Why English majors vote socialist
August 11th, 2026
Jay Sophalkalyan has a post on Substack pointing out that in the 2025 NYC mayoral race:
Andrew Cuomo performed better among New Yorkers without a college degree. Among voters with bachelor’s or graduate degrees, by contrast, Mamdani defeated him by nearly 20 points.
…and goes on to argue that education is no defense against fanaticism, drawing from the experience of his native Cambodia and the genocidal Khmer Rouge.
He’s not wrong, but perhaps worries too much. People with humanities degrees (which carry some prestige but little value for earning a living) have always been critics of free markets. They don’t like the result.
When in school, they were promised that because they were smarter than the others, worked hard, and graduated from a prestigious university, they’d end up at the top of society. But markets reward pro-social activity – providing things that others want to pay for. University equipped them to produce art and literary criticism, but there’s not much demand for that, and too many people wanting to sell it. So these people don’t make much money, and blame “capitalism”.
As Randy Newman put it in It’s Money That Matters (1988):
Of all of the people that I used to know
Most never adjusted to the great big world
I see ’em lurking in bookstores
Workin’ for the public radio
Carryin’ their babies around in sacks on their backs
Movin’ careful and slow[Chorus]
It’s money that matters
Hear what I say
It’s money that matters
In the USA[Bridge]
All of these people are much brighter than I
In any fair system they would flourish and thrive
But they barely survive
They eke out a living
They barely survive
These people aren’t starving, but neither are they running the world. They feel cheated – teachers and schools led them to feel entitled to rewards for what teachers and schools value in students – hard work plus obedience plus cleverness. But the adult world doesn’t really want that – mostly it wants goods and services. Under socialism, once the money-grubbing makers and doers and, worst of all, merchants, are ground into the dirt, they will be elevated to their rightful place. They will run the world.
It hasn’t actually worked out that way anywhere socialism has been tried, but they majored in English, not history.
August 11th, 2026 at 6:53 pm
Do they not run the world? Humanities majors dominate politics and media.
Is it peculiar to Humanities majors? Lots of scientists are leftists too.
In the 1980s, I had the impression that engineers were heavily conservative or libertarian. I’m not sure that’s still true.
How about the successful wealthy people? The CEOs of large corporations seem to shift with the wind.
August 11th, 2026 at 8:10 pm
A tiny few – the types who work at the New York Times – do run the world, at least part of it.
But the vast majority got neither money nor power. And they resent it. They were promised that. They graduated with good grades. They’re entitled to it.
Once those who *do* are crushed, there will be those who obey, and those who are obeyed. They’ll be the latter.
Or so they imagine.