not rich, but they certainly aren't poor and really aren't middle class either. In fact they're earning fully 3X what the median Brooklyn household earns and are likely in the top 20% of households in the borough. Forget about what they are earning compared to an actual middle class household in Wisconsin or whatever.
And yet at $240K a year they likely can't afford more than a 1BR apartment in Ft. Greene. Factor in the cost of childcare and they likely feel like they are barely scraping by. Forget about taking the kiddies to Europe or buying a weekend home. And they see 20 something kids in finance renting $5,000 a month apartments.
They're prime Millennials who did everything right...they were high achieving teenagers, went to great colleges, got masters degrees, colored inside the lines their entire lives, they play by all the rules. They're attuned to every sort of fashionable well educated cultural virtue signaling. They bring their NPR totes to shop at the farmers market (happily paying a 20% premium), still wear COVID masks on the subway and seem to genuinely enjoy composting. That at least in my corner of Brooklyn is the typical DSA voter.
When I was a millennial child in the 1990s I was specifically told NOT to do what that hypothetical married couple did and instead to be a Finance or Tech "asshole" instead including by my own parents who are somewhat to the left of me politically(One of which is now a retired teacher with two master degrees). In terms of those prime millennials doing all the "right" things well I don't know where they went to school but they didn't do the right things I was told to do at my High School in suburban Boston.
As an aside even as someone from cosmopolitan suburban Boston who has been to NYC many times and even lived there for six months during my internship on Wall Street I have literally been to Brooklyn once and only once(I lived in Manhattan)
For context I lived on East 22nd Street in the Gramercy Park neighborhood of Manhattan which I thought was way way cooler than any place in Brooklyn. There was a bar down the street from me called Joshua Tree which I used to joke was a “bankster” bar i.e. rich young wall street type hangout place.
Thank you for using swear words without asterisks. The idea that intelligent, educated commentary should never include vulgarity is, frankly, fucking ridiculous.
"Common occupations among DSA members include teachers, non-profit workers, social workers, and public sector employees." My armchair sense is that DSA members are somewhat self-selecting as high-education and low-income. Almost a milder, modern version of "downwardly mobile" hippies
Absolutely. Like hippies looking down their noses at higher income jobs. Any one of them could be earning more running a KFC franchise but that is beneath them. They're in love with a false idea of who they are.
People doing the types of jobs cited, overwhelmingly, are doing so because they feel called to service. They do it because they love it and know the service is necessary and good for society, regardless of the low pay. You sound deranged. Or, alternatively, like a typical conservative, I suppose. Let me guess, empathy is the fundamental weakness of Western society, right?
Proof or it didn't happen. Stop projecting your ugliness onto others. The bitter, unfulfilled snobs in the US are all extremely wealthy right wing shitheads.
"Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life" comes with that caveat that "what you love" may not make much money. It sucks, and people get angry if they learn that too late. It's a shame too, because some of those jobs are very beneficial to society. They just aren't profitable as a business model, and so they don't pay well.
What is ironic is Graham Platner isn't even known to be that good of an Oyster farmer. There is another Oyster business in the same town that is far far more sucessful.
Besides the possible disgruntlement about being downwardly mobile when they clearly feel they should be on top of society, I wonder if the 'being highly educated' element isn't part of it, given how far to the Left a lot of college professors seem to be now, especially in the humanities / liberal arts sectors that many of these people occupy. Like when I speak to some of my friends in this group they all seem to have nearly identical ideas about certain things, to the point it's nearly word for word. It's like it was drilled into them at some point, these are base truths that are not even worth discussing. Maybe they are all just reading the same sub stack. And of course this phenomenon is not limited to them; people I know in the MAGA crowd do the same thing. I just assume they are all just reading Trumps social media posts or something.
Well I knew when I was a kid I wanted to be on top too but that is why I gravitated towards finance and tech. These DSA folks apparently didn't seem to get the same memo I got say in 1995.
