Is it better to have good politics, or bad politics? Good politics. And do we just want ourselves to have good politics, or do we want everyone to share those good politics? We want everyone to have them. Yes. So if someone is insulting anyone for having good politics, that is very stupid.
What I am talking about specifically is the mini-news cycle that we are in focused on the question of whether or not certain leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America are actually, you know, rich kids. Before we discuss this, it must be said that this is, above all, a lesson in effective partisan media. The New York Post, a right wing rag, has been pumping out stories about how Gustavo Cordillo, the 38 year-old co-chair of the NYC DSA, went to Yale and lives in a $1.5 million Brooklyn house owned by his dad, and how that is so very ridiculous because he is “peddling his anti-capitalist lefty agenda while enjoying the life in the two-story, nearly 2,000-square-foot row home on a gentrifying tree-lined block in Bed-Stuy.”
The Post, a truly immoral scumbag tabloid that is simultaneously the most skilled tabloid journalism publication in America in a way that we can all learn from, ran the story, and then it was picked up over the next few days by other right wing outlets making essentially the same “hey this left winger is a rich kid” joke, and then yesterday the story was picked up by the New York Times, which had profiled Cordillo earlier, and once that happened it instantly became acceptable fodder for non-right-wing reporters and pundits. This is a textbook case of how to shepherd a shallow partisan smear into the mainstream news cycle. You may find it distasteful, but you should admire its efficacy. Any competent cutthroat political communicator must be able to replicate this process on demand.
(When I worked at Gawker, we frequently played a similar but less political role in this general process, by writing about stories that the Times was interested in but considered disreputable, which would then allow them to write follow-ups framed as “People are talking about this thing,” which provides them an entry point to feed their readers salacious news while still maintaining an analytical, hands-off pose. Once you understand this dynamic you will see it all the time.)
This rudimentary form of character assassination will cause lefties to complain that it is biased and unfair and whatnot, which is true but beside the point. This is a sign that DSA is gaining actual power. People and institutions that gain actual power will draw the scrutiny of the press. This may manifest itself unfairly in certain instances (especially if the New York Post is involved) but in general it is healthy. The more powerful people get—whether by getting rich, gaining political power, or otherwise—the more we want the press paying attention to them. DSA should take these newfound, accelerating attacks as a compliment. They are real live players now. And knowing that this is the case, they need to get a clear hold in their own minds of what they actually believe, and how to communicate it.
What, after all, are attacks like the ones against Gustavo Cordillo really saying? They are first of all charges of hypocrisy, which is the sin that the public hates above all in its political figures. People who are bastards but who embrace the fact that they are bastards tend to insulate themselves from these attacks. Republicans, for example. Their platform is “we are rich and greedy and that is good and we will kill anyone who stands in our way.” You may find this unethical but it is very hard to find a handhold to charge anyone with being a hypocrite when they are espousing that line. They’re completely up front about being awful! Religious Republicans, Christian preachers who cheat on their wives and anti-homosexual preachers who are secretly gay, are the only slice of the party really vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy, because they are the only ones pretending to be defending ideals higher than “increase corporate profits.”
In what sense is Cordillo presumed to be a hypocrite? The accusation, when you get right down to it, is that he is rich but he is advocating political positions that are anti-rich. The first thing to notice about this is: It is not actually hypocritical. A hypocrite would be a rich person saying, for example, “rich people should pay higher taxes, except for me.” A rich person saying “rich people should pay higher taxes, including me” is just someone with good politics. Their politics are even more praiseworthy because they involve self-sacrifice in the name of an ideal. Genuine hypocrisy—not that you expect the New York Post to explore this sort of thing—is a rich person saying “I care about people who are less fortunate than me” while embracing policies that benefit themselves and harm the public programs that help needy people. Republicans, in other words.
The deeper charge against Cordillo, the one that pushes the emotional buttons, is that he is a class traitor. Nothing provokes rage among members of a class more than a class traitor. For people with money, the existence of one of their economic peers who calls for, say, higher taxes on the rich is not just a political disagreement—it is an implicit insult to all of the rich people who did not do that, because it goes to show that they could have done something more selfless if they wanted to. Class traitors of this type are living proof of everyone else’s human flaws. We are all susceptible to this. When the philosopher Peter Singer argues that Americans should be donating large portions of their earnings to the neediest people in the world, whose very lives can be saved by these donations, and that purchasing frivolous items is the moral equivalent of taking money away from the starving, people become enraged, because it implies that they are bad for not doing more. It is experienced as an assault on our own image of ourselves as good people. The gleeful piling-on that you see whenever someone like Cordillo can be framed as a hypocrite is just the manifestation of everyone’s collective relief that they can be absolved for their own sins.
Nobody chooses how they are born. Some people are born rich and some are born poor. If you are born rich, with much greater wealth than you need for yourself, you are, I think, morally obligated to give away a lot of that wealth. This is a fairly common and uncontroversial moral intuition. It is what rich people who find their way into left wing politics have recognized. Being born wealthy is neither a sign of worth nor a reason for guilt. It is just blind luck. What we are responsible for is what we can control. When rich kids who may have lived privileged lives embrace left wing politics, that is good. That means that they have the moral fiber to recognize that they have been financially blessed by an unfair system, and that they should do their part to try to make the system more fair. It is easier for people whose parents are rich to understand and be honest about this than it is for people who get rich themselves. The heirs can see clearly that their wealth is a matter of luck, while those who gained great wealth through business or otherwise are sorely tempted, by human nature, to believe that they deserve what they have, while ignoring the many structural advantages they were given that allowed them to be in a position to get that wealth. This is unremarkable. Self-justification is one of the strongest forces on earth. But it goes to show why there are rich kids who are members of DSA, but there are not too many Goldman Sachs executives who are.
Every time a right winger points and laughs at a socialist who was born rich, it should be understood as a desperate attempt to justify their own moral failure to themselves. If you grew up rich and are now a leftist and someone points that out, the proper response is: “Yes I am. Why aren’t you?” I do not believe that there is any plank in the DSA platform that says that nobody is allowed to live in a brownstone that their dad bought. What they say instead is: If your dad has enough money to buy a brownstone, he should be paying higher taxes so that we can build more affordable housing for people who can’t afford brownstones. A rich kid who nods his head and agrees with that assertion and works to raise taxes on himself in the name of social justice is not guilty of hypocrisy at all. He’s exhibiting a commitment to basic fairness. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. Every rich person is morally obligated to do this. It’s the ones who aren’t class traitors that we need to worry about.
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Related reading: Young Morality and Old Morality; New York Socialist City; Embrace Left Wing Machine Politics.
Back in February, I wrote about the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, which was living in fear of an imminent invasion by ICE. That invasion is here. Members of that community are being arrested and deported. The Haitian Support Center is a respected organization in Springfield that is a fine place to donate if you want to help the people in that town try to continue their American dreams.
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Also: Owning a $1.5m house in Brooklyn doesn't make you rich. Pretty much every building in Brooklyn costs at least that much. And you could have bought nearly any brownstone in Bed-Stuy 30 years ago for less than $100k.
At the bottom of the accusation is the belief that ordinary people don't deserve to own things.
North Alabama DSA Co-Chair here, not a rich kid. Dad's a machinist, mom just has a HS diploma, and I had to work 2 jobs to make it through college even with a "full ride" from grades and my ACT score - got a Chemical Engineering degree ultimately and with a GPA that I am not proud of - 3.23 because of those jobs. That's been the bulk of my experience with most of my comrades here too, similar stories all. The news stories are definitely bad faith, but they are also total fucking horseshit.