The Bougiest Proletariat Revolution Ever

A worker's revolt spreads among well-off urbanites

Image generated by DALL-E 3.

After Zohran Mamdani’s win in the New York Democratic mayoral primary last night, the right and left fringe — as they so often do — competed to have the wrongest take. Here’s Poster Child For Metastasized Resentment Of Male Pattern Baldness Stephen Miller:

Is there any event that Miller won’t blame on immigrants? If Miller prematurely ejaculates, does he look around the room for the dastardly Arab who made him come too soon? Of course, Miller’s belief that demographic shifts are leading to a Caliphate On The Hudson is rebutted by the New York Times’ results map, which allows you to sort by racial majority within precincts. The only lessons that I take from the racial data contained in that map are: 1) Black people went for Cuomo, and 2) “Asian” is hands-down the dumbest category in our dumb racial classification system, as it lumps together Koreans, Iraqis, Filipinos, and many others, presumably because we’re sheepish about having a category called “miscellaneous”. At any rate, I see no evidence in the data that America’s political character is being altered by a Coalition Of The Swarthy. See for yourself:

On the left, Senator Chris Murphy — who is trying to shake his reputation as a no-name Senator by being so flamboyantly wrong about certain economic matters that he’s impossible to ignore — said that the win teaches us an important lesson about economic power. He wrote:

It bothers me that as Senators seek out identities in advance of the 2028 presidential primary, one potentially viable identity is “blathering economic nitwit”. Murphy’s take is in line with AOC’s comment that Mamdani had “demonstrated a real ability on the ground to put together a coalition of working-class New Yorkers.” But, once again, the results tell a different story — here’s what happens when you sort the results by income:

Mamdani’s movement was in no way a “working-class” movement against “elites”, though of course his backers portray it that way. The Democratic Socialists of America — of which Mandani is a member — claim to speak for the poor, and Mamdani certainly goes for man-of-the-people vibes; he’s mastered the politician-walking-through-the-city-with-his-sleeves-rolled-up genre of viral video. But evidence suggest that this grassroots movement against elites mostly appeals to…elites. Mamdani did well with high-income voters in high-income areas, especially the upwardly-mobile and highly-educated parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan. And that dynamic would have been even more pronounced had Mamdani not scared away Jewish voters in Upper Manhattan with his “globalize the Intifada” comment, a dynamic that brings to mind the classic Onion “Our Dumb Century” headline: German Jews Concerned About Hitler’s “Kill All Jews” Policy.

This is the second time in recent years that a “populist” left wing movement has turned out to be not-so-populist after all. The post-George Floyd “racial reckoning” was ostensibly a rising up by non-white Americans against “white supremacy”, but as information came in about the preferences and voting patterns of non-white Americans, it became clear that they mostly didn’t share the movement’s goals. Very few Black people want to defund the police. Latinos do not typically favor open borders. Nobody wants to run through the “preferred language” minefield, in which you can be blown to bits for, say, using the term “Eskimo” instead of the preferred “Indigenous Person Fighting A Non-Stop Battle Against Literally Freezing Their Ass Off”. The difference between the Racial Reckoning and Socialism is that the former sees the world through the lens of race while the latter focuses on economics, but they’re similar in that the people they’re ostensibly “for” don’t seem to be on board.

Socialism has had this problem for centuries.¹ European Socialism was always dominated by college kids trying to figure out how to get the lower classes to behave the way Marxist theory said they should behave.² South American Socialism was a bit more grassroots, but upper-class college twerps like Che Guevara (university-educated chess prodigy from Argentina), Simón Bolívar (parents were aristocrats, studied in Spain) and Fidel Castro (son of a successful sugarcane farmer, studied law at the University of Havana) usually formed the tip of the spear. This dynamic isn’t unique to Socialism; political movements tend to come from the educated upper class because everyone else has too much fucking work to do. But it’s a unique problem for Socialism, which claims to be a workers movement but tends to attract the most work-averse category of humans that ever existed: college students.

The filter that’s missing from the New York Times’ map is “education”. I suspect that if that filter existed, the results would come into focus.³ America is experiencing an ever-deepening cultural rift, and that rift strongly correlates with education. Views of the world based on race or economic status have less explanatory power with each passing day; when people cluster with people who are “like them”, they increasingly seek out people who share their behaviors and values. In some ways, this is good — I’d prefer that we sort ourselves by cultural proclivities than by race. But it’s definitely weird; America sometimes seems like an emulsified salad dressing slowly dividing into parts. And one of the cultural identities that seems to be surging is “hyper-progressive urbanite”.

I think it’s useful to recognize hyper-progressive urbanites as a cultural group, and I think it’s vital that Democrats recognize just how foreign that group is to everyone else. Mamdani’s nomination is not the result of the workers rising up; it’s the result of an election occurring in a place with many hyper-progressive urbanites where the moderate candidate was a grab-assing mediocrity. Anyone who assumes that Mamdani’s win is the first rumblings of an avalanche, and that Democrats should start planning Revolution Through Government-Owned Grocery Stores is likely to be wrong. The strand of politics that’s potent enough in Manhattan to eek out a primary win when conditions are just right remains deadly poison in most other contexts. To the extent that American workers have united, they’ve united to say “we hate this woke lefty crap.” And I think we should listen to them, even though — as always — they are not acting the way that Socialists think they should.

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1. Here I’m merging the distinction between “Socialism” and “Communism”, which I think is fair, because many Communists just started calling themselves Socialists after Stalin did irreparable brand damage to the word “Communist”.

2. To be fair, there was also always a trade unionist strand of European Marxism. But: 1) The unionists’ concerns tended to be local and narrow, more concerned with a five-day work week that global revolution, and 2) It’s not clear how Marxist they really were — many times, they just look like a union advocating for their members’ interests. The periodic thrusts for political revolution almost always came from the college kids.

3. And, sure enough, though I can’t find any sorting of results based on education, I did find this poll in which Cuomo’s favorability rating among college-educated voters is +0, and Mamdani’s is +25. College-educated voters seem to like Mamdani a lot more than non-college educated voters.