"Antisemitism", "deconstruction of the West" lol. Yeah yeah, you love Israel and hate brown people. Take your nazi-ass great replacement bullshit and gtfo.
My state, New Mexico, is a bit of a unicorn. We are 48% Hispanic. The majority of our legislators have Hispanic surnames. It is an unpaid position. We are a poor state with lots of problems, yet we are considered a Blue state. We are the only State in the country that offers both universal free childcare and university and vocational educations. Federal cuts to healthcare and SNAP have been replaced by State funds. NM has the lowest number of people who have lost healthcare in the nation. Public transportation is free in many of our cities. Solar panels cover the roofs of our covered parking. Old oil wells are capped and the companies are required to be bonded. ICE and the ongoing genocide in Palestine are very unpopular, yet our legislators are focused on the needs of our people, which does require banning ICE near polling places. Many would call this socialism, but you will find very few Democrats that consider themselves DSA. We believe in doing what's best for our people, including our LGBTQ and immigrant neighbors.
These downwardly mobile educated DSA voters are bitter snobs. If they deigned to take the jobs a lot of upwardly mobile first and second generation immigrants compete for, they would not be downwardly mobile. They prefer to work for non-profits and bitch. Man :) So 60's so sad.
This is correct. DSA membership is populated by many highly educated/lower income people who have values rooted in the Enlightenment: freedom of thought divorced from the Church and the ruling elite, scientific inquiry, individual agency, the use of logic, etc. The idea that your life can be entirely separate from the elite's control is a very threatening idea to the investor class, because it implies that they mean far less than one's own intelligence in making personal choices. That is why the wealthy push Christian nationalism: they want everyone to worship a lord, draw conclusions exclusively from his instructions and never question the beliefs of their master. In other words, they want people to worship their boss. They want people to work for their Medicaid because it chains the individual to the elite and robs the individual of the agency to make decisions about their life. Democratic socialism empowers the worker (be they educated or not) to chip at and banish the power of the moneyed elite and collectively own their own destiny. That is why the extreme Right loves to make fun of us. They see us as a legitimate threat to their existence.
Being "well educated" is an amorphous term. But I agree that many college grads with a "decent" liberal arts degree are unhappy that they are downwardly mobile, without a good house, or kids, or vacations in Europe. They are stuck in the wrong economic slot, often with college debt, tapped out parents, and the realization that even in good economic times that they are treading water. Often spoiled to a degree, without the strength of struggling to excel because they were good and good enough to do OK. Finally, too many young people want to be in crowded big cities, where everything is expensive, crowded, and impersonal. The "successful" young people, like the protagonists in Upton Sinclair's Main Street wind up becoming more selfish, conservative, and narcissistic about their good life. I call it the Mandarin class.
Too many parents and teachers think a young person should choose a vocation like a avocation or a vacation - something that they enjoy! But it's work! Not a party! There is room for a avocation activity, but few people actually can pick a vocation that they really enjoy! Reality hasn't been a strong feature of career guidance!
Compare the postgrad row to the some-college row: the gap in Democratic voting is largest in the $30K–$60K column, and second-largest above $200K. At the low end, the divergence is credentials without income. At the high end, my guess is it’s income without what income used to buy. The >$200K postgrad cell includes coastal professional couples — the physician married to the software engineer — who did everything the meritocracy asked and still can't purchase the bundle their less-credentialed parents got on one salary: a house within a sane commute of work, three kids, decent schools. I called this group the "squeezed-talent class" in a recent Dispatch piece on the affordability discourse, and argued it's one of only two groups in America with a genuine structural affordability problem.
I’d love to see data about whether the two frustrated cells split politically. If your credential failed to produce income, the market looks like the problem, and DSA-style politics is attractive. If your income fails to purchase the goods because supply is cartelized, the market looks like the suppressed solution, and the natural home is YIMBYism rather than socialism. The DSA gets the adjunct English professors and the abundance movement gets the engineers.
