#elite class

[frontpagewoman]

AI and its billionaire overlords are coming for our jobs, water, electricity and status.

Scary

[dogloveri23]

I'm not stupid! Kanji Ike x reader

I stared at the doors of class 1-D. We had aced our mid-term tests and had managed to save Sudõ from being expelled yet one person who caught my eye was Ike. He was considered a numb skull but he managed to pass and escape being expelled but something about me having 99 in all subjects has made him aware of me. I get constant stares from him sometimes almost an approach sometimes. I don't understand what he wants. I mean he's hopelessly inlove with susane for unknown reasons. I can't say for sure he likes me.

In a few months it was summer, he had gotten bolder with me. He had struck up a conversation with me and we were getting along . We had fun at the pool and were often having good conversations and playing games together.

But now we are on an island owned by the school for an apparent test. I hate camping and I can't quit because it would cost us points. Ike found a spot for us to stay. I sit by the river not sparing anyone a glance. "Are you ok?" A voice said from behind me. Before taking a seat next to me. "I am, I guess" I said. "Will you go food hunting with me" the boy who revealed to be Ike said. "Yeah sure" I said before getting up.

We made our way into the forest before he broke the silence saying " I'm not stupid". I didn't know what to say. "You know if thats why you are worried then you shouldn't be" He said. " I don't think you're stupid, I trust you, ya know" I said before he proceeded to laugh. "His laugh is cute" I blurt out. I felt something on my lips. It was him.

If you like my writing feel free to buy me a coffee

[masaru2042]

Decided to amuse myself.  Again.

Alyx decided to make a little deal with Rivett the Mechanist for some shadow gear.  To help her sneak around Dragon City a little easier.  However, Rivett had other plans for her...which she wasn’t happy about.  A little persuasion should make him see things correctly.  Or perhaps the pointy ends of her horns.

[thetechydragon]

How to be a nuissance in operations 101

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Why privileged young New Yorkers love socialism — and Zohran Mamdani

By: Rob Henderson

Published: Oct 23, 2025

For a downwardly mobile generation of elite grads, the mayoral candidate is the answer to their dreams

A recent survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov reveals that 62 per cent of Americans aged 18–29 say they hold a “favourable view” of socialism, and 40 per cent agree that “violence against the rich can be justified”.

Such findings, along with 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani’s likely victory in New York City’s upcoming mayoral race, has left many asking why socialism is now so popular among young Americans.

There are two reasons for this.

First, it is not that the country’s young people suddenly became socialists. It is that older generations were turned off by socialism for specific historical reasons — they remember the final years of the Cold War, the fall of the Soviet Union, the triumph of capitalism in the 1990s. If that period shaped your political outlook, it is hard to hear the word “socialism” without thinking of failure.

For younger Americans, the story is different. I am 35, one year older than Mamdani, and I can tell you that Millennials and Gen Zers have not really been taught about the failures of socialism.

I will point out, with a bit of hyperbole, that in US high schools we get 155 hours on Hitler, three minutes on Stalin, zero on Mao and zero on Pol Pot.

And socialism is an idea that sounds good on face value. It promises to take from the rich and give to the poor. That means not only “free stuff” for everyone, but also a sense of fairness. And the human desire for fairness runs deep. In fact, the more equal a society becomes, the more acutely aware people become of any remaining inequalities. The interesting question is not why so many support it, but why people reject it.

This is known as the “Tocqueville Paradox,” named after the 19th-century French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville who observed that as societies enjoy more economic and moral progress, people get more frustrated by injustice. This explains how today’s society can be outraged at minor social injustices, despite being surrounded by unprecedented equality.

Today’s young adults live with a level of convenience and abundance unmatched in history. Flights are affordable, meals arrive at the tap of a screen and college graduation rates have skyrocketed. They enjoy endless entertainment for a few dollars a month, cheap and fashionable clothing and handheld devices that deliver limitless information. Yet despite all this progress, homeownership in major cities remains out of reach. That matters.

