Are you worried about the DSA kiddies? Folks like Zohran Mamdani, son of a college professor and a filmmaker? Or Katie Wilson, child of two evolutionary biologists?
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It seems like all the DSA kiddies are the spawn of educated and credentialed experts. Should we be worried?
Well, according to Bjorn Merker in Perishing Promise, something similar was going on in Berlin back in 1840. The place was swimming in university educated rich kids spouting crazy Romantic nonsense. People like Karl Marx, son of the leading lawyer in Trier, just east of Luxembourg. Karl was having a grand old time with his Brudi (German for “bros”) in Berlin, living off an allowance from Papa (just like Katie Wilson), although Papa kept telling him to get a job. But then Papa died and Mutti cut him off. No problem, reisches Kind Friedrich Engels stepped in.
Enough about those rich-kid German students in Berlin in 1840.
But should we be equally concerned with the DSA rich-kiddies of 2026? Probably. But there is this, from a noted intellectual of the ages:
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
If you don’t know who wrote that, check with AI.
But is history repeating itself as farce this time around?
At least Marx & Co. had an excuse back in 1840 waking up after a night of carousing on good German beer.
Nobody had a clue, back in the hungry 1840s — with the world economy in a tailspin because President Andrew Jackson had closed up the Second Bank of the United States, and with Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton machine-textile worker dad starving in Manchester, and an Irish and German potato famine — that a staggering increase in income, including the workers, was about to engulf the world.
Of course, Adam Smith had told us in The Wealth of Nations in 1776 that things were on the up and up. But Marx, stealing the ideas of Lorenz von Stein, wrote that the workers would end up “immiserated.”
And any credentialed academic who suggests that Houston We Have a Problem with the DEI culture will be hounded out of academia — even in the backwater of Ghent — by his transgender academic bosses.
I know. You can’t make this up.
But the question for us uncredentialed commentators is to judge whether this is tragedy or farce.
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Actually, it is neither. Back in 1840 those German students had an excuse to prophesy the immiseration of the working class. But now, 180 years later, we’ve had 250 years of economics, from Adam Smith to the marginal revolution to the Austrian school (Keynes need not apply). We’ve had five technological revolutions, and each one created a huge increase in per-capita income. We’ve had two big communist revolutions and both created famine and killing fields. We’ve had a century of the welfare state and the result is gigantic entitlement programs that only help people at enormous expense. We’ve had all kinds of programs to fight inequality and oppression and mostly they made things worse.
If you really think that socialism, democratic or otherwise, is going to fight injustice or create “affordability,” you are a science denier, and a history denier, and I know not what.
So why is the political space still full of far-left rhetoric? Because it gets votes, it gets money, it gets influence, and it gets power. For the powerful and the rich kids of the powerful. But not for you and me.
Some experts are analyzing the present as a duel of left populism versus right populism.
Maybe. I went to the funeral, recently, of an academic who got his psychology professorship in the Sixties. His colleagues reminisced about the academic life, and it was pretty sweet: grants and opportunities for yourself and for your friends. But for the children of that academic generation, not so good. And as for the grandchildren…
The right populism is far wider and deeper, because it is a movement of the ordinary middle class that has been getting the short end of the stick from the educated class for about a century. I like to say that Nixon’s Silent Majority, Reagan’s Reagan Democrats, the Obama-era Tea Party, and Trump’s MAGA are all part of the same movement, an inchoate eruption in an ordinary middle class that “don’t get no respect” from the ruling class.
The last 250 years since Adam Smith have been an economic miracle. Go and look at my Great Enrichment page at usgovernmentspending.com. Real per-capita GDP in the U.S. is up by 40 times since 1800! That’s 4,096 percent.
And the rich kids of the professors say that socialism is the answer? I got a bridge…
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.
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