The Left Isn’t Building a Working-Class Movement—It’s Building a New Elite

“Non-workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your Uber Eats delivery fees!”

That really seems like it should be the slogan of the far-left, socialist coalition taking over the Democratic Party.

Yet, the Democratic Socialists of America and its prominent leaders continue with the dubious message that they are for the “working class,” despite being unable to explain what that phrase even means.

Why?

In a revealing interview on Saturday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was asked by The New York Times if he had a definition for what he means by “working class.”

“I think if you have to work to pay your bills, I think that that is one definition of being a part of the working class,” Mamdani answered.

So, virtually everyone who isn’t disabled, retired, on welfare, or in prison is working class, according to this definition.

And those last two groups appear to be key parts of his coalition, too.

It doesn’t take much to deduce that this isn’t a real answer to the question.

Mamdani’s interviewer, Lulu Garcia-Navarro—to her credit—pressed the mayor further and asked if someone making $250,000 qualifies.

“I haven’t sat at home and asked myself where it starts and stops,” he replied. “What I would say is those who are working to try and afford the basic dignities of life and aren’t able to do so, I think that that is also working class. Oftentimes we’re asked how we divide this country. I think there’s only one majority in this country—it’s the working class.”

Yes, I’d say that people drawing a paycheck and paying their bills are still in the majority in this country.

What’s interesting about Mamdani’s “working class” definition is that it is both absurdly broad but actually gets halfway to the truth of what his movement is aiming for.

It’s truth in the sense that Mamdani and company want to cast the widest possible net to find voters dissatisfied with the current economic dynamics of American society. Frustration over housing prices, the cost of living, inflation, etc. are very real issues that fall especially hard on young people.

They’d like to use the broad term “affordability” to capture as much of this dissatisfaction as possible to grow their movement even as the particulars get cloudy.

The modern Left is hardly a hardscrabble collection of blue-collar truckers, welders, oil drillers, longshoremen, and cops.

If anything, those groups are the “forgotten men” of America who increasingly support President Donald Trump and Republicans.

Instead, the DSA’s most fervent supporters and certainly its political activists, the sinews of its organization, tend to be college-educated—with a high percentage of post-graduate degree holders—and come from upper-middle-class backgrounds.

Though they are notably, in many cases, not exactly making what they perceive as middle-class salaries themselves.

This isn’t just perception, it’s showing up in voting data, too.

One interesting tidbit in a New York Times review of the recent Democrat primaries in New York that ushered in a wave of socialists showed that the voters predominantly supporting this far-left turn are younger and come from “precincts with more college graduates and higher median incomes.”

In interviews with these young voters, the Times noted that the common theme was that they feel “underpaid and overqualified for their jobs.”

This pattern holds up outside New York City, too.

One pseudonymous commenter on X was spot on when he wrote that Mamdani and the Left aren’t creating a true working-class coalition but are instead trying to form a “new class of welfare-deserving affluents.”

The children of millionaires are using billionaires as foils for their larger political project.

In a piece titled “The Brave New Age of Trust-Fund Socialism,” in The Washington Free Beacon, Andrew Stiles catalogued the growing number of the Left’s leaders who come from not just wealth, but upper-crust, influential families.

Mamdani’s parents are a college professor and a prominent Bollywood producer. One of his chief advisers is an “heir to a garment-industry fortune.”

Daniel Moraff, the political operative who recruited Graham Platner to run for Senate in Maine, is a grandson of the man who founded the toy store that became Toys “R” Us.

Platner, the “oyster farmer” with the Nazi tattoo, is the grandson of a renowned architect and clearly came from some money.

Even by the broadest of broad definitions of “working class,” these folks hardly qualify.

So, their movement is built on a fair amount of old socialist and communist canards that no longer make sense in the 21st century, but the “class” they represent is real, even if many of them count community organizing and part-time rapping as “work.”

Most revolutions are started by people like these, the frustrated but well-off true believers.

Unlike the “No Kings” Boomer liberals with a terminal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome who can’t accept that they haven’t been “IT” in a long time, the coalition created by Mamdani, the DSA, and the campus Left is here to stay.

They will continue to remove, absorb, and replace the Democratic Party establishment as party leaders age out or capitulate. And that’s because they better understand the economic, racial, cultural, and gender grievances that motivate so many young people. Their most successful advocates, like Mamdani, cleverly cloak their politics of envy in a mask of fairness.

They are capturing the energy and voting power of a highly motivated, ideologically leftist, dissatisfied downscale elite and are merging it with a new, increasingly foreign-born coalition of unassimilated immigrants—here legally or not—who they hope will add to their voting power and tip election scales in their direction going forward.

The coalition the Left is creating isn’t working class, but it imagines itself as such, and it wants respect.

Even more than that, it wants power. Unless more Americans wake up to the threat it poses, it will get it.

Jarrett Stepman is a columnist for The Daily Signal. He is also the author of “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Pastopens in a new tab.”

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Signal by Jarrett Stepman.

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.