There is a second reason why the popularity of socialism is growing: downward social mobility among educated young people. The sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, in his 2024 book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, argues that the decline in status among children of privilege is one of the key contributors to radical political sentiment.

To outsiders, this may seem like a trivial problem for the affluent, but the basic promise of socialism carries special weight for those who thought they were born to succeed and now see that success slipping from their grasp.

These young people, born into privilege, came of age after the Great Recession. They saw job security vanish as technology changed the economy. They discovered that the elite jobs they were promised in media, the arts, academia and politics were scarce. Al-Gharbi writes that these experiences fuelled the “Great Awokening”. Disillusioned strivers have turned their anger toward the system that failed them, along with the fortunate few who managed to hold on to their place in society.

Mamdani himself is a member of this downwardly mobile generation of elite aspirants. Raised by a Columbia professor father and acclaimed filmmaker mother in a comfortable faculty apartment on Riverside Drive, he attended the private Bank Street School for Children, which costs up to $66,147 a year. His alma mater is Bowdoin College in Maine, where there are more students from families in the top 1 per cent of the income scale than there are from the entire bottom 60 per cent.

Before being elected to the New York state assembly in 2020, Mamdani only managed to string together three years of employment.

This includes a short-lived rap career and a spell on a film project for his mother, Mira Nair, the director of Monsoon Wedding. He has joked: “You know, nepotism and hard work goes a long way.” Now, through a modern social-media-driven campaign that values style over substance, he has finally found success.

Unlike the working classes they claim to represent, today’s downwardly mobile elites still possess the advantages of their upbringing. They have degrees, contacts and cultural capital. Given these advantages, it is no wonder that their concerns — such as not being able to buy an apartment in Manhattan — which seem trivial to most Americans, dominate the national conversation.

Some of this decline in status is voluntary. As al-Gharbi points out, many young college graduates would rather be freelance writers or part-time professors than manage a restaurant. The dream is freedom and creativity. The reality is disappointment when success and wealth do not follow.

Once upon a time, their education and résumés guaranteed them prestige. Now, many educated young people feel themselves losing ground. Socialism provides a comforting solution. It explains failure as injustice and promises redemption through redistribution.

“Take from the rich and give to the poor” is one of the oldest and most powerful ideas in politics. It is simple, moral and emotionally satisfying. Competing with it has never been easy. And any movement that hopes to win young people must offer a message that sounds just as good.

[ Via: https://archive.today/aOOMs ]

--

The Tocqueville Paradox

Socialism's enduring appeal

By: Rob Henderson

Published: Jun 26, 2025

The luxury belief class has just done the equivalent of plucking a random grad student from an Ivy League Hamas encampment and nominating them for mayor.

Take the New York City subway early in the morning from the outer boroughs and you’ll find it packed with cleaners, nannies, restaurant staff, hotel workers and construction workers coming off the night shift. Some are heading home. Some are just starting their day. It’s “the help” arriving and departing.

Like many other large cities, New York runs on a two-tier system. There’s the professional class clustered in the centre, and there are the people who keep the centre running but can’t afford to live in it.

And so they must endure long rides on public transportation to get to work. They keep their heads down and ignore the trash, the smell, the homeless men passed out across the seats. Working-class commuters see the sprawled-out bodies and try to make it through the ride without being harassed or stepping in puddles of urine.

Many politicians and media outlets act like the public disorder problem is overblown. But fare evasion, open drug use and serious mental illness on the subway are still part of daily life.

It’s in this polarised environment that the mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has gained traction among the city’s richest voters. At only 33, Mamdani is one of the youngest people ever to run for mayor of America’s largest city. Mamdani, a self-proclaimed nepo baby who has spent four years as an Albany assemblyman and is described by The New York Times as a “a TikTok savant”, has virtually no experience for the job.

And yet, what’s really worrying about this candidate is that he’s a poster child for luxury beliefs.

“Luxury beliefs” — a term I coined years ago — means opinions that confer status on the upper class at little to no cost for them, while inflicting serious cost on the lower classes. And the very people who back Mamdani are the ones who most resemble him: affluent, overeducated, and eager to prove their virtue at someone else’s expense.

