The Patriot Post® · DSA Members Are Overeducated, Economically Struggling

The Democratic Socialists of America constantly claim to represent the working class, yet its movement is far less driven by working-class ambition and more motivated by professional-class grievance. Its loudest members are rarely factory workers, mechanics, farmers, or small-business owners. They are often overeducated and underemployed college grads, convinced that America has denied them the status, income, and influence that their degree was supposed to guarantee.

The bitterness from that lack of immediate success fuels the entire movement. The system denied them what they were owed, so they want to tear it down and make everyone else suffer, while calling themselves empathetic and just.

That mindset helps explain the major divide in American politics. Conservatives tend to focus on what America makes possible for people of all backgrounds: better jobs, business ownership, homeownership, strong families, upward mobility, and the freedom to create a better life. DSA types focus solely on themselves, arguing limits on government handouts prove the system is unjust and oppressive.

One side asks how we can build on what America provides; the other organizes itself around discontent and therefore deems the system evil.

Aside from the short-sighted and entitled perspective on life, the numbers also show exactly why the DSA’s sweet spot isn’t the traditional working class but the overeducated and downwardly mobile.

Statistician Nate Silver recently examined more than 400,000 responses collected by the Cooperative Election Study between 2016 and 2024. He found that America’s most reliably Democrat-supporting group consists of people with postgraduate degrees who earn between $30,000 and $60,000 a year. This group is also especially likely to describe itself as “very liberal.” (Note: There’s nothing liberal about the modern Left.)

This group is an easy target for a modern socialist movement. After years of being told that a degree guarantees success, many graduate with debt and disappointing prospects. “They’re gloomy about their own financial prospects, and feel aggrieved about the state of the country,” Silver says. “Their class status is ambiguous: privileged in some senses, but they’re part of the ‘have-nots’ in other meaningful ways.”

The DSA’s own numbers reinforce his point. According to its 2021 member survey, more than 80% of members age 25 and older had at least a bachelor’s degree. Meanwhile, 45% reported household incomes below $60,000. Common occupations included teaching, social or nonprofit work, academia, technology, healthcare, and government. Only a small percentage held traditional blue-collar, retail, or service-industry jobs.

The organization is young, urban, secular, and overwhelmingly white — with almost no ties to Christianity or organized religion; roughly 60% identifying as atheist or agnostic.

Since 85% listed white as at least one of their racial identities, it hardly represents the diversity and inclusion standards the Left relentlessly demands from everyone else.

It sounds more like a white left-wing neighborhood surrounding an expensive university.

The problem isn’t that educated people can’t care about workers, nor that a degree guarantees wealth or privilege. Plenty of teachers, nurses, and social workers struggle with rising costs and feel connected to the DSA message. The problem is that the DSA pretends this small professional class represents every American worker.

That requires stretching the definition of “working class” until it becomes almost meaningless. Under the traditional Marxist definition used by many socialists, anyone who must sell his labor to survive is a worker. That allows a lawyer, professor, journalist, or nonprofit executive to place himself in the same class as a warehouse employee earning $17 an hour. It ignores differences in income, job security, social connections, family wealth, professional status, and future earning potential.

Conveniently, this definition also allows relatively privileged activists to claim the moral authority of people whose lives they barely understand and with whom they actively choose not to engage.

The Daily Wire’s Chloe Trapanotto describes this group as “overeducated,” “undercapitalized,” and “insufferably self-righteous.” In short, she characterizes the group as having impressive credentials on paper but little accumulated wealth, almost no real-world experience, and an unspoken goal of keeping it that way.

“Turns out spending 785 years in school just to crawl out of the halls of the Intifada Ivies with a master’s in African Art won’t make you boatloads of money,” Trapanotto quips sarcastically. “It will, however, make you an aggrieved, uptight, miserable Marxist, whose life’s purpose isn’t reunion with the Lord our Savior, but a tireless personal crusade against procreation, on account of climate change.”

Thanks to our “elite overproduction problem,” they sold the lie that academic achievement would guarantee them a comfortable, influential life. When reality failed to deliver, many concluded that capitalism — not their degree choices, debt, location, or expectations — must be the problem. Turning to socialism, they find an explanation for their frustrations and position themselves as society’s enlightened saviors.

That helps explain why the DSA’s version of working-class politics is blatantly disconnected from what ordinary workers actually request. When true working-class citizens discuss solutions, they focus on plentiful jobs, affordable energy, lower taxes, safer neighborhoods, less regulation, homeownership, and an economy where wages can rise.

The DSA, however, offers a package designed by academic activists: government-run healthcare, blanket student-debt cancellation, rent controls, massive public programs, aggressive redistribution, and government control over more of the economy.

Some of those policies may benefit lower-income families, but the overwhelming priorities benefit college-educated progressives. Canceling graduate-school debt, for example, might aid people with substantial earning potential but offers nothing to the mechanic who avoided college, paid for vocational training, or already repaid his loans.

The broader political realignment makes the contrast even harder to ignore. The Pew Research Center found that Democrats held a 13-point advantage among voters with bachelor’s degrees, while Republicans led by six points among voters without them. That academic split is relatively new and has widened dramatically over the past two decades.

The DSA constantly champions the “underdog” to make its message more appealing. But its core constituency looks very different: elites who believe their degrees qualify them to reorganize society for everyone they consider beneath them — while the people they claim to be fighting for want nothing to do with them.

Furthermore, they don’t define supporting workers as helping people keep more of their paychecks, build businesses, buy homes, or find better jobs. When they talk about helping the working class, they mean giving those who spent more time in an overpriced classroom more authority to make decisions for them.

That isn’t working-class representation. It is professional-class paternalism dressed in a union T-shirt. The DSA claims to fight for workers while dismissing what workers actually value: building a better life without government interference. That contradiction shows why its message often fails with the very people it claims to represent.

Working-class Americans don’t want to be managed by credentialed activists who assume they know better; they want the freedom and opportunity to succeed on their own terms.