Jacobin writer and DSA-LA organizer Noah Suárez-Sikes on the week-long media frenzy over Gustavo Gordillo, the thirty-eight-year-old former union electrician elected cochair of NYC-DSA. The gotcha: he lives in a Brooklyn row house his father bought.
- The house was purchased in 2019 at barely above the Brooklyn median price — worth under a third of the threshold for Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax on second homes over $5 million, and it isn’t a second home
- The pile-on is a pattern: Cea Weaver got the same treatment; the New York Post attacked DSA volunteer Grace Ryan over her father’s chocolate company; journalists camped outside Gordillo’s row house
- The class-traitor lineage is long: Engels bankrolled Marx, Marx’s father was a lawyer, Lenin and Castro studied law, Bolívar came from one of the Americas’ wealthiest families, and patrician FDR oversaw the greatest expansion of social welfare in US history
DSA’s breadth of class backgrounds is a strength, not a scandal — elected socialists range from street vendors’ sons to people who were once undocumented or homeless. Polling backs the movement: 58 percent of Democrats and 46 percent of Americans 18–34 view democratic socialism positively.
The attacks are elite institutions projecting their own guilty consciences — comfortable people who do nothing, furious at someone who does. As Suárez-Sikes puts it: “Gordillo may be living in a house his father bought him. But it’s DSA that’s living rent-free in our critics’ heads.”