As is often true of those who embrace luxury beliefs, Mamdani purports to care most about the working class. He says he wants free buses, government-run grocery stores, and a freeze on rent increases.

But his platform would hurt the working classes a lot more than it would help them.

Take, for example, Mamdani’s plan to freeze rents. Without raising rents, many landlords cannot afford to maintain their buildings, which leads to apartments becoming rundown or empty. This is one reason why, ironically, cities with rent control policies have the lowest levels of affordable housing — a policy that hurts working-class families most.

Then there’s Mamdani’s push for free public buses, a plan that would cost $630 million a year. An analysis by the Transportation Research Board found that “some public transit systems that have experimented with or implemented a fare-free policy have been overwhelmed … by the presence of disruptive passengers, including loud teenagers and vagrants.” This, too, would make life harder for low-income New Yorkers who depend on public transit every day.

Mamdani has also been a supporter of the “defund the police” movement. But a recent poll from the Manhattan Institute found that a majority (54 per cent) of New York City voters say they want to see more police officers across New York. Only 17 per cent say they want to see fewer, while 21 per cent say they want to keep the existing number as it is. Consider that compared with Americans who earn more than $50,000 a year, the poorest Americans are three times more likely to be victims of robbery, aggravated assault and sexual assault, according to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics.

It’s not like Mamdani — who grew up amid privilege — would understand any of this. Raised by a Columbia professor father and acclaimed filmmaker mother in a comfortable faculty apartment on Riverside Drive, Mamdani attended the private Bank Street School for Children, which costs up to $66,147 a year. His alma mater is Bowdoin College in Maine, where there are more students from families in the top 1 per cent of the income scale than there are from the entire bottom 60 per cent. And though he boasts he is a product of the New York City public high school system, he in fact attended the Bronx High School of Science — one of the most selective academies in the city, where many come from the elite.

Before being elected to the New York state assembly in 2020, Mamdani only managed to string together three years of employment. This includes a short-lived rap career and a spell on a film project for his mother, Mira Nair, the director of Monsoon Wedding. He has even joked: “You know, nepotism and hard work goes a long way.”

Hollywood actress Emily Ratajkowski endorsed him. One person who pretends to be someone else for a living endorses another person who pretends to be someone else for a living.

If you asked, who should lead this Fortune 500 company, or who should run this school, or who should manage this McDonald’s, the last person on earth you’d ask is a rich Hollywood celebrity. But somehow when it comes to politics, there really are people dumb enough to seek the support of an entertainer with no experience in governance, economics, or reality.

To appear humble and relatable, he wears hoodies and stages photo ops of himself eating fast-casual meals on the subway.

In reality, these are the self-fellating theatrics of the kind I witnessed as a first-generation student at Yale, which helped inform my theory about luxury beliefs.

But while Mamdani pretends to be an ordinary person for political advantage, working-class New Yorkers see right through him. A recent Emerson poll projects him winning 57 per cent of white voters, but only 26 per cent of Black voters and 35 per cent of Hispanic voters. While 57 per cent of college-educated voters support Mamdani, only 23 per cent of those without a college degree do.

The latest results show Mamdani failing to win the support of the very people he claims to champion.

Working class voters know that, with his unrealistic promises, Mamdani sounds like a kid running for student council who promises longer recess and endless free pizza. It sounds great until someone asks who’s paying for the pizza, or discovers that “longer recess” means there’s no time to teach the 3Rs.

Economist Larry Summers recently warned that “New York City is closely watched. If it adopts irresponsible budget policies or the Democratic primary chooses a candidate advocating irresponsible, semi-socialist, government bankrupting policies, the consequences will be grave for New York and progressivism more broadly.”

Mamdani is now the presumptive Democratic nominee.

If he wins the upcoming mayoral election, New Yorkers can expect to be governed by luxury beliefs. The elites will feel absolved, having elected a socialist who makes them feel less guilty about their wealth, while never having to suffer the consequences. And the working class will have to keep on struggling.

