Privilege Populism
How the radicalized children of the credentialed class overtook the base of the American left, and why they never win the class war.
Weeks ago, the new mayor of New York City picked a fight with the founder of Citadel, and lost it in public.
Zohran Mamdani, four months into running the largest city in the country, posted a video attacking Ken Griffin personally. The pretext was Mamdani’s proposed $500 million tax on pied-à-terre apartments, the kind of policy proposal that plays well on Bluesky but collapses upon contact with basic arithmetic.
Nevertheless, Mamdani was – visibly – gleeful that he had found an easy villain to slay for an audience of admirers perennially bound to the political identity assigned to them during undergrad.
Griffin responded with neither anger nor bluster. The billionaire did not humor the socialist mayor with a thundering moral or philosophical defense of capitalism and free markets, nor did he wax historical about the public necessity of private wealth generation.
Instead, feet firmly on the ground, Griffin simply pointed at his construction site in Miami (a tower he is building, with his own capital, in a city that wants him there) and suggested:
Then he said something else that every big blue-city mayor in America heard (and that the smart ones quietly absorbed). What is happening in New York, Griffin said, is “triggering the trauma I went through in Chicago.”
The exchange went viral. Most people commenting on social media thought it was about New York, its novice mayor, a mobile billionaire, and a contested tax proposal and a building.
Alas, it wasn’t. It was about a reconfiguration of the American left that has been underway for a decade, that almost no one is naming correctly, and that has produced a new political type we do not yet have a vocabulary for.
We need a term here. Allow me to give you one.
The Rise of the Non-Working Class
Mamdani is not a have-not.
He is a Bowdoin graduate, his father a tenured professor at Columbia, and his mother an internationally celebrated filmmaker. He was raised inside the credentialed-creative pipeline that, four years ago, he leveraged into winning a New York State Assembly seat at age 29 and that has now propelled him into Gracie Mansion at age 34.
The man who proposes to extract $500 million from the owners of second homes is the son of not one, but two members of the glittering cultural elite.
This is a description, not a criticism.
Mamdani’s base is not the working class. His base is the college-educated children of affluence who did not inherit what they thought was their birthright. This is a demographic cohort that was promised a particular kind of life by their degrees and is now furious that it never arrived. This fury informs their politics. They did everything the elite credentialing factory told them to do and discovered the credential was not, in fact, a key to the status and success to which they believed themselves entitled.
Their anger is real, and they have made a decision about whom to be angry at. This decision – a catastrophically wrong one – is the entire story.
They are not angry at the universities that took their money or the professors who baited their righteous indignation with seductive fictions about the world and this country, or the credentialing economy that cranked out aspiring elites several orders of magnitude above the economy’s actual demand for them. In their frustration, they have decided that the people standing between them and the life they were promised are not the institutions that failed them but a hedge fund manager in Miami.
This is Privilege Populism.
Privilege Populism entails the aesthetics of class struggle, performed by people whose parents or grandparents already triumphed in that fight. This new generation appropriates the symbols of the fight and deploys them against those whose success has been greater and more enduring.
It is, as some have observed, war between the haves and the have-mores.
The have-nots are absent from this class war because they lack both access to it and interest in it. Radicalized haves instead agitate to advance their own interests while wearing the interests of the have-nots as a costume. The Privilege Populists are invariably blind to this, which is one reason they are unable to connect the policies they champion to the societal failures that emerge around them as a result.
Dialectics and Dunces
Why does the resentment get pointed at the hedge fund manager and not at the people who actually broke the promise?
The answer is not that the credentialed downwardly mobile are stupid. They are not. Many of them are, by the metrics the credentialing system uses, exceptionally bright. The answer is that the misdirection is built into the worldview the credentialing system installed in them.
Consider what would have to be true for the anger to land where it actually belongs.
A graduate who borrowed $180,000 to attend a private liberal arts college, who emerged with a degree in a field the labor market does not particularly want, and who is now 31, sharing a Brooklyn apartment with one or more roommates, would have to conclude that the institution they attended sold them something fantastical. They would have to conclude that the professors and mentors who awakened their political consciousness profit from the system to which they inflame “resistance.” They would have to conclude that the entire framework they were taught for understanding power (class, race, capital, oppression, etc.) is the framework that bolsters them.
All this seems unthinkable, and the credentialing system has evolved over the past half-century to make such conclusions seem unthinkable.
So, filled with all this thwarted entitlement, the anger gets redirected. Outward, upward, sideways, almost anywhere except at the institutions that charged them a premium for it.
The hedge fund manager is a convenient target. He is visible, wealthy, unsympathetic, and crucially, ideologically far estranged from what’s found in student group manifestos. He exists beyond the walls of the credentialing economy. He probably hasn’t read Foucault or Fanon. And worse, he succeeded despite his shortcomings. The grave injustice of his success becomes the problem to oppose.
This logic is also why Privilege Populism cannot connect its policies to the outcomes those policies produce. If you cannot see your own institutions as a plausible cause of your misfortunes, you also cannot see them as a possible cause of anyone else’s. When the rent goes up, it is the landlord’s fault, not the zoning regime designed by the credentialed class you trust. When the productive class leaves, it is their selfishness, not Privilege Populism’s malevolence.
This is why Griffin did not get into a war of words with Mamdani. He simply pointed at a building in a city that wanted him there, and let that towering physical reality do the rest of the work.
The Real Race to the Bottom
I have watched this play out before.
For twenty years, I worked in the public policy space in Illinois. I saw Chicago’s productive class quietly relocate while its progressive political class directed increasingly hysterical acts of grievance towards those who stayed. I saw the tax base hollow out one Citadel, one Caterpillar, one Boeing headquarters at a time. I saw many of the people who stayed look at the resulting decline around them and conclude, somehow, that the answer was to vote even further to the left. We must have more socialism, they declared. The alternative, as ever, was unthinkable.
Ken Griffin left Chicago in 2022. He took Citadel with him. He was understandably unwilling to be the whipping boy of elites who never built anything, never would, took him for granted, and resented him for it.
What is happening in New York is the same, but with younger actors and more social media clout. The productive class is already running the numbers. Some have already moved, while others will wait it out a little bit, hoping the city corrects. It will not correct soon, because the people who run it cannot grasp the connection between cause and effect.
They may never grasp that connection.
The audience for the politics of Privilege Populism is large, well-credentialed, loud, and engaged. The audience for the building is much smaller, quieter, and busier. They’re also more mobile.
Privilege Populism keeps winning the room, but it loses the city.
This is so spot on!