Democratic Socialists of America: March of the Overeducated Underachievers
Highly educated yet downwardly mobile graduates are fueling a pretend working-class movement.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has long styled itself as the authentic voice of the working class, frequently railing against economic inequality and capitalism. In reality, its ranks are filled with underachievers who hold liberal arts degrees that have failed to deliver the comfortable urban lives they expected.
This mismatch is the primary engine of the DSA’s growth.
Nate Silver’s analysis bears this out. According to a 2021 DSA survey, 80 percent of members aged 25 or older hold bachelor’s degrees. Yet 45 percent of all members report household incomes below $60,000. That’s roughly twice the rate of Americans with bachelor’s degrees or higher in the broader electorate—19 percent—who earn that little.
Common DSA member occupations include teachers, nonprofit staffers, social workers, and public-sector employees—roles that often leave highly credentialed people feeling downwardly mobile in the expensive, urban enclaves DSA members enjoy.
This is not the profile of factory workers or truck drivers. It is a portrait of elite overproduction. Universities have churned out far more liberal-arts and social-science graduates than the private sector can employ. The resulting frustration—student debt, stalled careers, and status anxiety—pushes intelligent but underemployed young adults toward revolutionary politics that promise to upend the system that allegedly failed them.
Social Priorities Over Economic Reality
Despite the DSA’s rhetoric about class struggle and its socialist branding, its members are far more concerned with cultural and social issues than issues that actual working-class people care about.
Most voters prioritize bread-and-butter concerns like jobs or health care. Silver’s data shows that the highly educated, lower-to-middle-income voters who form the group’s core base prioritize social issues like gay rights, transgender rights, racial justice, the environment, and Palestine.
These are preoccupations of people whose ideology is shaped more by the campus and nonprofit activism than by physical labor and the daily struggles of those who engage in it. Genuine working-class voters without college degrees—those who weld, drive, or stock shelves—tend to focus on crime, taxes, immigration, and reliable employment. Ironically, it is these people whom the DSA’s agenda often alienates the most.
Cosplaying Commoners
The DSA’s disconnect mirrors its candidates who aim to appeal to blue-collar workers. As a recent USA Today opinion piece documents, figures such as Mayor Zohran Mamdani in New York, former Senate hopeful Graham Platner in Maine, and current Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan have been marketed as champions of ordinary people. Yet polling consistently shows they perform strongest among college-educated voters and weakest among those without degrees.
More noticeably, none of them comes from a working-class family.
Mamdani is the son of a Columbia professor and Oscar-nominated filmmaker. Platner is the son of a lawyer and grandson of a renowned architect. El-Sayed has the closest claim for working-class roots—the son of an automotive engineer and a nurse—but was raised in an affluent suburb and became a Rhodes Scholar and Columbia-trained physician.
These candidates are elevated by highly credentialed party operatives and campaign consultants who themselves graduated from elite East Coast universities. The result is fake populism: socialist elites virtue signaling to other socialist elites while talking down to the actual lower and middle classes.
The deeper structural driver of the DSA is universities’ persistent overproduction of leftist liberal-arts graduates relative to demand in the workforce. Until higher education produces a commensurate number of graduates matched to available jobs in each field, there will remain a surplus of intelligent, angsty young adults who feel entitled to elite status yet locked out of it. Socialist politics offers them both an explanation for their disappointment and a community that validates their cultural worldview. The DSA’s future is, therefore, quite bright precisely because universities continue to produce foot soldiers who march to the tune of their own entitlement.
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