There's also a life-cycle connection between the two cells: some fraction of the $30K–$60K postgrads — the grad students, residents, and postdocs — are the squeezed-talent class in larval form. The 27-year-old at $45K becomes the 34-year-old at $350K who still can't buy in Boston.
There are some of us who are pro-growth (including build out of AI within reason), in favor of a Palestinian state along with an Israeli state (minus the illegal settlements), and Medicare for All (disclosure: I am on Medicare as a senior😉). Carefully crafted, all of these can be winning issues.
I'm not sure I'd spend so much time "analyzing" (psycho-, or otherwise) DSA membership. DSA is only 100K members spread out across the US, especially and often only in deep blue areas. While they've gotten huge PR, good and bad, (see NYC Mayor and Platner), you may be over-analyzing and over-valorizing their scope and electoral strength. I'd like to hear a little more on the Mich. senate primary and elections.
"The most common failure mode for contemporary Democrats is believing that if they somehow get the economic messaging just right then people will stop caring about those cultural issues. But clearly Democrats themselves care a great deal about these issues and that’s why they are so reluctant to compromise with public opinion on them. If Democrats are allowed to care a lot, so are swing voters" - Matthew Yglesias
I suspect running on abolish ICE, defund the police, boys in girls sports, catch-and-release disguised as criminal justice reform, and similar positions are red lines for low-propensity working-class swing voters, just as Israel/Palestine is a red line for progressives.
They seem like privileged kids from fairly wealthy backgrounds who are resentful that they have not achieved the economic success of their parents, in spite of making precisely the types of decisions (taking a low paying job while living in an expensive city, for instance) that their parents did not. As someone else noted, they seem to be economically insecure by choice.
To be fair to them there boomer parents probably did have an easier time with economic success. People of Platner's generation really had to move into either tech or finance to keep up with the economic success of their parents. Platner couldn't even graduate college.
I mean, my wife is Platner's age and graduated from a liberal arts college with a degree in anthropology. She now owns a medical practice business consultancy and is decidedly better off than her parents were at her age. You can have financial success in many different ways if you don't make the bad choices the DSA folks seem intent on making (like taking a low paying job in an expensive city, or restricting your job options to your degree field.)
The real issue the DSA is going to have going forward is really no other segment of society really likes them. The low educated low paid don't think much of the DSA and low educated highly paid definitely don't which leaves the highly educated and highly paid. The last group probably has the most direct contact with DSA types but even then there is a real limit to how much they really want to compromise with the DSA. It is one thing to have a tactic alliance against someone like Andrew Cuomo it is another to enter into a long term strategic alliance.
I will add there are also plenty of people from very elite backgrounds who you might just generally assume are downwardly mobile but they are even more upwardly mobile than their parents and grandparents. J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller's grandsons are both highly successful tech entrepreneurs/executives in Silicon Valley for example.
What if we used Age instead of Income? Income is also highly correlated with Age, the older you get the more you typically make and also the more likely you are to vote GOP. Even as a teacher or at a non-profit, usually you start off making less than $60k but eventually make more than that.
I think this is absolutely spot on and has huge implications for the Democratic Party.
I also think another powerful element driving DSA support is the wild amount of money in big coastal cities like NYC, LA, Boston, San Francisco, etc. The PERCEPTION of being "downwardly mobile" and/or economically insecure even among relatively high earning households should not be overlooked.
Take a hypothetical married couple with 1 or 2 kids living in my solidly Commie Corridor brownstone Brooklyn neighborhood. Lets say you have a NYC public school teach with a masters and 8 or 9 years of experience making around $100K and a not-for-profit executive with 10-12 years of experience making around $140K. That household is not rich, but they certainly aren't poor and really aren't middle class either. In fact they're earning fully 3X what the median Brooklyn household earns and are likely in the top 20% of households in the borough. Forget about what they are earning compared to an actual middle class household in Wisconsin or whatever.
And yet at $240K a year they likely can't afford more than a 1BR apartment in Ft. Greene. Factor in the cost of childcare and they likely feel like they are barely scraping by. Forget about taking the kiddies to Europe or buying a weekend home. And they see 20 something kids in finance renting $5,000 a month apartments.
