People Are Starting to Notice That the Alleged "Working Class Populist Socialist" Uprising on the Left Is Made Up Exclusively of College-Educted Rich Leisure-Class Nepo Babies and NGO Sucklers

The Claim: Democrats are electing "working class populists" who just happen to be socialists

The Reality: Democrats are electing rich-bitch children of privilege who are socialists because they've never done a day of work in their lives.

Batya Sargon-Unger:

Progressives want you to believe socialism is on the march because working-class people have had enough. They want you to believe they are "fighting the oligarchy!" and they are taking on the billionaires and the "Epstein class" and bringing back an agenda focused on labor. But it's all nonsense.

You know how I know?

Because it's rich people who vote for them, and working people voting for their opponents.

This was wildly apparent in the New York elections last week, in which rich, over-credentialed gentrifiers voted out candidates preferred by working-class New Yorkers, as I explained in a piece called "Stop Calling Them 'Socialists.' They're Over-Credentialed White Gentrifiers Driven by Resentment Ousting Working-Class Candidates."

But the latest evidence of progressives and socialists pretending to fight for the little guy while actually winning with the credentialed caste at the expense of the desires of working-class voters comes out of Maine.

Platner is polling ahead of Republican incumber Susan Collins by two points. But he has absolutely cratered with working-class voters.

Susan Collins has a 21 point lead against Platner with working-class voters.

Shane Goldmacher
@ShaneGoldmacher

Graham Platner is ahead of Collins by 2 points in new NYT poll.

One of the most intriguing details: She has a 21-point lead among non-college voters as Platner has made centering the working class the center of his campaign.

So how is Platner winning?

With college educated voters!

Platner is demolishing Collins with college-educated voters--by 34 points.

51% of working-class white voters say that Platner is "too far to the Left"--while 61% of working-class white voters say that Collins is "not too fair either way."

Platner is also cleaning Collins' clock with women, leading her by eight points.

So much for solidarity! College-educated women, those very HR ladies the pundits were delighted had been vanquished, looked at Graham Platner, who shoved and manhandled his ex girlfriend and locked her in a room, according to the New York Times, and thought, "Me, too."

Platner's handlers and supporters sold him as a working-class hero, an "oysterman" and veteran with rough edges who has tattoos and wasn't developed "in a vat." This, like all their socialist frippery, turned out to be cosplay: The oyster farm is fake, a vanity hobby that makes no money apart from $6,000 Platner's mom gives him to sell the oysters at her restaurant. His VA loan turned out to be fake; his dad bought him his house for $200,000. He went to a fancy prep school. His farm is on a private island owned by a friend.

This working-class cosplay was just enough to convince college-educated women that he was a real man--though not, it seems, good enough to convince working-class men, who can smell a faker a mile away. As my friend Ryan Girdursky aptly put it, "Graham is what a college educated person thinks a working-class person is supposed to act like and working-class people can see he's a fraud."

Even old lefty Thomas Edsall at the communist New York Times notices that the new "Workers Party" of the left contains almost no actual workers, writes John Sexton.

Thomas Edsall takes a break today from attacking President Trump and instead turns his attention to the extreme left-wing of his own party. Like all good Marxists, the Democratic Socialists of America present themselves as a party for the working class. But it turns out there are almost no working class people in the party.

Candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America are surging to victory on the claim that they are proponents of "a government by, for and of the working class" that will wrest power from both "far-right Republicans and corporate Democrats."

Here's the problem. Most of the leadership of the D.S.A. and a majority of voters who back its candidates are in no way working class. Instead, an elite made up of well-educated professionals dominates this insurgency...

In 2021 the D.S.A. surveyed its members and found that 85 percent were non-Hispanic white (far more than the national population, which was 57.8 percent white in 2020, according to the census)...

Four percent of the members held blue-collar jobs, according to the survey, the most recent publicly available...

More than 80 percent of members who were 25 years old or older had college degrees (just more than double the percentage for the United States as a whole), and 35 percent had a master's degree, a doctorate or a professional degree (again, more than double the American average). Sixty percent identified as agnostic or atheist (with the American average, taken at its most generous, at less than half that).

The DSA isn't the party of the people, it's the party of the white, atheist college grads almost none of whom hold blue collar jobs. When asked about this, the DSA communications person said the group's policies were working class even if their members aren't. But that's not true either. For instance, the DSA is hard left on trans rights while America in general and working class people in particular are not.

...the D.S.A.'s March 31 declaration, "We Will Not Be Erased," would be met with some skepticism if not hostility by working-class voters disdainful of the D.S.A.'s commitment of support for "bodily autonomy, for moving past arbitrary restrictions and conservative norms around gender and family and for the right of all to obtain medical care."

The same is true of the DSA's stand on immigration. It's not the position held by actual working class people.

See the link for that.

The left is trying to claim that the Democrat Socialists are sick of woke politics, too, that's why they focus laser-like on breadbasket issues like health care and rent.

But that's all bullshit-- what they focus on is open borders and transing children. Just like all other lefties, only more dogmatic and authoritarian about it.

People are sick of Leisure Class Leftists telling the rest of us that we have to waste our money on their sick priorities:

Nicholas Kristof @NickKristof

.@elonmusk says that no one can name a person who died from his aid cuts. In fact, I've met the kids who are dying, and I've talked to the families who lost children. In my columns, I've cited many, many names of people who have died because of Musk's aid cuts. A few examples:

*Yamah Freeman was a 23-year-old woman who died in childbirth because Musk cut funding for the diesel for ambulances in her part of Liberia. She couldn't get to a hospital and died as people were carrying her there. I talked to her parents and sister in their village.

We have to fucking fuel up the ambulances in Liberia?!

Coddled Affluent Professional @feelsdesperate

I'm supportive of international public health aid when it comes to cheap interventions like dispensing HIV and TB and malaria meds. (I am a lib 🤷‍♂️ .)

However, Kristof is just making everything worse.

First, you can't hysterically crybully Americans into supporting these programs and trying to do so instead of making a calm, measured case just makes people reactive and oppositional because it's so obviously a cynical, manipulative tactic.

Second, it's not our responsibility to fill up anyone's gas tank. All of these initiatives have to be completely reconsidered and our obligations need to be clearly defined. That Kristof can't intuit that Americans would oppose filling foreign gas tanks demonstrates just how out of touch he is and that he's bound to do more harm than good in attempting to propagandize on behalf of international public health.

Third, none of these vignettes meet even the most basic evidentiary standards to support his assertions. Furthermore, this isn't how it's done - big programs need to be supported by population level data and Kristof is obviously trying to be emotionally manipulative with anecdotes rather than addressing the policy questions in the right way with the right type of data.

Fourth, it's lazy and cynical to try to lay this all on Musk. Maybe you shouldn't have billion dollar 'managed democracy' and leftist NGO dark money sinkholes wearing the skin suit of true humanitarian programs. Maybe the people who designed these programs as such deserve a little more (or a lot more) of the blame for intentionally putting them in proximity to legitimate political targets.

Every time I read a half-informed journo trying to do advocacy for foreign health aid I cringe because it's clear they don't know what they're talking about and are making lazy, motivated assertions that are bound to backfire and make things worse. If journos really cared about these issues and weren't just scrounging for cheap partisan artillery they'd be a lot more carful, thoughtful, and reserved in what they're arguing.

Update: Ro Khanna, the guy who got rich by knocking up an heiress, wants to end capitalism all of a sudden.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 03:40 PM

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