Conservative columnist Christopher Chantrill has a provocative question for voters watching the rise of young democratic socialist activists: are we witnessing a 2026 replay of 1840s Berlin, where wealthy, university-educated sons — and now daughters — flirted with radical ideology while living on their parents’ dime?
Writing for American Thinker, Chantrill points to figures like New York State Assembly member Zohran Mamdani, the son of a college professor and a filmmaker, and Katie Wilson, described as the child of two evolutionary biologists, as examples of a pattern he sees among young DSA-aligned politicians and organizers. His term for them: “DSA kiddies,” a phrase loaded with the implication that these are privileged amateurs playing at revolution.
The historical parallel Chantrill draws is direct. Karl Marx, he notes, was the son of Trier’s leading lawyer, living on an allowance from his father while carousing in Berlin with his “Brudi” (bros) and spouting Romantic nonsense. When his father died and his mother cut him off, Friedrich Engels — himself a wealthy child — stepped in to fund the work. The difference, Chantrill concedes, is that Marx and his cohort had some excuse: the world economy was in a tailspin after Andrew Jackson closed the Second Bank of the United States, textile workers in Manchester were starving, and potato famines were devastating Ireland and Germany.
Today’s DSA activists, by contrast, are operating with the benefit of 180 years of economic history — and Chantrill argues they’re ignoring all of it. He cites the dramatic rise in real per-capita GDP in the United States, up roughly 40 times since 1800, as evidence that the economic miracle Adam Smith predicted in 1776 actually happened. Instead of acknowledging that history, he says, the “rich-kids of the professors” are offering a solution set straight out of a freshman seminar: spend millions on government grocery stores, freeze rents, raise taxes, and “wave the magic wand of ‘affordability.'”
Chantrill’s broader argument is that this is neither tragedy nor farce, but something more insidious. He points to five technological revolutions that each produced huge increases in per-capita income, the twin disasters of 20th-century communist revolutions, and a century of welfare-state expansion that has burdened taxpayers while delivering mixed results. “If you really think that socialism, democratic or otherwise, is going to fight injustice or create ‘affordability,'” he writes, “you are a science denier, and a history denier, and I know not what.”
The piece is as much a commentary on class structure in American politics as it is on socialist ideology. Chantrill argues that the political space is full of far-left rhetoric because it “gets votes, it gets money, it gets influence, and it gets power” — for the powerful and their children, not for ordinary voters. He contrasts what he calls a shallow “left populism” — driven by privileged graduates of elite institutions — with a “right populism” that he sees as far wider and deeper.
To explain that right-wing populism, Chantrill offers a historical thread: Nixon’s Silent Majority, Reagan’s Reagan Democrats, the Obama-era Tea Party, and Trump’s MAGA movement are, in his view, all eruptions of the same ordinary middle class that has felt disrespected by the educated ruling class for a century. It’s a framing that will be familiar to readers of conservative populist commentary, and Chantrill wears it proudly.
The personal anecdote that grounds much of this piece is telling. Chantrill describes attending the funeral of an academic who earned his psychology professorship in the 1960s, a generation for which academic life was “pretty sweet” — full of grants and opportunities for oneself and one’s friends. But for the children and grandchildren of that generation, the picture is less rosy, and that, he argues, is the breeding ground for the resentment fueling right-populist revolts.
Whether readers find the comparison apt or strained, Chantrill’s underlying challenge is one that will likely resonate beyond the opinion pages: what do you do when the people advocating for radical economic change are themselves products of the most privileged, credential-rich class in history? It’s a question that has been asked of socialist movements for nearly two centuries, and Chantrill suggests the answer, this time, may be farce.
For those interested in the data behind his claims, Chantrill points readers to his own “Great Enrichment” page at usgovernmentspending.com, where he charts the dramatic growth in U.S. per-capita GDP over the last two centuries. It’s a reminder that the debate over socialism’s viability isn’t just philosophical — it’s empirical, at least in his telling.
At the very least, Chantrill’s piece invites a question worth considering: if history does repeat itself, first as tragedy, then as farce — which act are we watching now?
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/08/the-fake-populist-spawn-of-the-educated-and-the-privileged/