They're prime Millennials who did everything right...they were high achieving teenagers, went to great colleges, got masters degrees, colored inside the lines their entire lives, they play by all the rules. They're attuned to every sort of fashionable well educated cultural virtue signaling. They bring their NPR totes to shop at the farmers market (happily paying a 20% premium), still wear COVID masks on the subway and seem to genuinely enjoy composting. That at least in my corner of Brooklyn is the typical DSA voter.
When I was a millennial child in the 1990s I was specifically told NOT to do what that hypothetical married couple did and instead to be a Finance or Tech "asshole" instead including by my own parents who are somewhat to the left of me politically(One of which is now a retired teacher with two master degrees). In terms of those prime millennials doing all the "right" things well I don't know where they went to school but they didn't do the right things I was told to do at my High School in suburban Boston.
On the radio when I was a kid there used to be this Randy Newman song from the late 1980s that I think sums up the present day Commie Corridor. https://youtu.be/cS06eprlj2I?si=5bh50BsMtyvp959W&t=64
As an aside even as someone from cosmopolitan suburban Boston who has been to NYC many times and even lived there for six months during my internship on Wall Street I have literally been to Brooklyn once and only once(I lived in Manhattan)
For context I lived on East 22nd Street in the Gramercy Park neighborhood of Manhattan which I thought was way way cooler than any place in Brooklyn. There was a bar down the street from me called Joshua Tree which I used to joke was a “bankster” bar i.e. rich young wall street type hangout place.
Thank you for using swear words without asterisks. The idea that intelligent, educated commentary should never include vulgarity is, frankly, fucking ridiculous.
Journalism is another frequent job for this cohort. It’s one reason for the high number of “things are so bad” stories.
"Common occupations among DSA members include teachers, non-profit workers, social workers, and public sector employees." My armchair sense is that DSA members are somewhat self-selecting as high-education and low-income. Almost a milder, modern version of "downwardly mobile" hippies
Absolutely. Like hippies looking down their noses at higher income jobs. Any one of them could be earning more running a KFC franchise but that is beneath them. They're in love with a false idea of who they are.
People doing the types of jobs cited, overwhelmingly, are doing so because they feel called to service. They do it because they love it and know the service is necessary and good for society, regardless of the low pay. You sound deranged. Or, alternatively, like a typical conservative, I suppose. Let me guess, empathy is the fundamental weakness of Western society, right?
If they feel called to it then they should feel happy and fulfilled! But they aren't. They'e bitter snobs.
Proof or it didn't happen. Stop projecting your ugliness onto others. The bitter, unfulfilled snobs in the US are all extremely wealthy right wing shitheads.
"Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life" comes with that caveat that "what you love" may not make much money. It sucks, and people get angry if they learn that too late. It's a shame too, because some of those jobs are very beneficial to society. They just aren't profitable as a business model, and so they don't pay well.
Yes. And: if you haven't figured out it doesn't pay after a few years please don't blame it on society.
What is ironic is Graham Platner isn't even known to be that good of an Oyster farmer. There is another Oyster business in the same town that is far far more sucessful.
Besides the possible disgruntlement about being downwardly mobile when they clearly feel they should be on top of society, I wonder if the 'being highly educated' element isn't part of it, given how far to the Left a lot of college professors seem to be now, especially in the humanities / liberal arts sectors that many of these people occupy. Like when I speak to some of my friends in this group they all seem to have nearly identical ideas about certain things, to the point it's nearly word for word. It's like it was drilled into them at some point, these are base truths that are not even worth discussing. Maybe they are all just reading the same sub stack. And of course this phenomenon is not limited to them; people I know in the MAGA crowd do the same thing. I just assume they are all just reading Trumps social media posts or something.
Well I knew when I was a kid I wanted to be on top too but that is why I gravitated towards finance and tech. These DSA folks apparently didn't seem to get the same memo I got say in 1995.
