Bernie’s Wealthy Bros

At Front Page, Daniel Greenfield analyzes the source, by zip code, of donations to the Bernie Sanders campaign:

Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Their employees are three of the top 4 Bernie donors. Apple is in fifth place. These dot coms are not exactly organizations known to employ members of the proletariat.
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Geographically, Bernie’s top dollar zip code is 94110 in San Francisco. The average household income in this part of the Mission District, specifically the Inner Mission, the Bernal Heights area, is $166,302. The median home value is around $1.5 million and the median rent is almost $5,000 a month.

There are no poor socialists in what was dubbed as “the hottest neighborhood in San Francisco.”

This was the area that Salon founder David Talbot blasted as the “hottest zip code in the country” overrun by “Silicon Valley movers and shakers” in “new-model Teslas, BMWs and Uber limousines”. It’s only fitting that it should also be the spigot through which so much of Bernie’s tech bros dollars flow.

The second top dollar Bernie zip code in San Francisco, 94117 or Haight-Ashbury, seems like a better fit for Bernie. But the Summer of Love has long since given way to the Winter of Trust Fund Hipsters in the Haight where the average income is $201,503 and average home values top $1.6 million.

The media has made much of Bernie’s flow of donations from Brooklyn. But the money isn’t coming from the working-class Brooklynites of Bernie’s old neighborhood, but the gentrifying areas of the borough. 11215 or Park Slope is the second biggest top dollar zip code of Bernie donors.

The neighborhood, formerly urban, known as the home of Mayor Bill de Blasio, and the Park Slope Food Co-Op and its anti-Semitic push to boycott Israel, is filled with renovated brownstones filled with wealthy hipsters. It’s a place where a three-bedroom apartment can go for $2.9 million.
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In third place on Bernie’s donor list is 10025 or the Upper West Side of Manhattan. With an average rental price of $4,695, it’s not exactly an inexpensive place to live. The UWS is the 8th richest neighborhood [in the U.S.] with a $190,281 mean household income. And this is where Bernie’s cash comes from.

11238 or Prospect Heights, in fourth place, is a newly gentrified neighborhood in Brooklyn where the median sales price passed $1 million, and you can expect to spend $800,000 for a one-bedroom co-op.

It goes on and on.

What do Bernie’s top donor zip codes have in common? Beyond wealth, Bernie’s cash flow is coming from a handful of very blue cities, almost all of them in California and New York City. Only two of the top ten zip codes are located outside San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City. That alone conveys the insular and unrepresentative nature of Bernie’s funding base compared to the rest of the country.

Bernie’s campaign is powered by the very concentrations of power and wealth that he condemns.

The socialist movement in the U.S. is, in large part, a movement of the one percent–in particular, the young, hipster element of the one percent. This isn’t as surprising as it may seem. Giving more power to the government isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you think you are going to be running the government, or that those who run the government will do so in your shared interests. It is a lot easier for wealthy young hipsters to imagine the government being run in their interests than for blue-collar Americans to do the same, which is why wealthy hipsters are likely to be socialists, while working class Americans are not.