Beginning in 1944, Congress enacted a series of bills that, collectively, became known as the G.I. Bill. A significant purpose was to provide funds so that men and women who served in the military could get a college education, a big stepping stone to the American Dream. Ironically, this truly patriotic and pro-American impulse created an American class system that gave birth to today’s toxic and fast-growing socialist moment in America.
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Beginning with the American Revolution, our nation had a long and sorry history of abandoning its veterans. In 1932, during the Great Depression, 17,000 World War I veterans marched on D.C. trying to cash out on “veterans bonuses” that could only be redeemed in 1945. One of Hollywood’s biggest hits, The Gold Diggers of 1933, created a whole musical montage dedicated to that movement:
After World War II, America, as the last nation standing, decided it wouldn’t make that anti-veteran mistake again. Congress enacted a series of bills that would give veterans low-cost mortgages, low-interest loans, some unemployment money and, significantly for this essay, tuition and living payments so that veterans could attend public colleges and universities. The bills were repeatedly renewed and have become part of America’s fabric.
A dear family friend was one of the bill’s recipients. Here was a man from an impoverished Texas background who, after serving bravely during WWII (he was at the Battle of the Bulge), became a doctor thanks to the G.I. Bill and enjoyed a prosperous and wonderful life.
This friend was representative of a generation. It took uncounted millions of men and women and steered them from lower-income blue-collar jobs into higher-income white-collar jobs. By 1960, in today’s dollars, the G.I. Bill meant that the man with the college degree would earn, on average, $42,000 per year more than the man without the degree. The man without the degree would be Archie Bunker, still living in a small, shabby house in Queens; the man with the degree would move to a big, modern house in Scarsdale, complete with two cars, 2.5 children, and an annual vacation to Europe.
It was the American Dream writ large, and a pretty large percentage of the population could and did benefit from this Dream. About 37% of adult men served in the military during WWII. By 1970, about 43% of all living adult American men had served in the military.
Slowly, but steadily, America became a class society. But it was not an aristocratic, bloodline class; it was an academic class.
College, once the preserve of only a few in America, became a given among the descendants of the G.I. Bill’s beneficiaries. However, while the G.I. recipients, many of whom came from less-affluent backgrounds, went to college to learn useful skills, recent generations, most raised in tremendous affluence, have learned useless skills. They can talk your ear off about how to spot racism and transphobia in a cereal box’s ingredient list, but they can’t actually do anything.
As Charles Murray describes so well in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, America’s common culture fell apart as college-educated Americans broke away, creating a separate physical world, one that was also divided from the rest of America by its differing culture and values. (David Brooks’s Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There also describes this new, almost hereditary upper class.) I lived in that world for decades, and I cannot tell you the disgust and disdain many of my peers had for the flyovers and Red staters without academic degrees.
As academia moved left, so did this new upper class. After all, for generation after generation, the children and grandchildren of the G.I.s were marinated in academia’s increasingly Marxist values. Their father’s or grandfather’s hard-earned affluence became guilt, their guilt became self-loathing, and, in the current college generation, that self-loathing morphed into radical socialism.
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It’s this generation that backs the DSA platform that advocates for destroying the Constitution, ending the rule of law, opening borders, destroying private property, redistributing wealth, and making common cause with the world’s worst countries provided their people are brown-skinned and despise America.
Nor are their numbers inconsequential. It’s not just that their candidates are winning primary after primary, and that many of those who won their primaries seem poised to join already-elected DSA members or fellow travelers (e.g., Zohran Mamdani, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Pramila Jayapal, etc.). It’s also that the DSA has grown from 8,000 members in 2016 to 120,000 members a decade later, a 1,400% growth rate. And keep in mind that not all supporters of the ideology officially join the DSA.
Nate Silver noticed this fact and reported on it in a widely read newsletter. He examined the data from the Cooperative Election Study, which polled voters about their income and education. And here’s what he concluded:
Based on this grid, what is the most Democratic voting group in America? It’s voters with postgraduate degrees but lower-to-middle household incomes of $30K to $60K per year.
This is very much also the sweet spot for the DSA. In the group’s , 80 percent of members aged 25 or older had bachelor’s degrees, but 45 percent had household incomes below $60,000 per year.
In other words, people who acquired massive debt to acquire useless degrees, while spending well over four years being indoctrinated in Marxist ideology.
The G.I. Bill was meant to be a great upward equalizer, giving people a pathway to the American Dream. Ordinary men and women could go to college, learn a skill, dramatically increase their earning capacity, and join the middle- and upper-middle classes.
It’s one of history’s great ironies that what the G.I. Bill turned out to be was a great leveler in the worst Marxist sense. The same men and women who patriotically served America gave birth to a generation of people whose sole desire is to burn down the American Dream and leave all Americans in the equity of the ashes.
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