The results in the New York City mayoral election reconfirmed Zohran Mamdani’s strong support among the educated young who are unhappy with how they are faring, whether it be in their careers or, relatedly, in their ability to pay for the sort of life they had been taught to expect would be coming their way.

I touched on this in June in a post that included this comment:

The emergence of Zohran Mamdani “from nowhere” is yet another sign that “elite overproduction” (a term coined years ago by social scientist Peter Turchin) in an age of automation will give rise to serious political upheaval, a topic I first discussed in an article for National Review in 2016. To oversimplify, elite overproduction describes a state of affairs in which members of the “elite” (or those with the talents to join it) become too numerous for society to accommodate their aspirations. That leads to frustration and, more specifically, the formation of a “counter-elite” set on reorganizing society in a way that gives them the leading roles to which they believe they are entitled.

I added:

Widespread [graduate] unemployment or underemployment means that many graduates will find that the expectations fostered by their education will be dashed. They now face, or are already experiencing, to use an ugly term, proletarianization. To be sure, for many of them, their aspirations may have been unrealistic, but disappointment is subjective.

Writing on this topic in 2016, I argued that:

For many graduates, gently shepherded through often undemanding schoolwork and gently burdened with a monstrous debt, dreams will turn into nightmares. There will be no place for them on the track to success. Their expectations were unrealistic, but their disappointment will be real. If their teachers haven’t already radicalized them, life may do the trick.

And this clearly is what is happening. It is only likely to spread, and not just among the young.

As I argued in 2016:

When we reach the point where even those who are still doing well see robots sending proletarianization their way, there’s a decent chance that something akin to “middle-class panic” (a phenomenon identified by sociologist Theodor Geiger in, ominously, 1930s Germany) will ensue. Many of the best and brightest will face a stark loss of economic and social status, a blow that will sting far more than the humdrum hopelessness that many at the bottom of the pile have, sadly, long learned to accept. They will resist while they still have the clout to do so, and the media, filled with intelligent people who have already found themselves on the wrong side of technology, will have their back.

The conventional response to this sort of gloomy talk is to point out that history shows that new technology creates new and better jobs. Indeed it has done, but it would be a mistake to assume that those new jobs will be better jobs, at least initially (and in the case of those who cannot adapt, quite possibly forever) and that (2) these new jobs will materialize overnight. The early years of the spread of automation in industrial revolution Britain appears (there is some debate about this) to have been accompanied by stagnation in working class wages, the “Engels pause.” I touched on this in the 2016 article, and revisited the topic in a Capital Letter earlier this year, noting that

The Luddites who smashed the new weaving machines in the 1810s were doing the right thing for themselves and perhaps for their children, but not for their grandchildren. Real wages began ticking up in the 1820-40s, but really started accelerating after 1850 as the benefits of industrialization spread, creating new opportunities and new jobs, including for highly skilled workers to operate increasingly sophisticated equipment.

I doubt if 21st-century graduates or for that matter older folk who have lost well-paid, high-status jobs will be content to wait for decades for better times (their 19th-century predecessors were none too content either, but less well-placed to do anything about it). Instead, as noted above, the would-be “counter-elite” will attempt to rework society in a fashion designed to maximize their chances of doing well.

My guess in 2016 was that their efforts would be:

focused on a largely fruitless (but for a few, fruitful) “war against inequality” centered on a drastic redistributive effort. Taxes will rise steeply, on capital gains as well as income, and, given time, on the mere ownership of capital: We can expect a wealth tax on the living, a foretaste of death taxes to come.

Spending will doubtless soar, on infrastructure (occasionally even sensibly) and on retraining schemes for jobs that will never be. Health care will grow ever closer to single-payer. For the upper middle class squeezed by automation, reinvented as Robin Hoods on the make, all this will combine power play (the opportunity to redistribute away the gains of their more successful competitors) with marvelous career opportunities (someone has to operate the machinery of redistribution) and, of course, claims to the moral high ground.

And so to (possibly) the most ominous passage in Mamdani’s victory speech:

We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.

Translation: There will be plenty of good jobs for those who wish to join this new ruling class.

For everyone else, well . . .