By: Gerard Baker – wsj.com – August 11 2025

It’s the overeducated elites, not laborers or the masses, who are getting behind socialism today.

If AI is the transformational force that everyone thinks it is, the political consequences will be as profound. Mr. Mamdani’s success in New York’s Democratic mayoral primary offers a glimpse of one way in which that transformation may be unfolding. The socialism he has been selling to younger voters may reflect not only the usual radical idealism of the young but also the disruptive economic consequences of technological change.

The old joke was that if you weren’t a socialist when you were 20, you didn’t have a heart, and if you were still a socialist when you were 40, you didn’t have a brain. The facts of life are conservative, Margaret Thatcher declared. The only certain cure for the mind virus of socialism in young people was to wait a few years until it went away.

The temptation of socialism for callow youth has been strengthened in recent years by a couple of factors. First, the drifting into distant memory of the Cold War. Growing up in Britain in the 1970s and ’80s, I can attest that the appeal of socialism was always tempered by the reality that the place that most proudly called itself socialist was a prison colony for very poorly remunerated serfs. The Soviet Union and its satellites were poor advertisements for the ideology their names proclaimed.

Today, socialism doesn’t immediately conjure gulags, though it should. Capitalism doesn’t immediately conjure economic and social nirvana either. When I was in my 20s the faces of socialism were those of semi-embalmed members of the Politburo and crusty old trade-union leaders with bad breath. In America today the leading advocates for socialism, Mr. Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are 30-somethings from New York whom you might not mind matching with on a dating site.

Even communist China is complicated, with a curious combination of socialist goals and—at least until recently—sustained economic dynamism. As you survey the global political landscape, can you be certain that Western capitalism is going to repeat in this century its ideological victory of the last one?

The second factor has been the mainstreaming of far-left ideology in education. We laughed at “Berserkeley” in the 1970s, but the joke is on us now. Most campuses today make that model of madness look like a Trappist monastery. Twenty-two-year-olds are emerging from these institutions with a warped view of the world, their minds filled with silly yet corrosive ideas about decolonization, constructivism, intersectionality and the white man’s guilt.

But the big difference now is this: In the past we could rely on the relentless economic logic of capitalism to fix things. Especially for these overeducated naïfs, the pursuit of a job, a career and the steady accumulation of income, wealth and a stake in the country would dim the lure of socialism. How many kids who had Che Guevara T-shirts and busts of Karl Marx are now thriving in law and financial firms?

But what if that is no longer the future that awaits these capitalists in chrysalis?

The evidence is mounting that AI will destroy white-collar jobs that demand college degrees at a faster rate than other kinds of jobs. A study published by Microsoft last month found that among the 40 jobs most at risk are personal financial analysts, management analysts and public-relations specialists.

The jobs that are most likely to survive AI are the ones that need only vocational or on-the-job-training, such as nursing assistants, painters, plumbers and tire changers.

All that expensive education, and no prospects at the end of it! It’s enough to make Marxism-Leninism start to make sense. Polling indicates a lot of these people are voting for Mr. Mamdani in November.

It seems likely to cement the great political inversion of the past 50 years—in which the educated elites have moved left and the people without a college degree have embraced the Republican Party. And it presages a new social order that will underlie that political divide: a system that features at opposite ends what the French economist Thomas Piketty has called the “Brahmin Left” and the “Merchant Right.”

You may see all this as ironic, or some kind of karma: that the capitalism so many young privileged people have derided even as they benefited from it disproportionately might really begin to disadvantage them.

But what are they going to be like when they actually have something to complain about?

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Source: Mamdani May Herald a New Kind of Class Struggle – WSJ