Every morning, I ride the Metro-North into Grand Central station, walk through the main concourse, and see the constellations painted on the ceiling. It is the only place in New York City where you can see the stars. You can’t wish on them; you can’t follow them north or augur the future in their twinkling.
There is no future in this city. You will own nothing, and you will not be happy. In New York, you are on your own, and not even the heavens can help you. As you come and go to work, the stars will remain in the same place, and so will you—or at least you hope.
Because New York is a city for people who have everything and people who have nothing. For now, you are neither, but the voice in your head says, *Not for long*, and repeats it every day, because you know things can always get worse—there is no middle without a bottom.
One day the constellations on the ceiling will come crashing down with the plaster, and so will you, another middle-class star cast out of heaven. You are consumed by an angry terror. There is nothing more radicalizing than a fear of falling.
At least, I suspect, for the people I walked among at a Zohran Mamdani watch party last Tuesday. Held at an upscale waterfront bar in upper Manhattan, the event was hosted by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which was handing out a postcard-sized pamphlet titled “TRANS RIGHTS CLASS FIGHT,” detailing the efforts of the DSA to pressure hospitals to facilitate gender transitions for children, among other initiatives.
I have read the pamphlet several times and am still not sure how “trans rights = class fight.” But I am sure which class I found myself in that night, as Andrew Cuomo conceded, the young, fashionably dressed crowd cheered for their mayoral candidate, and the news reported that Mamdani had performed worst among the very poor and very rich but won voters making between $75,000 and $150,000 per year.
New York is a city for people who have everything and people who have nothing. I was among the young professional managerial class.
When you hear about the laptop class—the people with AirPods, college degrees, and “good” jobs that require them to have three roommates in their thirties—this is them. They’re the most privileged class of workers ever produced by capitalism, and they want to end it. Voting for Mamdani won’t do that, but it at least shows you’re trying.
They didn’t always.
In her 1989 book *Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class*, the late sociologist Barbara Ehrenreich—a professional-class person and longtime member of the DSA herself—followed the professional managerial class over the course of the latter half of the 20th century, documenting its metamorphosis from liberal social reformers to Reaganite Yuppies.
“If this is an elite, then,” Ehrenreich concluded, “it is an insecure and deeply anxious one.”
According to Ehrenreich, by the 1970s, this group was already careening towards conservatism after becoming disillusioned with the African American poor due to rising crime rates, and angry at the left’s traditional base—the unionized, industrial white working class—for its perceived social conservatism amid the counterculture.
But when the economic crisis of the ’70s hit, it was the insecurity of their class position that sealed the deal.
“They retreated into their careers and private lives, secure in the belief that the ‘have-nots’ were not worth helping anyway,” Ehrenreich writes.
By the time her book was published, this group had helped deliver Ronald Reagan the White House, cemented the conservative revolution, and embraced the decadence of the ’80s with a fervor.
Ehrenreich’s history ends here, so I’ll write the rest.
Somewhat disturbed by the GOP’s alliance with the Christian right, the worldly and secular professionals spent the next several decades focusing almost solely on social issues, turning the Democratic Party—from Bill Clinton forward—into a socially progressive party that embraced the so-called “neoliberal” consensus on economic issues: deregulation, free trade, open markets, and borders.
It made sense.
The transition from a manufacturing economy to a service-based one might have killed blue-collar factory jobs, but it created professional managerial class careers in finance, education, and tech, among other fields.
That is, until it didn’t.
Job prospects for the professional managerial class began to sour in the wake of the Great Recession, and we entered into an era defined by what the political scientist Peter Turchin calls elite overproduction—or the “discomfiting hypothesis that societies go haywire when the number of wannabe elites outstrips the number of truly elite jobs,” as Reihan Salam pointed out recently.
Even those lucky enough to get the elite jobs still find themselves in a precarious position.
If the Great Recession, COVID-19, and the specter of an artificial intelligence-assisted “white collar bloodbath” have taught the professional class anything, it is that their credentials cannot save them.
This insecurity, compounded by the outrageous cost of living in many large cities, has pushed the PMC’s anxieties to the breaking point.
Add that to the triumph of identity politics in professional class institutions like universities, corporate C-suites, non-governmental organizations, and media—itself a byproduct of inter-elite competition as many have observed—and what you have is the modern left.
Therefore, it shouldn’t be any surprise that Mamdani-esque socialism is sprouting up in the places where the PMC is at its most precarious.
There are, after all, college professors and lawyers in, say, Des Moines, Iowa. The difference is that they can buy a house and raise children on their six-figure salaries, while those in San Francisco and New York cannot.
It’s no great exaggeration to say that the history of American leftism (of the DSA type Mamdani represents) since Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2016 has been one of PMC revolt, largely concentrated in cities such as San Francisco; Portland, Oregon; Washington, D.C.; and New York, where having a low six-figure job does not easily—or even conceivably—translate into the former mainstays of a middle-class life, like homeownership and good public schools.
Everyone seems to acknowledge, at least nowadays, that the working and blue-collar middle class turned to Donald Trump because of a desire to blow up a political and economic system they felt had left them behind.
The great irony of the current political moment is that many of the people Trump’s base holds most responsible for their declining fortunes—not altogether incorrectly—also increasingly feel left behind in the world they built for themselves.
If the Great Recession, COVID-19, and the specter of an artificial intelligence-assisted “white collar bloodbath” have taught the professional class anything, it is that their credentials cannot save them.
And what of that world?
So far as I can tell, the only group still defending it is the more relatively stable—yet still somewhat aggrieved—portion of the professional managerial class flying the banner of “abundance,” an establishment political movement within the Democratic Party whose essential thesis is that real neoliberalism has never been tried.
As I stood at the Mamdani election party, scrolling through my AI-slop-filled phone, reading stories of white-collar jobs being automated out of existence, and watching downwardly mobile yuppies cheer on their openly socialist candidate as Cuomo, who resigned as governor in scandal less than four years ago, conceded the election—I couldn’t help but giggle at the absurdity of trying to put the genie back in the bottle or thinking the center might hold.
Fear of falling pushed the PMC into Reaganism. Now, at least in New York, it’s pushing them out of capitalism altogether.
Even members of the right-wing commentariat, like podcaster and tech founder David Sacks, can’t help but notice that the old world is over, writing of Mamdani’s primary victory, “What to make of the NY mayoral race? Socialism beats neoliberalism in the new Democratic Party, just as nationalism beats neoconservatism in the new Republican Party. Those are your choices for the future. Globalism is on its way out.”
None of this is to say that the PMC will be good socialists—by the look of the flyer in my hand, they’ve already come to the baffling conclusion that there’s no difference between class struggle and child sex changes.
More to the point, the socialist mantra “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” has only ever stood the test of time in Anabaptist sects. It requires a religious devotion to self-sacrifice that is not characteristic of this anxious and hyper-competitive class—as many actual socialists have spent the last decade warning.
The PMC has a different mantra, one that will lead them to whatever political movement their insecurities drive them to, and it’s this: **I will not accept a life I do not deserve.**