The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has a class problem that its own rhetoric is designed to obscure. Its rising stars – Zohran Mamdani, son of a Columbia professor and an acclaimed filmmaker; the Ivy-credentialed activists staffing progressive nonprofits; the heirs animating the movement's core – reveal a pattern the movement cannot honestly explain. The face of American socialism is increasingly young, college-credentialed, and conspicuously well-bred. This is not coincidence. It is structure.

The pattern is older than the DSA. Engels co-authored the "Communist Manifesto" while running his father's textile mill. Marx married into Prussian nobility and lived on Engels's industrial fortune. Lenin's father held hereditary status under the tsar. Castro was the son of one of Cuba's largest landowners. The proletariat has rarely led its own revolutions; the bourgeoisie's disaffected sons have. The pattern is not accidental.

What socialism reliably produces is not equality but a closed caste. The Soviet nomenklatura had its sealed stores, hospitals, and dachas. The Chinese Communist Party's "princelings" – Xi Jinping among them – inherited position as straightforwardly as any Habsburg.........

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