America’s socialist insurgency has found the working class, and a surprising number of them appear to have graduate-school group chats. Democratic Socialists of America candidates are having a real political moment. Fox News Radio spent this week talking about the movement’s growing influence in Democratic primaries, while National Review’s September issue pointed to an awkward demographic detail. The DSA’s strongest recent support has come heavily from high-income, highly credentialed neighborhoods, and the magazine says 80 percent of card-carrying members have college degrees. That does not make them fake socialists. It does make the branding more interesting.
The DSA is entitled to win votes wherever it can find them. A political movement does not become illegitimate because its supporters own diplomas, order expensive coffee or know what a co-op board is. Plenty of working people have college degrees. Plenty of affluent people support policies they believe would help people poorer than themselves. The joke is not that educated people care about inequality. The joke is that a movement built around working-class authenticity keeps drawing some of its clearest electoral strength from the exact professional-class enclaves it likes to describe as symptoms of the economic order it wants to overturn.
National Review frames the contrast sharply. It says DSA-backed candidates swept high-earning, highly credentialed neighborhoods while more moderate candidates performed better in lower-income areas, and it makes the same point about Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s coalition. Fox’s political coverage this month has also treated the rise of DSA candidates as a meaningful force heading into the midterms. One Fox radio segment this week featured Representative Kat Cammack mocking what she called the movement’s lack of self-awareness. Cammack is a Republican and her description is plainly partisan, so it should be treated as an attack, not a census. The underlying political question survives the insult.
The target here is the left’s favorite costume, not the left’s policy agenda. Progressive politics has spent years elevating authenticity as a moral credential. Candidates do not merely support workers. They are supposed to speak for workers, organize workers, center workers and preferably have a photograph involving a picket line. Corporate liberals are treated with suspicion because they are too comfortable, too credentialed and too insulated from the lives of ordinary people. Then a socialist coalition starts winning among highly educated urban professionals and suddenly the résumé is less embarrassing.
There is nothing wrong with that coalition. There is something funny about refusing to name it. The contemporary left has a large constituency of younger, highly educated voters who may earn decent incomes and still feel financially insecure because housing, health care, child care and student debt are expensive. That is a real political bloc. It is not the 1930s industrial proletariat. It is a twenty-first-century professional precariat with Slack, rent anxiety and very strong opinions about zoning. Calling that group working class can be defensible under a broad economic definition. Calling everyone else bourgeois until election night is where the bit starts writing itself.
The distinction matters because political movements behave differently depending on who actually composes them. A coalition dominated by credentialed urban voters will notice different problems, use different language and prioritize different reforms than one dominated by factory workers, service employees or people without college degrees. That does not mean one group is morally superior. It means representation is more than a slogan. If a movement’s base is changing, its self-description should probably change with it.
The right has its own class theater, of course. Republican politicians regularly pose as tribunes of the forgotten worker while fundraising among wealthy donors and speaking at private clubs. But this piece is not an escape hatch for the DSA. BuzzyTimes balance belongs across the edition, not inside every paragraph. The left’s problem today is that it has built a politics deeply suspicious of elite credentials while attracting a membership unusually rich in elite credentials. A movement that believes class position shapes politics should be curious about the class position of its own activists.
That curiosity would actually make the DSA more interesting. The rise of educated socialists suggests that economic discontent no longer maps neatly onto old categories of rich and poor. A person can have a degree, a decent salary and no realistic path to homeownership in the city where the job exists. Another can have no degree, lower income and little interest in socialist politics at all. That is a complicated electorate. It deserves more than costumes from a century ago.
The DSA may keep winning, and if it does, its coalition will matter more than the jokes about oat milk ever will. The question is whether the movement can describe that coalition honestly enough to govern it.
If the party of the working class increasingly wins through highly educated professional voters, who gets to decide what working class means?
Sources
National Review: Workers of the World Aren’t Uniting Behind the DSA
Washington Examiner: Highly credentialed, underemployed, and furious: Meet the DSA
The Guardian: Is Florida ready for a democratic socialist?