Are they really "educated"? in the sense of any skills that the market values?
Confiscation of others property is no solution.
Oh shut the fuck up. No one's property is being "confiscated". Go work on your list of suspected communists, Mr. McCarthy.
You are utterly ignorant if you cannot acknowledge that the core belief of the DSA is anti-Semitism and property confiscation.
Simply watch it unfold.
The agenda is the deconstruction of the West.
This is beyond obvious.
And the question is will American , and the rest of the West, resist?
"Antisemitism", "deconstruction of the West" lol. Yeah yeah, you love Israel and hate brown people. Take your nazi-ass great replacement bullshit and gtfo.
Braindead take
My state, New Mexico, is a bit of a unicorn. We are 48% Hispanic. The majority of our legislators have Hispanic surnames. It is an unpaid position. We are a poor state with lots of problems, yet we are considered a Blue state. We are the only State in the country that offers both universal free childcare and university and vocational educations. Federal cuts to healthcare and SNAP have been replaced by State funds. NM has the lowest number of people who have lost healthcare in the nation. Public transportation is free in many of our cities. Solar panels cover the roofs of our covered parking. Old oil wells are capped and the companies are required to be bonded. ICE and the ongoing genocide in Palestine are very unpopular, yet our legislators are focused on the needs of our people, which does require banning ICE near polling places. Many would call this socialism, but you will find very few Democrats that consider themselves DSA. We believe in doing what's best for our people, including our LGBTQ and immigrant neighbors.
These downwardly mobile educated DSA voters are bitter snobs. If they deigned to take the jobs a lot of upwardly mobile first and second generation immigrants compete for, they would not be downwardly mobile. They prefer to work for non-profits and bitch. Man :) So 60's so sad.
This is correct. DSA membership is populated by many highly educated/lower income people who have values rooted in the Enlightenment: freedom of thought divorced from the Church and the ruling elite, scientific inquiry, individual agency, the use of logic, etc. The idea that your life can be entirely separate from the elite's control is a very threatening idea to the investor class, because it implies that they mean far less than one's own intelligence in making personal choices. That is why the wealthy push Christian nationalism: they want everyone to worship a lord, draw conclusions exclusively from his instructions and never question the beliefs of their master. In other words, they want people to worship their boss. They want people to work for their Medicaid because it chains the individual to the elite and robs the individual of the agency to make decisions about their life. Democratic socialism empowers the worker (be they educated or not) to chip at and banish the power of the moneyed elite and collectively own their own destiny. That is why the extreme Right loves to make fun of us. They see us as a legitimate threat to their existence.
Being "well educated" is an amorphous term. But I agree that many college grads with a "decent" liberal arts degree are unhappy that they are downwardly mobile, without a good house, or kids, or vacations in Europe. They are stuck in the wrong economic slot, often with college debt, tapped out parents, and the realization that even in good economic times that they are treading water. Often spoiled to a degree, without the strength of struggling to excel because they were good and good enough to do OK. Finally, too many young people want to be in crowded big cities, where everything is expensive, crowded, and impersonal. The "successful" young people, like the protagonists in Upton Sinclair's Main Street wind up becoming more selfish, conservative, and narcissistic about their good life. I call it the Mandarin class.
There were plenty of different degree options even back in the 1990s they could have taken and had been able to afford vacations in Europe.
Too many parents and teachers think a young person should choose a vocation like a avocation or a vacation - something that they enjoy! But it's work! Not a party! There is room for a avocation activity, but few people actually can pick a vocation that they really enjoy! Reality hasn't been a strong feature of career guidance!
Compare the postgrad row to the some-college row: the gap in Democratic voting is largest in the $30K–$60K column, and second-largest above $200K. At the low end, the divergence is credentials without income. At the high end, my guess is it’s income without what income used to buy. The >$200K postgrad cell includes coastal professional couples — the physician married to the software engineer — who did everything the meritocracy asked and still can't purchase the bundle their less-credentialed parents got on one salary: a house within a sane commute of work, three kids, decent schools. I called this group the "squeezed-talent class" in a recent Dispatch piece on the affordability discourse, and argued it's one of only two groups in America with a genuine structural affordability problem.
