The Revolution Has a Trust Fund

By Abe Greenwald

How do you know when you’ve made it in America? When your grown-up kid declares he’s a socialist. It means you’ve given your family a level of material comfort and security so unquestionable that your child has never even thought about how it happened. The very life you’ve provided him is like a seamless work of art in which all the grueling spadework has been successfully hidden. Good for you. Bad for everyone else. 

The New York Post has a terrific piece today that provides a detailed example of this phenomenon. The co-chair of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America, Gustavo Gordillo, lives in a two-story, $1.5 million home that his parents purchased in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

They didn’t buy the place for themselves but for the 38-year-old Gordillo and his brother. What, after all, would his parents want with a 2,000-square-foot house in Brooklyn when they own a “sprawling more than 5,000-square-foot, five-bed, six-bath home in Boca Raton that is currently on the market for $3.1 million” and “another $3 million home in Weston, Fla., that is just slightly larger and has five beds and seven baths”?

Gordillo, you see, comes from an exorbitantly prosperous and enterprising family of Peruvian immigrants who came to the U.S. and struck gold. Naturally, he hates American capitalism and the country that has showered him in miracles. 

The most prominent American socialists who call for the U.S.’s destruction tend also to be among the most blessed by American liberty and the free market. They are exemplar beneficiaries of the American dream. If a TV network were to greenlight Lifestyles of the Rich and Socialist, they’d have no shortage of subjects. Gordillo, Hasan Piker, Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, Graham Platner, and the socialist-adjacent Abdul El-Sayed are all millionaires or come from millionaire families. The list grows the more you look. 

Gordillo’s supporters will not be put off by his hypocrisy. Recall that the exposure of personal wealth hasn’t hurt the other socialists/Communists up to this point. The reason is that Americans who support socialists are also hypocritical elites. Polls show that DSA candidates score big among young, educated professionals while driving away working-class Americans. 

There’s a time-worn theory in political science explaining that America is a terrible candidate for the emergence of socialism or Communism. Unlike Europe, we don’t have a feudal past that would lead inevitably to bourgeois revolution. Nor do we have an unbending and defined class system. Moreover, individual liberty is in our national DNA, and capitalism enjoys broad legitimacy.  

All this is true as far as it goes. But perhaps it makes more sense to look at socialism’s potential in the U.S. through a different lens. Instead of using the evolution of European socialism as a comparative model, we might consider a model that dispenses with the political almost entirely. I’m thinking here of the European elite’s historical fascination with Mesmerism and other fantastical cults. Beginning in the 18th century, European aristocrats would sit around in salons where Franz Mesmer would “treat” their assorted ailments with magnetized water and metal rods. And they’d inevitably find that his pseudoscientific voodoo had “cured” them.

Today in the U.S., we might say that these high-society neurotics were suffering from what has been dubbed “affluenza,” an emotional condition characterized by guilt and purposelessness, brought on by extreme wealth and comfort. The same goes for our rising socialist stars. They’re as ignorant of political science as the aristocrats were of human biology, but they know that Marxist voodoo makes them feel better—while not having to give up a thing. The question is: How many of us will ultimately be enlisted to administer therapy to the rich and stunted of America?

Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of COMMENTARY.