Here’s a video I did for The Times, on the luxury beliefs of Mamdani:

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/luxury-beliefs-that-only-the-privileged-can-afford-7f6b8a16

‘Luxury Beliefs’ That Only the Privileged Can Afford

By: Rob Henderson

Published: Feb 9, 2024

In the same way that you don’t notice the specifics of your own culture until you travel elsewhere, you don’t really notice your social class until you enter another one. As an undergraduate at Yale a decade ago, I came to see that my peers had experienced a totally different social reality than me. I had grown up poor, a biracial product of family dysfunction, foster care and military service. Suddenly ensconced in affluence at an elite university—more Yale students come from families in the top 1% of income than from the bottom 60%—I found myself thinking a lot about class divides and social hierarchies.

I’d thought that by entering a place like Yale, we were being given a privilege as well as a duty to improve the lives of those less fortunate than ourselves. Instead, I often found among my fellow students what I call “luxury beliefs”—ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class but often inflict real costs on the lower classes. For example, a classmate told me “monogamy is kind of outdated” and not good for society. I asked her what her background was and if she planned to marry. She said she came from an affluent, stable, two-parent home—just like most of our classmates. She added that, yes, she personally planned to have a monogamous marriage, but quickly insisted that traditional families are old-fashioned and that society should “evolve” beyond them.

My classmate’s promotion of one ideal (“monogamy is outdated”) while living by another (“I plan to get married”) was echoed by other students in different ways. Some would, for instance, tell me about the admiration they had for the military, or how trade schools were just as respectable as college, or how college was not necessary to be successful. But when I asked them if they would encourage their own children to enlist or become a plumber or an electrician rather than apply to college, they would demur or change the subject.

In the past, people displayed their membership in the upper class with their material accouterments. As the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen famously observed in his 1899 book “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” status symbols must be difficult to obtain and costly to purchase. In Veblen’s day, people exhibited their status with delicate and restrictive clothing, such as top hats and evening gowns, or by partaking in time-consuming activities, such as golf or beagling. The value of these goods and activities, argued Veblen, was in the very fact that they were so pricey and wasteful that only the wealthy could afford them.

Today, when luxury goods are more accessible to ordinary people than ever before, the elite need other ways to broadcast their social position. This helps explain why so many are now decoupling class from material goods and attaching it to beliefs.

Take vocabulary. Your typical working-class American could not tell you what “heteronormative” or “cisgender” means. When someone uses the phrase “cultural appropriation,” what they are really saying is, “I was educated at a top college.” Only the affluent can afford to learn strange vocabulary. Ordinary people have real problems to worry about.

When my classmates at Yale talked about abolishing the police or decriminalizing drugs, they seemed unaware of the attending costs because they were largely insulated from them. Reflecting on my own experiences with alcohol, if drugs had been legal and easily accessible when I was 15, you wouldn’t be reading this. My birth mother succumbed to drug addiction soon after I was born. I haven’t seen her since I was a child. All my foster siblings’ parents were addicts or had a mental health condition, often triggered by drug use.

A well-heeled student at an elite university can experiment with cocaine and will probably be just fine. A kid from a dysfunctional home with absentee parents is more likely to ride that first hit of meth to self-destruction. This may explain why a 2019 survey conducted by the Cato Institute found that more than 60% of Americans with at least a bachelor’s degree were in favor of legalizing drugs, while less than half of Americans without a college degree thought it was a good idea. Drugs may be a recreational pastime for the rich, but for the poor they are often a gateway to further pain.

Similarly, a 2020 Yahoo News/YouGov survey found that the richest Americans showed the strongest support for defunding the police, while the poorest Americans reported the lowest support. Consider that compared with Americans who earn more than $50,000 a year, the poorest Americans are three times more likely to be victims of robbery, aggravated assault and sexual assault, according to federal statistics. Yet it’s affluent people who are calling to abolish law enforcement. Perhaps the luxury belief class is simply ignorant of the realities of crime.

