Re: From The New Yorker: Subaru Socialists and the Great Disappointed

Thanks to Bobby for the link and to Charles for getting the text past the paywall.
The piece is worth reading. The decisive move happens in a single paragraph. Everything else follows from it.
Kang opens by citing Scheiber's "Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class." He summarizes its finding accurately: the credential no longer buys exit from the wage relation, and the bridge job is the destination. This is a materialist claim. Scheiber's own subtitle draws the materialist conclusion: these people are working class.
A few paragraphs later, Kang abandons this. He decides Harris was right to call them "middle class" and claims the people themselves are mistaken about their position. Their refusal of the label is, he says, "largely cultural." But the criterion has changed. Class is no longer about whether you must sell your labor time to live. It is now household income, credentials, and taste. Once that swap is made, a barista with a master's degree and a professor with a mortgage are treated as the same, and the category explains nothing.
Everything that follows is stratification analysis presented as class analysis. The naming gives it away. "Subaru Socialist" locates politics in a consumption signature: the car, the coffee shop, and the Stereolab on the speakers. Consumption is where class appears as a difference in taste, not where it is actually constituted. In two thousand words about people employed by Starbucks and Amazon, the wage relation never appears. There is no workplace, no union, no employer with a name.
Two further problems:
The Silver/CES data does not support the claims made. That DSA's membership skews credentialed tells us only about who selects into voluntary organizations in this country. The same is true for the Federalist Society and the garden club. Membership composition is not the class base of politics. Kang moves from one to the other without noticing. He treats the typical DSA member as identical to the electorate that produced the recent wins. The precinct data does not support this.
Gaza is treated as a character test and a matter of generational moralizing: hard-line, litmus, and purity. This turns a programmatic question about US military aid to a state conducting a genocide into a psychological trait of the young. A position is not a temperament. This is the depoliticizing move. It serves the *New Yorker*'s readership, which needs these voters to be seen as disappointed consumers, not workers with a demand.
The only useful admission comes at the end. Kang says the content of the policy matters less than the promise of upheaval. He presents this as a diagnosis of mood. In fact, it is a question about form: what organizational vehicle can carry that promise without dissolving it? He does not ask this. Instead, he closes with a rhetorical question. The party remakes itself in Mamdani's image. Kang treats this as inevitable. For us, it is the central problem. The article's ideological function is to make absorption look inevitable by never allowing independent organization to appear as a possibility.
Tony
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Tony


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