Success breeds failure. Policies and practices well-suited to society at one juncture in history are often poorly suited to the world they have beneficially transformed. If you carry a good thing too far, it can turn out not to be a good thing anymore.
Case in point, one of the most successful public policies in U.S. history, the World War II GI Bill of Rights, which financed college educations for military veterans. Signed by former President Franklin Roosevelt, it embodied New Deal generosity even as its chief backers included the racist Democratic Mississippi Rep. John Rankin and the supposedly reactionary American Legion. One secret of its success, like that of Social Security, was apparent reciprocity: It provided benefits for those who made some contribution.
In doing so, it subsidized both economic and intellectual upward mobility for those from modest or even subsistence beginnings — the children of Appalachian coal miners, eastern and southern European immigrants, and even many black Americans whose service was limited to segregated units.
Taken together, their achievements not only increased the enrollment of colleges and universities (many of which disliked the democratization) but vastly increased the size and capacities of the American economy.
This success embedded in the minds of elites and many ordinary Americans the notion that any further expansion of higher education would be good for individuals and the country. State legislatures founded new systems of universities and community colleges. Congress pumped large sums into higher education and took up the idea of somehow subsidizing loans to college and graduate students.
As a result, the share of Americans pursuing higher education rose from just 5% before WWII to nearly two-thirds today, with almost 40% earning a bachelor’s degree. Those numbers have been increased by seemingly generous student loans, the proceeds of which are gobbled up by a vast increase in higher education administrators (they now outnumber teachers) and by ever-higher tuitions.
As Charles Murray argued in his 2008 book Real Education, these are far higher percentages than the share of the population with the cognitive skills needed to profit from serious four-year undergraduate study, much less advanced graduate school. Schools have responded with reduced rigor and grade inflation to the point that, as Palantir CEO Alex Karp noted, “Inflated grades have degraded the value of college degrees.”
The result is that American society, which before the GI Bill of Rights tended to provide higher education to too few, now provides it to too many. Consequently, we have what the maverick scholar Peter Turchin called an “overproduction of elites.”
One consequence is that the economic premium from a bachelor’s degree is becoming smaller, if not vanishing. Another is that there is a glut of college graduates entering the labor market — some 7 million since January 2020 — while the number of those without such a degree is declining. A country with shortages of construction workers and truck drivers has a glut of people whose credentials lead them to think they should be running things.
The result, as Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel predicted back in 2020, is a crash in expectations, as young people facing an expensive housing market with disappointing salaries and high costs will “find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate and then if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.”
All of which helps explain the election of the self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani as the next mayor of New York City. His core constituency was “a group that has become increasingly central to American politics,” John Carney wrote in the New York Post. “The downwardly mobile professionals, the overproduced graduates of our university system, raised to expect middle-class stability and discovering instead that the system has little to offer beyond high rent and burnout.”
Or, as Gregory Conti wrote in First Things, his core constituency was “the college-educated, cash-strapped professional middle class.”
I’ve called this group the barista proletariat, and it has proved crucial not only in New York but also in the election of teacher union official Brandon Johnson as mayor of Chicago in 2023 and in the elevation of university towns over industrial cities as the most Democratic counties in presidential target states.
BAD NEWS FOR REPUBLICANS, WARNINGS FOR BOTH PARTIES
Nationally, this is a splinter group. Mandani got just 50.4% of the vote in a city where the last four Democratic presidential nominees got 68%, 76%, 79%, and 81%. But the command of police forces in central cities with a disproportionate share of the nation’s economic product and violent crimes has consequences.
Surveys show that Mamdani received high percentages from recent migrants to New York and from young voters. Neither has memories of how the crime-fighting policies of former Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg (1994-2013) made the city, and in particular their gentrified neighborhoods, more liberal. Nor have they experienced the repeated failures of rent control and socialist provision, which Mamdani has championed. The overproduced elite is well-positioned to inflict major damage on the nation it disdains but feels entitled to lead.