The victory by Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral election was not a working-class revolution in the way Karl Marx envisioned the “workers’ paradise” that would replace capitalism.
This was a "revolution" — if you can call it that — of the highly educated. What they're rebelling against is "reality itself," writes Reason.com's Connor Boyack. "The more schooling Americans receive, the less capable they seem of learning from history," he says.
Exit polling from CNN suggests that 42% of voters without college degrees supported Mamdani, compared to 58 percent of college graduates. More to the point, 75% of voters 18-29 supported the socialist, as did 65% of those 30-44. If "Youth will be served," as Jack London believed, the young appear to be helping themselves to seconds.
"Students often graduate knowing what to think but less about how to think," writes Boyack. How can they know how to think when they're penalized for independent thinking? The gods of diversity, equity, and inclusion demand adherence to "a rigid monoculture" where there are only gray tones and students are taught to think in black and white.
Mamdani's campaign painted the "enemy" in one dimension: "greedy" landlords, the "evil" rich. It's not your fault that your film criticism major can't get you a job that pays $75,000 a year. It's the "system" that's "rigged" against you.
This is socialism's siren song, which has bewitched people for more than 100 years. Meanwhile, the realization of socialism's promises is always just around the corner, just over the horizon.
"Socialism, democratic or otherwise, has been tried, and has failed—from the breadlines of Moscow to the blackout nights of Caracas, from Cuba's decay to Venezuela's collapse," says Boyack. But it hasn't really been tried yet is the usual comeback. That, or the "wrong people" were trying to implement it.
"That graduates could emerge with $200,000 degrees to vote for a program of economic ruin suggests that our universities have succeeded in producing ideological zealots rather than informed citizens," says Boyack.
When more than 60 percent of Harvard undergraduates earn As—compared to only a quarter of those students two decades ago—we see not excellence but indulgence. Real learning demands friction; modern universities sell comfort.
Once upon a time, universities taught humility before the lessons of history. Now their graduates are led to believe that utopia can be built with enough committees and grievance studies departments. The result is a class fluent in moral slogans but illiterate in economics. It is no coincidence that today's most zealous socialists, including Mamdani, have never run a business, hired a worker, or balanced a budget—but they can quote Marx and Engels at length.
We have created a generation that mistakes credentials for wisdom and indignation for virtue. The "educated" class now supplies the foot soldiers of a movement that could, in time, erode the very prosperity that made their education possible.
Boyack writes, "If Mamdani's victory teaches anything, it is that our peril now comes from the overeducated elites who cannot distinguish intelligence from wisdom." Nor can they distinguish their own interests from those of a conniving socialist whose idiotic notions of "sharing the wealth" are likely to bankrupt the city and impoverish the people.
