Why Do Rich Kids Love Socialism?

When the news broke that a co-chair of New York City’s Democratic Socialists of America chapter lives in a $1.5 million Brooklyn townhouse paid for by his father, critics of the DSA had a field day.

The New York Post jabbed at Gustavo Gordillo, a 38-year-old former Yale student, for benefiting from his dad’s largesse “while railing against the rich and property ownership.” The condemnation got even louder when the Post reported that Gordillo had dropped out of an electrician apprenticeship and never become fully credentialed.

“So, this commie failed out of his apprentice program for not doing the work required,” Katie Pavlich, a host for cable’s NewsNation, wrote on X .

Gordillo told me that leaving his electrician training was “a difficult choice” that he’d made so he could devote more time to his DSA role.

Gordillo is only the most recent prominent leftist to be accused of being a silver-spooned elite masquerading as a working-class radical.

Until Graham Platner’s Maine Senate campaign exploded in disgrace, Platner was routinely cast as a son of privilege playing Carhartt dress-up.

His grandfather was a famous architect and interior designer, his mom’s restaurant was his oyster farm’s primary customer, and his dad helped set him up with a house, just as Gordillo’s father did.

Zohran Mamdani was likewise criticized during his mayoral run for being a socialist despite having been born to Hollywood-film-producing, Ugandan-villa-owning parents.

These charges of hypocrisy have only gotten louder as DSA candidates have won a string of Democratic primaries across the country.

Conservative and moderate organs of opinion have described these progressive successes as being driven by white, wealthy, college-educated youngsters.

This observation-slash-accusation is substantiated by both national polling and the DSA’s most recent membership survey, which found that 77 percent of members were white and that more than 80 percent of members 25 years or older held at least an undergraduate degree.

If the Democrats are having a Tea Party moment, as The New York Times recently suggested , it is a revolution powered largely by disaffected, college-educated people, many of whom are comparatively well-off.

The New Yorker ’s Jay Caspian Kang, with whom I co-host a podcast, has called these voters “Subaru socialists” : degree holders who have enough money to afford, say, mid-level cars and meals at nice restaurants but who may not own a home or feel fully secure.