College Graduates Put Socialism Back on the Ballot
Zohran Mamdani’s campaign shows how the rhetoric of working-class revolution now resonates most with the highly educated.
Zohran Mamdani's electoral victory in New York City marks a new triumph—not for the working class, but for the highly educated. It is a curious revolution in which the ringleader is not the factory worker but the philosophy major, rebelling not against oppression but against reality itself.
Exit polling from CNN and NBC suggests that 42 percent of voters without college degrees supported Mamdani, compared to 58 percent of college graduates. His base doesn't appear to be the hardworking laborer of Marxist lore, but the well-credentialed and the well-schooled.
This is the irony of our age: The more schooling Americans receive, the less capable they seem of learning from history. The academy, once a crucible of open inquiry, has shifted to emphasizing consensus and shared ideology. Students often graduate knowing what to think but less about how to think. In the name of diversity, universities foster a rigid monoculture. In the name of inclusion, dissenting views are discouraged.
Mamdani's campaign echoed familiar themes: The rich are hoarders, landlords are villains, the system is rigged. It was not the "workers of the world" who responded to that call, but the laptop class that claims to speak on their behalf. The irony would amuse Marx himself: a revolution against the bourgeoisie—by the bourgeoisie.
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. Yet the same ideas, refurbished in the language of equity and justice, are now sold in Ivy League seminars as moral progress. 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.
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.
Rather than chasing credentials, Americans should pursue avenues that cultivate competence, creativity, and character. In an age of artificial intelligence and automation, the insistence that every young person must pursue a four-year degree is foolishness. Efforts like the mikeroweWORKS Foundation and programs like Praxis offer what universities no longer do: practical skill, real accountability, and exposure to the marketplace of ideas rather than the echo chamber of ideology.
If Mamdani's victory teaches anything, it is that our peril now comes from the overeducated elites who cannot distinguish intelligence from wisdom. Their degrees may hang in mahogany frames, but the ideas they carry are recycled failures.
A nation led by such minds risks learning the old lesson all over again—that socialism, whether taught in seminar rooms or shouted from campaign podiums, always ends the same way: in equal misery.
It is time to retire the illusion that schooling equals education, or that credentials confer virtue. America's future depends on rediscovering what our elites have forgotten: that freedom, not dogma, drives genuine progress.