I’d love to see data about whether the two frustrated cells split politically. If your credential failed to produce income, the market looks like the problem, and DSA-style politics is attractive. If your income fails to purchase the goods because supply is cartelized, the market looks like the suppressed solution, and the natural home is YIMBYism rather than socialism. The DSA gets the adjunct English professors and the abundance movement gets the engineers.
There's also a life-cycle connection between the two cells: some fraction of the $30K–$60K postgrads — the grad students, residents, and postdocs — are the squeezed-talent class in larval form. The 27-year-old at $45K becomes the 34-year-old at $350K who still can't buy in Boston.
There are some of us who are pro-growth (including build out of AI within reason), in favor of a Palestinian state along with an Israeli state (minus the illegal settlements), and Medicare for All (disclosure: I am on Medicare as a senior😉). Carefully crafted, all of these can be winning issues.
Those aren’t DSA positions, those are mainline democratic positions.
A Palestinian state alongside an Israeli state is explicitly NOT a DSA position.
I'm not sure I'd spend so much time "analyzing" (psycho-, or otherwise) DSA membership. DSA is only 100K members spread out across the US, especially and often only in deep blue areas. While they've gotten huge PR, good and bad, (see NYC Mayor and Platner), you may be over-analyzing and over-valorizing their scope and electoral strength. I'd like to hear a little more on the Mich. senate primary and elections.
I suspect there are more than 100K people who are aligned with the stated positions of the DSA despite not being members of that group
As a previous commenter points out odds are high their 100K doesn't stretch very far where they are living (high rent knowledge worker urban areas).
"The most common failure mode for contemporary Democrats is believing that if they somehow get the economic messaging just right then people will stop caring about those cultural issues. But clearly Democrats themselves care a great deal about these issues and that’s why they are so reluctant to compromise with public opinion on them. If Democrats are allowed to care a lot, so are swing voters" - Matthew Yglesias
I suspect running on abolish ICE, defund the police, boys in girls sports, catch-and-release disguised as criminal justice reform, and similar positions are red lines for low-propensity working-class swing voters, just as Israel/Palestine is a red line for progressives.
They seem like privileged kids from fairly wealthy backgrounds who are resentful that they have not achieved the economic success of their parents, in spite of making precisely the types of decisions (taking a low paying job while living in an expensive city, for instance) that their parents did not. As someone else noted, they seem to be economically insecure by choice.
To be fair to them there boomer parents probably did have an easier time with economic success. People of Platner's generation really had to move into either tech or finance to keep up with the economic success of their parents. Platner couldn't even graduate college.
I mean, my wife is Platner's age and graduated from a liberal arts college with a degree in anthropology. She now owns a medical practice business consultancy and is decidedly better off than her parents were at her age. You can have financial success in many different ways if you don't make the bad choices the DSA folks seem intent on making (like taking a low paying job in an expensive city, or restricting your job options to your degree field.)
The real issue the DSA is going to have going forward is really no other segment of society really likes them. The low educated low paid don't think much of the DSA and low educated highly paid definitely don't which leaves the highly educated and highly paid. The last group probably has the most direct contact with DSA types but even then there is a real limit to how much they really want to compromise with the DSA. It is one thing to have a tactic alliance against someone like Andrew Cuomo it is another to enter into a long term strategic alliance.
I will add there are also plenty of people from very elite backgrounds who you might just generally assume are downwardly mobile but they are even more upwardly mobile than their parents and grandparents. J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller's grandsons are both highly successful tech entrepreneurs/executives in Silicon Valley for example.
What if we used Age instead of Income? Income is also highly correlated with Age, the older you get the more you typically make and also the more likely you are to vote GOP. Even as a teacher or at a non-profit, usually you start off making less than $60k but eventually make more than that.