Most personal to me is the luxury belief that family is unimportant or that children are equally likely to thrive in all family structures. In 1960, the percentage of American children living with both biological parents was identical for affluent and working-class families—95%. By 2005, 85% of affluent families were still intact, but for working-class families the figure had plummeted to 30%. As the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam stated at a 2017 Senate hearing: “Rich kids and poor kids now grow up in separate Americas.”

In 2006, more than half of American adults without a college degree believed it was “very important” that couples with children should be married, according to Gallup. Fast-forward to 2020, and this number had plummeted to 31%. Among college graduates polled by Gallup, only 25% thought couples should be married before having kids. Their actions, though, contradict their luxury beliefs: Most American college graduates who have children are married. Despite their behavior, affluent people are the most likely to say marriage is unimportant. Their message has spread.

I noticed that many Yale students selectively concealed their opinions or facts about their lives. More than one quietly confessed to me that they were pretending to be poorer than they really were, because they didn’t want the stigma of being thought rich. Why would this stigma exist at a rich university full of rich students? It’s a class thing. For the upper class, indicating your social position by speaking about money is vulgar. Sharing your educational credentials is a classier shorthand, but broadcasting your seemingly altruistic and socially conscientious luxury beliefs is the best of all.

It is harder for wealthy people to claim the mantle of victimhood, which, among the affluent, is often a key ingredient of righteousness. Researchers at Harvard Business School and Northwestern University recently found evidence of a “virtuous victim” effect, in which victims are seen as more moral than nonvictims who behave in exactly the same way: If people think you have suffered, they will be more likely to excuse your behavior. Perhaps this is why prestigious universities encourage students to nurture their grievances. The peculiar effect is that many of the most advantaged people are the most adept at conveying their disadvantages.

Occasionally, I raised these critiques with fellow students or graduates of elite colleges. Sometimes they would reply by asking, “Well, aren’t you part of this group now?” implying that my appraisals were hollow because I moved within the same milieu. But they wouldn’t have listened to me back when I was a lowly enlisted man in the military or when I was washing dishes for minimum wage. If you ridicule the upper class as an outsider, they’ll ignore you. The requirements for the upper class to take you seriously—credentials, wealth, power—are also the grounds to brand you a hypocrite for daring to judge.

But negative social judgments often serve as guardrails to deter detrimental decisions that lead to unhappiness. To avoid misery, I believe we have to admit that certain actions and choices, including single parenthood, substance abuse and crime, are actually in and of themselves undesirable and not simply in need of normalization. Indeed, it’s cruel to validate decisions that inflict harm. And it’s a true luxury to be ignorant of these consequences.

Rob Henderson is the author of “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class,” which will be published on Feb. 20 by Gallery Books.

[ Via: https://archive.today/FAksi ]

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Remember this?

Straight Black Men Are the White People of Black People

It feels counterintuitive to suggest that straight black men as a whole possess any sort of privilege—particularly the type of privilege cre

There's nobody more privileged than the elites who get to declare entire swathes of society to be persona non grata.

You're not supposed to notice that the people who declare themselves the most victimized carry the most clout.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Rage of the Falling Elite

How downward mobility fuels radical politics

By: Rob Henderson

Published: Sep 21, 2025

In America, we love a rags-to-riches tale. Think of Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish immigrant who rose from bobbin boy to steel magnate; Oprah Winfrey, who grew up poor in rural Mississippi; even Elon Musk, the awkward South African transplant who transformed himself into the richest man alive.

These stories are endlessly recycled because they affirm a central American creed: that each generation can surpass the one before.

Today, however, that creed is starting to creak. In 2025, the most combustible force in American society isn’t upward mobility, but its opposite.

It’s easy to laugh at the caricature of the wealthy progressive—taking a knee in Brooklyn for Black Lives Matter, occupying a quad at Harvard for Palestine, or waving a placard outside the headquarters of a Fortune 500 company in the name of climate. Yet the radicalization of seemingly well-off people is one of the defining political developments of the past decade.

