Subaru Socialists and the Great Disappointed
One of the most thought-provoking books I’ve read in the past year is Noam Scheiber’s “Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class.” Scheiber presents a series of incisively reported profiles of young people who did everything they were asked to do but still found themselves working at a Starbucks or in an Amazon warehouse. Their discontent, Scheiber concludes, isn’t explicitly economic or cultural or political but, rather, is what happens when people with degrees realize that what they thought was a temporary postgraduate job will almost certainly become their career. There is no dream job coming; the bridge is the road and the final destination. Combine that realization with the harsh reality of retail jobs, plus a revival of class solidarity and labor politics—thanks, in part, to Bernie Sanders—and the result is a highly educated and credentialled political movement that has swept leftist candidates into office across the country.
This new voting bloc has two similar but distinct components. There are what I call the Subaru Socialists: college-educated millennials in their thirties and early forties who earn a somewhat steady income but not what they expected. These voters arrived at their politics via the Great Recession, Occupy Wall Street, and the continual escalation of housing prices in urban areas—all of which heightened the contrast between what they were promised when they took on student debt and their current circumstances. Then there are the Great Disappointed, a younger set. They don’t have strong memories of the 2008 financial crash, as their millennial elders do, but they came of age during the pandemic and saw that seemingly invincible institutions could, in fact, sputter and fail when placed under duress. Like the Subaru Socialists, these twenty-two-to-thirty-year-olds aren’t exactly happy with the return on their educational investment. But their political views have seemingly coalesced less around the economy than around the war in Gaza, which serves as a character test for any politician who asks for their vote.
Pundits have many things to say about Subaru Socialists and the Great Disappointed, and almost all of it is at least partially true. Given that these voters are mostly white college graduates between the ages of twenty-five and forty, they are indeed “privileged” in the most boring sense of that word. They probably do spend a lot of time online. Many of them live in historically Black or immigrant neighborhoods where rent is cheaper, at least until enough of them move in and start opening coffee shops that play Stereolab or whatever. Economically, they might not be particularly worse off than their boomer parents were at the same point in their lives. They vote at a high rate for their age, which is why they need to be taken seriously.
Many skeptics see a contradiction in high-achieving, mostly white young voters employing rhetoric about labor and solidarity. Every big Election Night for the leftists comes with the same eye-rolling complaint from centrists and the right: “Oh, great, some gentrifiers who went to Sarah Lawrence are cosplaying socialism and pretending they’re working class.” But all voting blocs come with some supposed contradictions; poor, non-college-educated voters regularly prefer candidates who support tax cuts for billionaires, for example. What this usually means is that the apparent contradiction isn’t particularly relevant for those voters or very revealing about their preferences. And a whole lot of people under the age of forty-five no longer believe that indicators such as wages, unemployment, or the number of college degrees that are handed out in a given year have much to do with a healthy economy. They are concerned with the consolidation of wealth, the price of housing, the cost of child care, and student debt. And, absent an upheaval of the entire political establishment in this country, they don’t really see why anything would get better, even if they might admit that things are not so bad for them personally right now.
There’s another term for people who make an O.K. salary at a normal job but sometimes struggle to afford housing and child care: the middle class. No term in American politics is quite as slippery or misshapen. I imagine that the majority of Subaru Socialists in their thirties would resist the label, even if they make the median household income for their neighborhood and work a steady job that allows them to put away a modest amount of money each month in a retirement account. This resistance comes from a variety of sources, but it’s largely cultural: “middle class” suggests cul-de-sacs in the suburbs, moderate politics, and a career. The manager of a Starbucks or an enterprising but disgruntled gig-economy worker might pull down enough money to land in the middle class, but they will not feel the homogenizing stability and somewhat stultifying comfort they likely associate with the phrase.
During one of the many iterations of her Presidential campaign, Kamala Harris started talking about something she called an “opportunity economy” that would lift the “middle class” out of despair. I recall thinking that I had no idea who she meant by the middle class: was she talking about postal workers and teachers in the Midwest whose communities had been ravaged by opioids and deindustrialization? Was she talking about nurses in New Jersey who were being priced out of their homes?
