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August 24 2026 - 12:30pm
Over the weekend, the New York Post observed the return of one of America’s most enduring political punching bags: the champagne socialist.
The newest specimen is Grace Ryan, a 25-year-old New York University graduate and former Brad Lander organizer whose father built a $10 million chocolate business. After photos circulated of her smoking a cigar at the family lake house in a $400 Ralph Lauren sweater, Ryan asked whether her critics had heard of noblesse oblige. Days earlier, the Post revealed that Gustavo Gordillo, NYC-DSA’s 38-year-old co-chair, lives in a $1.5 million townhouse bought and renovated by his father. The former Yale student had also left an electrician apprenticeship before qualifying, saying he did so to devote more time to the Democratic Socialists of America.
Some of this is funny. Gordillo ghosting his blue-collar union job for a $95,000 gig with the DSA is almost too on-the-nose, and Senator John Kennedy’s nickname for the type — “Lulu Lenins” — is annoyingly good. And yet, the whole gotcha genre of “The socialist owns a million-dollar townhouse” is a shallow analysis that does less work than it thinks.
The truth is that hiding elite pedigree beneath working-stiff drag is a storied and bipartisan endeavor. Bill Clinton’s Southern drawl became more pronounced when useful. George W. Bush self-consciously cultivated an image that was more Marlboro Man than the Ivy League son of a president. JD Vance has been accused of hamming up his humble origins in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. John Fetterman turned a Carhartt hoodie and oversized basketball shorts into a kind of blue-collar diploma for a Harvard graduate whose successful father subsidized his low-paid years. Let he who has not worn a hard hat at a photo op cast the first stone!
Socialists are not uniquely guilty of this — they just do themselves no favors because their entire brand promise is that, unlike the sell-out politicians, they are the real thing. Clearly, most DSA members are not a bunch of single mothers working as Walmart cashiers or soot-covered miners demanding better working conditions. Polls and surveys show that socialists are disproportionately whiter, younger, and more college-educated than the rest of the country, and they’re just as likely to be unemployed or on disability as to have union membership.
It’s no surprise, then, that many young socialists have neglected the economy, unions, and free healthcare as their organizing principle in favor of, say, the war in Gaza or LGBTQ issues. As the sociologist Vivek Chibber has argued, socialist organizations “have to largely imagine what [working class] interests are”, since they don’t learn through direct engagement. A movement that has to imagine the working class from the outside will, unsurprisingly, keep producing leaders who look like Gustavo Gordillo or Grace Ryan, who — without a hint of irony — invoke noblesse oblige, the paternalistic fantasy of upper-class gifts bestowed on the grateful poor.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, no poor schlub himself, has generally been shrewd about this, with a laser focus on affordability and so-called kitchen-table issues. He’s not wrong that a graphic designer, a teacher’s aide, and a grocery store stocker can all share real material interests, especially as white-collar professions have taken a big hit in the age of AI. However, his rough definition of who counts as the working class — those who make under $1 million — is also rather arbitrary.
What he should say, and others should say, is that benefiting from an arrangement does not make it just, and anyone with money who wants to redistribute isn’t necessarily a fraud. Franklin Roosevelt did not grow up above a laundromat, and no one should have to take Franciscan vows to establish their political ideas. Given the choice, we should take nepo babies such as Ryan and Gordillo, who at least want a more equal society, over those who use inherited wealth and influence to extract still more from the rest of us. After all, class traitors are preferable to parasites. Just be careful, young socialists: “eat the rich” lands differently when Dad is paying for dinner.
