Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
Who are the so-called Democratic Socialists of America and their fellow travelers?
While it is difficult to generalize, many current and would-be socialist officeholders share several common traits.
Most of them represent a relatively small slice of American life. Almost all are urban, with little knowledge of small-town or rural existence.
Their world is subways, buses, high-rises, Uber, taxis, and proximity to corporate, academic, and financial institutions—yet often with little understanding of where their food, fuel, water, or everyday goods originate, or where their waste and sewage ultimately go.
Their worldview is shaped more by consumption than production, as though goods simply arrive in and depart from cities on autopilot.
A disproportionate number of our most prominent radicals are either first- or second-generation immigrants, most originating from failed or illiberal states in what was once called the Third World.
They or their parents left their homelands in search of wealthier countries, fairer societies, greater opportunity, and, in many cases, safety and freedom.
Yet once here, many of their families have prospered, often aided by extensive educational and institutional support from the generous American host.
Few have even tried to explain the paradox of fleeing failed states, only to become virulent critics of the charitable nation that they chose to join.
Many are college-educated, often with degrees in fields that did not translate into the professional pathways they believed they were entitled to.
They are often glib but otherwise poorly educated. Few possess any real grounding in history, literature, or the STEM fields.
Most of their major and minor courses of study are in the social sciences—political science, sociology, psychology, community relations, and the like—or the infamous “studies” programs.
When they graduate from left-wing universities, they emerge strikingly arrogant and ignorant at once. As elite radical egalitarians, they proudly brandish their degrees and constantly reference their university training. Yet for all the time and money poured into college during what were supposed to be the best years of their lives, prolonged adolescence and bitterness appear epidemic among the new young socialists.
In college, they rubbed elbows with leftist elites—wealthy students, tenured professors, and lavishly paid administrators. They came to believe they had earned their membership in this exclusive club. When that sense of belonging didn’t properly materialize, rage and shame drove them to find cosmic solutions for their own poor choices and personal disappointments.
Many of them—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Melat Kiros, James Talarico, Graham Platner, Claire Valdez—are either childless, single, or both. For all their sermonizing about diversity, it is relatively rare to find a Democratic Socialist who is suburban, married with children, and therefore has a direct personal stake in local school curricula, charter schools, vouchers, crime, law enforcement, and basic urban safety.
They are overtly obsessed with tribal identity. AOC and Rashida Tlaib fixate on “white privilege” and “white supremacy.” Darializa Avila Chevalier has denounced white women who date non-whites as “ugly colonizer women.”
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaks openly of targeting “whiter” neighborhoods for higher taxes. Most of them know whites only as fellow left-wing bicoastal elites, not as working-class and poor whites who live in the nation’s interior.
While they damn the nation’s founding as a settler-colonial white supremacist project and dismiss its first 250 years as a grim catalogue of -isms and -ologies, they never explain why they or their parents would have chosen to come to such a cesspool in the first place.
Or why do they not leave now for more authentically non-white paradises in Africa, Asia, Latin America, or the Middle East?
So many are rank hypocrites.
Mamdani rails against “settler-colonialist” Israelis. Yet he was born into the 1 percent elite, non-indigenous, “settler-colonialist” Indian population that migrated to Uganda and still controls over 60 percent of its gross domestic product.
Ilhan Omar loudly denounces “genocide” in Gaza. Yet she rarely mentions that her family fled Somalia because they—and thousands like them—were tied to the genocidal regime of Siad Barre, which murdered multitudes before he was deposed and his supporters poured into America.
The new socialists decry the wealthy. Yet their most visible leaders are rich. Ilhan Omar once listed a net worth of $30 million on her congressional financial disclosure.
Mamdani is the son of well-off elites. Bernie Sanders owns three homes. Ro Khanna, now a fellow traveler, is a multimillionaire many times over thanks to family trusts. Graham Platner’s affluent parents subsidized both his home purchase and his business.
Socialists claim to despise billionaires—except when they are happily taking millions from their financial patrons: speculator George Soros, billionaire Neville Roy Singham (who relocated to Communist China), or onetime associate of Jeffrey Epstein, Reid Hoffman.
In sum, Democratic socialism is a top-down movement run by insulated elites who have little understanding of—or genuine interest in—the lives of millions of ordinary Americans living outside the walls of their parochial cloisters.