ABE GREENWALD: The Revolution Has a Trust Fund.
How do you know when you’ve made it in America? When your grown-up kid declares he’s a socialist. It means you’ve given your family a level of material comfort and security so unquestionable that your child has never even thought about how it happened. The very life you’ve provided him is like a seamless work of art in which all the grueling spadework has been successfully hidden. Good for you. Bad for everyone else.
The New York Post has a terrific piece today that provides a detailed example of this phenomenon. The co-chair of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America, Gustavo Gordillo, lives in a two-story, $1.5 million home that his parents purchased in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
They didn’t buy the place for themselves but for the 38-year-old Gordillo and his brother. What, after all, would his parents want with a 2,000-square-foot house in Brooklyn when they own a “sprawling more than 5,000-square-foot, five-bed, six-bath home in Boca Raton that is currently on the market for $3.1 million” and “another $3 million home in Weston, Fla., that is just slightly larger and has five beds and seven baths”?
Gordillo, you see, comes from an exorbitantly prosperous and enterprising family of Peruvian immigrants who came to the U.S. and struck gold. Naturally, he hates American capitalism and the country that has showered him in miracles.
As with John Lennon in 1970, a working class hero is something to cosplay:
The @nycDSA chair @unionGustavo, who claims to be a "union electrician", is a Yale graduate who signed up for Union apprenticeship, failed, and then skipped on the bill.
He lives in a Brooklyn house owned by his parents' LLC as a pied a terre. https://t.co/x9yOcalD5k pic.twitter.com/4AqwHOTJ4o
— Kane 謝凱堯 (@kane) August 19, 2026