You Don’t Have To Be Poor To Care About the Poor

Supporting workers doesn’t mean you have to pretend to be one. And building wealth doesn’t mean forgetting about the poor.

Photo by Gene Brutty on Unsplash

Did you hear about the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) leader who lives in a $1.4 million home his parents helped him afford?

The story of Gustavo Gordillo, who helps lead the DSA’s chapter in New York City, has been ricocheting across right-wing media. Fox News describes the story as so:

The arrangement has drawn scrutiny because Gordillo has become a prominent voice in New York City’s democratic socialist movement while criticizing wealth, high investment returns and the affordability pressures facing working-class residents. Critics say his living arrangement — in a valuable Brooklyn property purchased and renovated by his family — undercuts that message and highlights the contrast between his political rhetoric and the financial advantages provided by his family.

By now, this has become a sort of paint-by-numbers story for conservative media. Right-wing reporters, editors, and publishers have come to fetishize the following narrative:

1. There’s a progressive who rails against the rich and advocates for the poor.

2. But this progressive isn’t even poor themselves. In some cases they are upper middle class or richer!

3. Therefore, that progressive is nothing but a filthy hypocrite.

Vermont’s Independent Senator Bernie Sanders and leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker both have been put through the assembly line of this argument in recent days; Sanders owns three property while Piker’s social media fame has made him a multimillionaire.

But if you think about all of this for more than a few seconds, it really doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Politics isn’t just about advocating for your personal position in life. This Randian perspective that people are largely out for themselves has a certain appeal in the United States, but even here you can see that it doesn’t quite explain the world very well.

Pro-life activists advocate for the rights of pre-born children they may never meet; animal rights advocates risk jail time to save the lives of animals who may never know about their sacrifices; police and fire fighters regularly give their lives in the line of duty to prevent harm to innocent people.

In each of these cases, you have instances of people using their prestige and power to protect people or other living things who don’t share their privileges. Not only is it not hypocritical, it’s actually quite ordinary.

Yet in the Fox News article above, you see endless repetition of this idea that activists who are well-off are only pretending to care about the poor. Rob Henderson, a pundit who has accrued a lot of fame and fortune off his rags-to-riches story, smugly notes that “in Dostoevsky’s novel ‘The Possessed,’ it was the sons of rich boomers who were the most in love with socialism. Not the poor. The more things change, the more things stay the same.”

It is true that to extent the United States as we knows it has anything we can identify as socialism — namely, democratically held assets and redistribution of wealth — much of it is very much thanks to the wealthy. Franklin Roosevelt, who heralded the New Deal and broke the power of America’s financial class over the economy in the 1930s, was famously wealthy. George Washington, our nation’s first president and perhaps the most important Founding Father, was one of the richest men in North America — yet it is thanks to him that democracy was reborn on planet earth.

Politics is often the purview of people who have the time and resources to invest themselves in studying public policy and organizing to change the political system. That’s something that’s very hard for poor people to do. The vast majority of revolutionaries across the world have been educated and come from upwardly mobile families.

Yet Henderson’s lazy reprieve that everybody who believes in democratic socialist ideals is just rich and out of touch might be catnip to Fox’s boomer audience, but it doesn’t reflect reality. Policy programs like Social Security and Medicare and expanding them to more people are consistently popular with workers and other people.

Probably the most unpopular views that some DSA politicians promote are their social cultural views, which don’t map neatly onto the economic spectrum. Demonizing the police or advocating for open borders are certainly unpopular amongst most Americans. But it’s not true that just rich leftists have unpopular ideas. Stephen Miller’s crusade against birthright citizenship and a return to the immigration policies of the 1920s, for instance, is equally unpopular among Americans. And while Henderson coined this phrase “luxury beliefs” to demonize the left, I can’t think of a more lazy belief than thinking the United States economy would still function if we cut immigration down to the levels that Miller advocates for.

Ironically, all of this messaging from the right functions as a form of standpoint epistemology, which is typically associated with the left. Progressives have for years argued that only minorities can really understand certain issues and therefore should be deferred to on those topics. Conservatives are now adopting the same worldview to try to rebut the rising support for democratic socialist/social democratic policies.

Yet if a poor person advocates for more economic redistribution, the line of attack is different: that person’s just a lazy moocher who wants more money from the rich. So if a rich person advocates for redistribution, they’re a hypocrite; if a poor person does so, they are just envious. Really, it seems that the right’s problem is advocating for the poor at all.

But the left, too, has to change it’s approach to messaging around this topic. Progressives tend to fetishize the “working class.” Portraying yourself as living a meager or blue collar existence is seen as politically desirable. But why does it really matter if an elected leader was born rich or born poor if they advocate for the wrong policies? Ultimately, we should be much more focused on debating ideas than debating people; character assassination can make for decent politics, but it makes for bad governance.