Mamdani & Champagne Socialist Allies Masquerade as Working-Class Heroes

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) organization is making a serious play for control of the Democrat Party, advertising itself as a racially diverse, working-class movement. But a closer look at who actually makes up the DSA reveals not the workers it claims to represent, but affluent, mostly white professionals.

Superficially, the DSA’s diversity talking points seem to be borne out by the most conspicuous DSA politicians—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, et al. But according to its own internal membership surveys, 85 percent of the DSA’s members are white, nine percent are Hispanic, five percent are Asian American, and four percent are Black.

What about the claim that the DSA is a working-class movement? Those same surveys find that fully 58 percent of DSA members are employed in the professional/managerial class. Only a paltry four percent are blue-collar workers. The rest of them are disabled, unemployed, or students.

As Ruy Teixeira of the American Enterprise Institute describes the DSA: “Its rhetoric and program uses the phrase ‘working class’ over and over again, as if repeating that phrase magically makes its members working class. But it doesn’t, and they aren’t.”

Teixeira uses the standard academic definition of the working class—adult workers lacking a four-year college degree. “By that measure,” writes José García of the Ford Foundation, “the working class constitutes over 60% of the U.S. labor force—more than 93 million people as of 2023. This group is not only large, but richly diverse: Roughly 53% are non-Hispanic white, 13% Black, and 25% Hispanic.”

But the academic definition of working class has little meaning to its members. Political scientist Nicholas Jacobs writes in The Conversation:

“There are conventional ways to define the working class, but they often miss how people understand their own place in society. In the 2024 American National Election Studies, for example, 21% of those who identify as working class have a college degree, only 5% belong to a private-sector union, and 37% own stocks. Conversely, most Americans without a college degree do not identify as working class.”

Jacobs offers additional bad news for the DSA: “Meanwhile, the share of working-class voters who identify as Democrats has been declining for half a century.” The farther left the party has drifted on social issues, the more its share of the working-class vote has declined. If the DSA pulls the Democrats even further to the left, they will almost certainly lose the remaining working-class Americans who still vote for them.

As Ruy Teixeira puts it, “The road back to the working class is likely long and difficult for Democrats. The DSA’s growth just makes it even more difficult.”

Beyond just the numbers, the DSA’s most celebrated “leader” gives the game away when attempting to define “working class.” In a recent New York Times interview, Mayor Mamdani was asked to do so and answered, “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.”

Does this sound familiar? Mamdani is simply paraphrasing the Marxist view of the working class, but soft-pedaling it through language that sounds reasonable on the surface to most Americans. In other words, Mamdani is implying, if you work for a living (as 99.9 percent of Americans do), then you are being oppressed by the 0.1 percent, and all your problems are their doing.

In Marxist theory, the working class (i.e., the proletariat) is defined by its relationship to the means of production. Rather than being determined by income level, lifestyle, or specific job type, the working class includes everyone who must sell their labor for a wage or salary in order to survive.

To whom do they sell it? As Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez insist, the workers must sell their blood, sweat, and tears to the oligarchs who own the means of production. This is why the formal DSA program focuses so much on the evils of private property and profit:

“The political and economic system under which we live is built on private ownership and profit at all costs. As capitalism fails to solve problems of its own making, it turns to right-wing authoritarianism. Big business makes deals with the government to line their pockets, and politicians stoke hatred between working people. Instead of offering real solutions to unemployment and the cost of living, they attack immigrants.”

Never mind that this system has lifted billions out of poverty and produced every piece of modern technology we enjoy today. It must be evil, Mamdani and his ilk say, because some individuals are more successful than others.

If you continue to read its platform, the DSA won’t stop with the elimination of private property and profit. It openly declares, “For the working class to govern, we need a new political system.” It insists that the establishment of a new workers’ paradise requires the following: “Abolish the Electoral College. Replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” The DSA would complete the job by establishing public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries.

By now it should be obvious, particularly after Mayor Mamdani’s definition of “working class,” that the DSA isn’t about socialism. It is selling communism, plain and simple.

The left constantly lectures us on the supposed difference between socialism and communism. Socialists, they insist, merely want to reduce inequality while increasing social justice via regulation of industry and commerce. Communists, they say, seek the same laudable goals by forcibly seizing the means of production and imposing centralized economic control.

It is important to note here that Karl Marx himself envisioned socialism as just one step on the road to communism. Socialist policies are designed to foment communist revolutions.

But the great and dark irony of the brewing socialist-communist movement in the United States today is the same that has afflicted all similar movements throughout history; namely, that it is being driven by the very individuals (white, wealthy elites) whom it purportedly seeks to overthrow. Meanwhile, the DSA is generally shunned by the downtrodden workers it claims to represent.

What history also shows us is that those who lead the communist revolution invariably end up hoarding all the resources while everyone else is left in abject poverty. There is no reason to expect that such a calamity in our own country would be any different. Under the banner of “diversity” and taking down “the elites,” a group of mostly white, elite individuals are now seeking to consolidate power and wealth for themselves. “Hypocrisy” doesn’t begin to describe it.

With any luck, the DSA will drive the Democrat Party into an iceberg, and both will sink beneath the political waves together.