Socialism in America continues to be driven overwhelmingly by white, wealthy, overeducated young people, even as the Democratic Socialists of America keep insisting their movement is one of, and for, the working class. 

Vice President JD Vance commented on Abdul El-Sayed's win in Michigan Tuesday, as yet another socialist secured a spot in the midterm elections amid a broader socialist rise across the country. The vice president pointed out that, as usual, the victory lacked any real support from the working class, and argued that genuine help for working people would look a lot more like the Trump administration's own record than anything El-Sayed is offering.

"First of all, the base of the Democratic Party just wants radicals," the vice president said. "It wants these DSA types. It wants people who hate even the idea of private property ownership. But it also, I think, tells us that that particular set of ideas is very popular in places you wouldn't expect."

"Because El-Sayed, he's this guy who holds himself out as a working class hero, as a guy who's going to fight for the working class. How does he fight for the working class? By flooding his state and his country with low-wage immigrants," Vance continued. "Of course, those people will drive down the wages of the working class. And he also doesn't want to do anything to protect the Michigan auto industry. He has fought against the Trump tariffs that have saved the Michigan auto industry."

So interestingly, as much as the media will pull this guy out as a socialist, as a guy who's trying to stand up for the working man, where did he do the best? He did the best among wealthy white liberals and among new immigrants to the United States of America. He basically represents the modern democratic coalition, which is self-hating white liberals united to people who just came to the country for the first time and don't actually have the sense of appreciation for it that they should. Those are the people who are voting for El-Sayed. He doesn't have a constituency among the working class he pretends to represent.

Vance is right about the basics. El-Sayed's coalition skews young, white, and well-off, not exactly the working-class base he claims. But it's worth reminding conservatives that the rise of socialism isn't driven by immigration, and that it is, in its own way, genuinely pro-working class, just not in the way the Trump administration means when it uses that phrase. Where the administration seeks to reshore manufacturing, restrict immigration, and shield American industry, El-Sayed is after something different: a much larger welfare state, funded by taxing the wealthy, taxing private enterprise, and forcing redistribution wherever voluntary exchange won't get there fast enough. In the mind of the DSA, that is what fighting for the working class looks like. 

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This is the more important point. Socialism in the United States is not a bottom-up movement. It's something worse, something closer to tyranny in its instincts. It is driven overwhelmingly by wealthy, overeducated, self-styled elites, confidently deciding what ordinary people should want on their behalf. And those beliefs stand in direct conflict with the founding ideals of this country. 

But notice what Vance never mentioned: any positive case for the opposite of socialis, the very system El-Sayed represents. He never mentioned the virtue of free markets

The solution to the rise of socialism remains what it has always been: embrace free markets, and keep government out of economic life as much as humanly possible. Because if the conservative answer to socialism is its own version of corporate cronyism, or heavy-handed federal guidance over who wins and who loses, then conservative economic policy isn't actually an alternative to socialism at all. It's just the Republican flip side of the same coin, accepting socialism's diagnosis of the problem while quarreling only over who gets to wield and impose the solution.