Harris was probably trying to talk to Subaru Socialists and the Great Disappointed. Her policy proposals during the “middle-class” phase of her campaign involved federal assistance on down payments for a first home, child tax credits for parents of newborns, and help if you wanted to start a small business. They might have benefitted someone living in the suburbs of Detroit, for instance—someone who graduated from Michigan State, say, and cobbles together about sixty-five thousand dollars a year through a retail job and Uber driving but dreams of opening her own coffee shop and starting a family. If that person heard Harris talking about “the middle class,” would she have assumed that Harris was talking about her?
The inability to imagine a middle-class life—especially for the Subaru Socialists right on the cusp of comfort—seems to be what’s behind a slate of recent electoral victories for the Democratic Socialists of America. In a recent post on his Substack, Nate Silver analyzed data from the Cooperative Election Study and found that the group of people most likely to vote Democratic were postgraduate-degree holders who had a household income between thirty thousand and sixty thousand dollars. Much of the membership of the Democratic Socialists of America, Silver pointed out, sat squarely within that band: more than eighty per cent of the members above the age of twenty-four had a bachelor’s degree, and forty-five per cent of all respondents lived in households earning less than sixty thousand dollars a year. (Silver found that, according to C.E.S. data, only about nineteen per cent of all college graduates in America make that little.) A profile emerges of the typical D.S.A. member, and it resembles our hopeful future coffee-shop owner: a college-educated voter in her early thirties who isn’t making as much as she thought she would.
Harris was correct to include this person in the middle class, even if this person might not see it that way. The problem for the Democratic establishment is that the Subaru Socialist does not believe that Harris and those like her have any interest in helping her out, even if they advance a slate of proposals that will undeniably get her closer to opening that coffee shop and starting that family. This helps to explain why the Biden Administration gets so little credit from the left for an economic policy drafted by former Elizabeth Warren staffers, or why nobody seems to care that Lina Khan, who currently chairs the board of the New York City Economic Development Corporation under Zohran Mamdani, actually held a much more important position under Biden. Absent a truly transformative and well-marketed idea such as universal health care, there’s nothing an establishment candidate can do to satisfy the Subaru Socialists, because the bad deal they were sold as children—study, go to college, and you’ll find yourself in a better place than your parents—has led to a fundamental discontentment with the way things are.
The Subaru Socialists and the Great Disappointed are certainly aligned in much of their politics, but their motivations, I believe, aren’t exactly the same. Last week, on the podcast I host, the pollster Adam Carlson said that he was seeing evidence that age, even more than educational attainment, was the most reliable indicator of how a person would vote in a Democratic primary. Age, he said, was “the single biggest determinant in how someone would vote in the June New York City primaries,” for instance. And in Michigan, he noted, a generation gap had begun to open up within the Black electorate—recent reporting showed that older voters preferred the establishment candidate, Haley Stevens, and younger voters were more likely to support the progressive Abdul El-Sayed. On the broader stage of general elections, Carlson argued, “Gen Z voters are less loyal to a party and are more elastic and seemingly want to punish whatever party is in power when things are bad for them.”
This anti-establishment rebellion has coalesced around Gaza. A majority of young Democrats believe that their tax dollars are funding a genocide; candidates like Melat Kiros, who defeated the longtime Colorado Congresswoman Diana DeGette in a primary, are running to the left of progressive incumbents not so much on economic issues as in their condemnation of Israel and of America’s continued military aid to the country. Gaza has become a litmus test for anti-establishment voters on both the left and the right—if you take a dime from AIPAC or if you aren’t the most fervently anti-Israel candidate in the field, you will have a tough time winning a Democratic seat in an urban, highly educated blue district.
The future of the Democratic Party involves a synthesis of Subaru Socialism’s disillusionment with the American promise and the polarized, hard-line moralizing of Gen Z. Young voters aren’t the only angry ones, of course; older Democrats are still understandably furious at a party that lost to Donald Trump twice and seems to have done precious little to stand in his way during the past year and a half. But it’s younger voters who have begun to give a political form and shape to that reactionary anger. You could look at the platforms of their favorite politicians and label that form “economic populism,” but I think that’s an imperfect assessment—what matters isn’t so much the specific policies but rather the promise of upheaval.
Given the robust turnout of this new voting bloc in high-profile elections, plus the press’s fascination with these voters—there are many Subaru Socialists in the media’s ranks, including me—the Democratic Party will almost certainly remake itself in the image of Mamdani, Kiros, El-Sayed, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Francesca Hong, who looks poised to win the Democratic nomination for governor of Wisconsin. Politics, after all, is largely a copycat game. And what, at this point, is the alternative? ♦