Christine Rosen uncovers evidence of the pathetic appeal of the DSA. Two slices:
But one aspect of the DSA’s appeal has been too often overlooked, particularly by conservative critics: its appeal as a form of instant community for a generation that often lacks one. DSA supporters are a highly homogenous group: 85 percent of DSA members are white, and 80 percent of them have college degrees. But it turns out that one of the things this knowledge-class proletariat is seeking (besides the abolition of prisons and the end of landlords) is . . . friends?
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Like sentimental socialists of old, the current crop of socialist youth, surrounded by others exactly like themselves and marinating in resentment about their circumstances, risks falling prey to what William James called the “sentimentalist fallacy,” or the tendency to “shed tears over abstract justice and generosity, beauty, etc. and never to know these qualities when you meet them in the street.” His example was “the weeping of the Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside.” Today’s equivalent might be the Sey Coffee barista with a Ph.D. in post-colonial studies who is invested in seeing herself as downtrodden (while ignoring the genuinely struggling working-class people who surround her).
Writing in the Wall Street Journal recently, former Democratic congressman Daniel Lipinski tried to calm fears of a radical takeover of the Democratic Party by the DSA. He claimed “it is best to understand what is happening inside the Democratic Party today not as a widespread endorsement of the DSA platform, but more broadly as a protest by those fearful about the future and feeling betrayed by the perceived fecklessness of party leaders. Such emotions make fertile ground for demagogues.”
Today’s DSA demagogues-in-training already know this; the question is when their young followers, busy with their communal political gatherings and reveling in sentimental abstractions, will see how deeply cynical — and harmful to a free society — the political program they are supporting really is.
GMU alum Alex Nowrasteh takes on ten arguments offered by the DSA. A slice:
5. “Housing is a human right. Build new, publicly owned social housing, strictly regulate investment properties, establish universal rent control, and guarantee right to counsel for all tenants.”
Government intervention tends to raise housing prices. Universal rent control would deepen the shortage it claims to address and is among the policies most widely critiqued by economists. A 2012 survey asked economists about whether rent control would have a positive impact on the quantity and quality of broadly affordable rental housing, and 2 percent agreed that it would, about what you’d expect if they misread the question. Economist Nancy Stokey summarized the evidence well when she wrote, “The planets are lined up here: theory and evidence point in the same direction.”
San Francisco’s rent control expansion cut the supply of rental housing by 15 percent and likely raised citywide rents by about 5 percent. Publicly owned housing adds an agency problem on top of a shortage while making the government your landlord, who cannot go broke, answers to politicians rather than to tenants, fills units by political allocation, and maintains buildings the way Pruitt-Igoe was maintained. If the goal is to increase the supply of housing to lower the price, abolish or reduce the burden of zoning and other land use ordinances. We should do that anyway, and it would be far better and infinitely cheaper than a cross-country government construction project.
Scott Lincocome makes clear that “data centers are not the problem. Bad policy is.” A slice:
Most of the hysteria, however, is nonsense—random anecdotes and shoddy pseudoscience that drown out rational analysis and leverage humans’ natural insecurities and innumeracy.
Let’s start with electricity, which is arguably the most difficult data center issue—at least in the future. Several regional and national studies have found little merit to the common claim that data centers have already caused large, localized increases in Americans’ electricity bills. In fact, a brand new, peer-reviewed study found that data centers actually caused average U.S. retail electricity rates to “fall modestly” between 2015 and 2024, because the centers’ high, steady power demand helped spread a grid’s fixed costs over more usage. This finding is counterintuitive but consistent with research from 2025 that high-demand areas—including ones like North Dakota and Virginia that saw an explosion of data centers—“saw lower prices overall,” while prices rose in places like California where demand had declined.
We study the effects of H-1B immigration on U.S. industries that employ H-1B workers and their trading partners. Using a novel cross-industry design and the 1999–2003 expansion of the H-1B visa cap for identification, we find that H-1B exposure raised incomes for natives and pre-existing immigrants, with gains concentrated in non-STEM occupations. Income gains propagate forward through supply chains to downstream industries but not backward to upstream industries, consistent with a productivity shock rather than a labor supply shock. We find no direct effect on patenting, suggesting that productivity gains arise from better task execution rather than patentable invention.
Arnold Kling continues to write with real intelligence about artificial intelligence.
