A society that produces so many losers, seething with resentment, is a tinderbox waiting to ignite

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ccording to the horseshoe theory of politics, the extreme Left and extreme Right of the political spectrum resemble one another. That is most obviously evident today in their shared animus towards Israel and Jews. But they also share certain sociological traits, as well as ideas: Those who provided the energy for the successful Mamdani campaign in New York City and the five million or so “Groypers” who tune in to neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes’s podcasts are both losers of one sort or another.

The ranks of the Democratic Socialists of America, like those of the Weatherman Underground of the 1970s, are not children of the working class, but overwhelmingly products of the upper middle class. Progressive activists, surveys show, are wealthier, whiter, and more highly educated that the average American, and three times as likely to have postgraduate degrees.

In a September piece in the Free Press, Rob Henderson, who first coined the term “luxury beliefs” after being lectured about his “white privilege” by his prep school-educated classmates at Yale — for the record, he’s actually half Mexican and half Korean and grew up in a series of foster homes — termed the Mamdani phenomenon “Revolt of the Rich Kids.”

Those rich kids are now discovering that the fancy college education for which their parents paid, or for which they went heavily into debt, is not worth much. Few companies are eager to hire gender studies majors, and even good grades from Harvard signify little to employers when the average grade is “A.”

As Henderson points out, they constitute the first downwardly mobile generation in American history, unlikely to earn as much as their parents. According to numerous recent studies, less than 40 percent of those born to the top quintile of income earners remain there, despite having started with an enormous step up in life, in terms of degrees, contacts, and cultural fluency.

In some cases, their very sense of entitlement stands in in the way of success. They view the qualities that employers seek — showing up, meeting deadlines, and tolerating authority — as beneath them. Others are victims of what Peter Turchin calls “elite overproduction” — an overabundance of those with the requisite connections and degrees for the number of high-status positions available in business, media, or academia.

Mamdani, the son of multimillionaire parents, raised in luxury, educated at an expensive college, who never held a job other than “rapper” into his thirties, understands the psychology of the disaffected elites from the inside. Their failure to secure either the prestige or income that they were raised to expect causes them to seethe with resentment toward those who did.

According to a University of Edinburgh study cited by Henderson, resentment at the success of others is one of the strongest predictors of support for coercive redistribution — not to lift the poor but to tear down those one rung higher.

The 5 million subscribers to the podcasts of neo-Nazi podcaster Nick Fuentes are part of an even larger group of losers: American men, who have not only grown up being lectured on their toxic masculinity, but are increasingly being left behind by the women in their age cohort.

They have long since become stereotype figures on TV sitcoms  — unemployed, still living in their parents’ basement at 30, spending their days staring at screens of one kind or another, while nursing a beer. The women with whom they went to high school are far more likely to have gone on to college and to have entered the professions which were once almost exclusively male, such as law or medicine. Not only do those women not see their former classmates as marriage material, they don’t even deem them worth talking to.

So it is hardly surprising that when a Nick Fuentes —  in many ways a figure just like them — comes along and offers excuses for their miserable lives, whether in the form of vile misogyny, an invasion of non-whites, or conspiracies to control the world on behalf of Israel and the Jews, there are so many eager to lap up what he is serving.

A society that produces so many losers, seething with resentment, is a tinderbox waiting to ignite.

The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far From the Tree

One of the general rules that I’ve extracted from the many special people I’ve been privileged to know is: Great people do not come from nowhere. Their parents usually have a great deal to do with the person they became.

That rule was reinforced last week when my wife and I made a shivah call to Mrs. Tzila Schneider, the founder of Kesher Yehudi, following the passing of her father, Rabbi Yechiel Aharon Baumol, z”l. The first thing that Mrs. Schneider said to us was, “My father passed away with over 500 living descendants, every one of whom is shomer Torah u’mitzvos.”

Over the years, I had heard a few things about Rav Baumol from his daughter. I knew, for instance, that he was very close to the Slonimer Rebbe, the Nesivos Shalom, and had the primary responsibility for transcribing his shiurim into written form.

But I had always assumed that the primary impetus for Mrs. Schneider’s activities was her late mother, Toirah Baumol, who had been a major figure in the absorption of Russian immigrants in the ’90s and the subject of a full-length biography.

Indeed, when I first met Rebbetzin Schneider well over a decade ago, it was a story about her mother that first captured me. The week prior to her chasunah, a young woman who worked as a cleaner for the family and who had been expelled from her seminary for baalos teshuvah moved into the family’s apartment. Part of the living room was blocked off, a sign was hung up saying “Mazal’s room,” and the family ate their Shabbos meals in the hallway.

But at the shivah, Mrs. Schneider set me straight. Yes, her mother was the activist, going to the airport to greet incoming planeloads of Jews arriving from the Soviet Union and taking care of all their arrangements. But that activism was fueled by her father, who had only a little corner for himself, under a small window, in their Meah Shearim apartment. It was he who provided the hashkafah that animated her mother’s work and that of Rebbetzin Schneider herself, over the 17 years that he lived with her family in Jerusalem’s Ramot neighborhood.

One cardinal rule in the Baumol household, strictly enforced, was that a negative word about another Jew was not permitted. Tzili recalled that once, when she was about nine years old, she had asked her sister at the Shabbos table about her new class in school. Her father quickly intervened, “We don’t discuss school at the Shabbos table,” likely out of a fear that some complaint about a teacher or a classmate might issue.

Every time her father picked up a cup of coffee, he would always say in Yiddish, “Another brachah,” And that captured an entire hashkafah. The seven girls and two boys in the family grew used to their beds being usurped by guests. Their father’s response to any complaint was inevitably, “It’s a mitzvah.”

What struck me most about the shivah house was the smile of each of the mourners, as they recalled the home in which they grew up. One sister, who has worked for decades for Rabbi Yitzchak Dovid Grossman and his Migdal Ohr institutions, was beaming, not just smiling, as she recalled the memories of growing up in a home of chesed. And in that smile, the riddle of 500 descendants, all shomer mitzvos, was solved.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1086. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)