Consider how the upper middle classes lionized Luigi Mangione, who is accused of killing the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Or how they propelled the socialist Zohran Mamdani toward becoming the next mayor of New York.

The children of affluence appear to be mobilizing—and boy, do they want you to know about it.

But what is really happening here? Why are people who appear to have “made it” rallying to causes at odds with their own standing?

The answer lies in a less romantic story than Carnegie’s or Oprah’s. It is the story of downward mobility.

* * *

For generations, Americans assumed that their children would live better than they did. Today, that assumption no longer holds. In fact, the higher your parents’ income, the less likely you are to match it.

According to The Pew Charitable Trusts, fewer than four in 10 children born into the richest fifth of households stay there; more than one in 10 fall all the way to the bottom fifth. Similarly, a 2014 study in The Quarterly Journal of Economics found that while 36.5 percent of children born to parents in the top income quintile remain there as adults, 10.9 percent fall to the bottom quintile.

Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, in his 2024 book, We Have Never Been Woke, argues that this downward mobility of children born into wealth is the psychological engine of contemporary politics. This may look like a trivial problem—the petty disappointments of a small slice of America—but the unhappiness of this group, raised to expect the world and denied it, has outsize consequences.

To be clear, this cohort has never faced genuine poverty. Still, they have experienced the sting of loss: They came of age after the Great Recession, watched job security fade as the digital economy made their skills obsolete, and learned that highly coveted jobs in academia, media, and politics were far fewer than promised. These disappointments, al-Gharbi writes, helped power the Great Awokening. Many disillusioned strivers aimed their anger at the system they believed had failed them, and at the lucky few who did manage to retain or enhance their class position.

* * *

Unlike the working classes they so often claim to represent, these downwardly mobile elites remain armed with the tools of their upbringing: degrees, contacts, cultural fluency. They may no longer have the bank accounts their parents did, but they retain platforms in media, academia, and politics through which to broadcast their grievances. Given these advantages—or perhaps the right word is privileges—it should come as no surprise that their concerns, which seem to the average American profoundly niche, have dominated the cultural conversation.

Some of this downward mobility is voluntary. Al-Gharbi notes that many young, college-educated people would prefer “to be a freelance writer or a part-time contingent faculty member rather than work as a manager at a Cheesecake Factory.” The dream is artistic freedom and flexible work. The reality is disillusionment when prosperity does not follow.

Such disappointment isn’t totally new. George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying follows a Cambridge-educated poet who abandons his advertising career, squanders his inheritance, and slides into genteel poverty. HBO’s Girls replayed the same theme for a new generation: Brooklynites with cultural capital but precarious incomes, simultaneously privileged and resentful. The details change, but the shape of the story remains the same—raised in affluence, buoyed by expectation, they discover too late that their choices and the system cannot sustain them.

What is different today, however, is how the disillusion now manifests itself. When reality disappoints those raised in privilege, the gap between expectation and outcome produces rage. Behavioral economics has long recognized this dynamic: Satisfaction depends less on objective conditions than on whether outcomes match or exceed expectations. And today, those expectations are far from being met.

Two years before Girls ended, sociologist Lauren Rivera, in her book Pedigree, found that graduates of lesser-ranked colleges who landed jobs at elite firms were far happier than Harvard and Stanford graduates who landed the same jobs. The reason was simple: Those jobs exceeded the expectations of the former, while for the latter they fell short. The higher the expectation, the sharper the disappointment. The harsh reality, then, is that privilege itself can encourage feelings of decline. When you’re born to—and surrounded by—overachievers, even respectable achievements can feel second-rate.

In a 2018 study, Duke sociologist Jessi Streib explored why many middle-class kids falter in school and work. Her finding was counterintuitive: Entitlement often dragged them down.

It’s not too hard to see why. Success in school requires showing up, meeting deadlines, and tolerating authority. Success at work requires completing projects on time, absorbing criticism, and cooperating with colleagues. Yet the downwardly mobile, Streib found, were often convinced such requirements were beneath them. Their grandiosity and defiance hastened their slide.

