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How the DSA serves as a religion substitute for downwardly mobile elites
In August, when the New York Post profiled Grace Ryan—a 25-year-old NYU graduate, chocolate heiress, and socialist activist known online as “Lulu Lenin”—it supplied her critics with an irresistible caricature. Ryan had displayed the expensive clothes and vacations of a young woman born to wealth even as she was championing a movement devoted to dismantling class privilege. Confronted with the contradiction, she offered a defense more suited to an Edwardian drawing room than a Democratic Socialists of America meeting: “Y’all never heard of noblesse oblige?”
Ludicrous and unknowing as Ryan’s remark was, it was revelatory nonetheless about something very real. The DSA attracts people who have benefited from capitalism but feel cheated by it. It provides them with a moral vocabulary that gives them room to reinterpret personal disappointment as systemic injustice. And, most important, it gives them somewhere to go on a lonely Tuesday night, just as, for thousands of years, religion provided a social basis for Mormons on a Monday, Muslims on a Friday, Jews on a Saturday, and Christians on a Sunday.
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Jesse Arm is the vice president of external affairs at the Manhattan Institute, where he oversees communications, government relations, and public opinion research.