* * *

As far back as 1987, a 40-year longitudinal study underscored this point. Even then, middle-class children who were emotionally volatile and prone to rage were more likely to experience downward mobility, and by midlife their occupational status was indistinguishable from their working-class peers.

This helps to explain why modern movements like Occupy Wall Street were filled not with the destitute but with college-educated professionals. These were not people starving; they were aggrieved that they were in the 90th percentile rather than the 99th. Surveys show progressive activists are wealthier, whiter, and more highly educated than the average American. They are nearly three times as likely to hold a postgraduate degree.

The dynamic has a name: elite overproduction. Coined by Peter Turchin, it describes what happens when there are more ambitious strivers than there are high-status positions. For Turchin, moderate competition can sharpen a society, but excessive competition destabilizes it. Those who lose out often become disaffected elites, many of whom share the values of the ruling class but resent being locked out of its highest tiers.

History shows it is these disaffected elites who often lead revolutions. Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, Che Guevara, even America’s founders—all were well-educated and ambitious, close enough to the ruling class to see its flaws, but excluded enough to seethe with resentment. Their criticisms of the ruling class of their time were sharp because they had seen its flaws up close. As Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh has put it, “The person likeliest to tear down a nation’s establishment is a half-member of it.” Widespread public discontent is not enough to trigger a large-scale conflict, civil war, or revolution on its own. For the masses to bring down a system, they need an individual or organization capable of solving the coordination problem of uniting large numbers of people toward a shared goal. Impoverished or “immiserated” masses remain largely inert unless they are organized and led by disaffected elites.

Many assume the central conflict in society is between the haves and the have-nots. In reality, much of the struggle is between the haves and the have-mores—people who are already doing well but want the money, resources, and status of those above them. They often disguise this ambition as concern for the have-nots.

Indeed, ambition compounds the problem. Research consistently shows that people of higher socioeconomic status are more likely to crave wealth, status, and prestige than those with less. Émile Durkheim recognized the dynamic more than a century ago: “The more one has, the more one wants,” he wrote. A 2020 Berkeley-Cornell study confirmed this: The affluent were the most likely to agree with statements like “I want a position of prestige.” Elsewhere, a University of Edinburgh study found that malicious envy—resentment at others’ success—was one of the strongest predictors of support for coercive redistribution.

The impulse, in other words, is not to lift up the poor but to tear down those who are one rung higher.

This pattern is not unique to our era. As the historian Michael Knox Beran has observed, in the early 20th century women from America’s wealthiest families were taught that their privilege was undeserved. Many responded with self-denial, repentance, and even sympathy for the Soviet Union. Eleanor Roosevelt—a New York aristocrat and future First Lady—spoke warmly of communism in 1939, calling Soviet innovations “a positive force in world affairs.” The Great Depression further radicalized a generation of Ivy League idealists, many of whom flirted with socialism and communism as they streamed into Washington. Part of the appeal was guilt, but part was also anxiety: They sensed their grip on cultural primacy weakening.

The postwar rise of the SAT accelerated this erosion, creating a more meritocratic system but also producing a more competitive and status-anxious elite. The WASP monopoly began to crack, and with it came a new, more insecure ruling class.

Today’s wealthy activists are the meritocratic descendants of this ruling class—and now, they face their own reckoning. Once upon a time, their education and résumés guaranteed them status. Now, as the economy stratifies, many feel themselves slipping. And once again, socialism—or its progressive equivalents—offers a way to explain the loss and to seek revenge on those who have outpaced them.

How this pent-up rage erupts is still unclear, but it’s certainly not going to be pretty. The children of privilege may not starve. But their disappointment—sharpened by ambition, magnified by envy, and amplified through elite networks—has the power to unsettle politics in ways that hardship alone rarely does.

The result, as we’re discovering, is a cruel paradox. While the American dream of upward mobility built this nation’s mythology, the reality of downward mobility may be what destabilizes it.