Last week presented a stark contrast in the trajectories of the Trump administration’s two riskiest foreign policy ventures. On July 13, the President Donald Trump formally declared a return to military action in Iran, making clear that a war that he had anticipated would last just four or five weeks will stretch past the five month mark and probably longer. Trump appears increasingly frustrated by Iran’s failure to concede to his demand to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, comparing the country to a “great boxer”: “You think you have them beat, and then all of a sudden he comes back and he gives you a shot.”

On the far side of the globe, however, the other country Trump attacked this term has proven much more manageable. Venezuela’s government — now led by former Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who took power when Nicolás Maduro was captured in a US raid in January — agreed to talks with an opposition leader handpicked by the US that aimed at “strengthening democracy.” 

The New York Times reported earlier this week that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is effectively the “viceroy” of Venezuela, ruling the country in absentia from Washington, DC. (“Viceroy” is traditionally an official who governs a country or colony as a direct representative of a monarch.) The US has direct control over the revenues Venezuela receives from selling its oil abroad, giving Rubio effective power over the country’s budget. The grip is so tight, the Times reports, that Rodriguez asks for White House approval before appearing on Fox News, much to Trump’s delight. 

Two different countries in two different parts of the world with two different responses to Trumpian military pressure. But when future historians tell the story of how this administration ended up enmeshed in exactly the sort of Middle East quagmire that he had run for office pledging to avoid, they’re likely to devote at least a few paragraphs to Venezuela. The easy success of one operation set the stage for the still unfolding disaster of the other. 

Exporting the Venezuela model

In a daring predawn raid on January 3, US Special Forces managed to capture Maduro in a matter of hours, with no US troops killed. Contrary to the warnings of critics that such regime change would result in chaos — and to the hopes of the Venezuelan opposition that it would lead to democracy — Trump and Rubio successfully replaced Maduro with his much more pliant vice president, who has proven more than happy to let Washington call the shots. Trump now regularly muses about making Venezuela the 51st state. 

The operation was, the Times reported, “evidence to the president of the unmatched prowess of U.S. forces” and, along with the relative success of the first round of airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear program last June, emboldened him to take further military action. 

“What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect scenario,” Trump said in early March, referring to prospects for regime change in Iran. And in one sense it worked; the US was able to remove the head of state within hours of launching military action, with Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei killed in a joint US-Israeli airstrike. 

 “I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy in Venezuela,” Trump said, when Iran’s regime was considering Khamenei’s successor. 

Trump was not involved. Iran’s Assembly of experts chose the former supreme leader’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, whom Trump dismissed as “unacceptable” and a “lightweight”.

Despite this, Trump continued to insist that regime change had effectively happened in Iran and that its new leaders were “much more reasonable.” While Iran’s new political system is still very much a work in progress, its insistence on maintaining control of the state and ongoing attacks against shipping and US allies in the region have made it fairly clear that it will not be taking orders from Marco Rubio or anyone else in DC. 

Why Iran is not Venezuela

On the surface, there are some striking similarities between Iran and Venezuela: They were once close allies of each other, as well as of Russia and China. Both are oil dependent authoritarian states espousing a revolutionary ideology defined in large part by opposition to the United States. Both are known for sponsoring foreign militant groups. Both have a history of disputed elections and crushing opposition protests. Both have large and vocal exile communities in the US. Both have struggling economies and have spent years under US sanctions. 

That’s where the similarities end, however. Start with the military: Iran’s combined forces are roughly three times the size of Venezuela’s and far better equipped, possessing missile and drone capabilities that have spread chaos across the region for months. Iran’s senior leaders came of age during the brutal Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and have spent decades engaged in proxy battles with the US and Israel, whereas Venezuela has not fought an interstate war in modern times. It’s telling that Maduro was relying on Cuban personnel for his own security. 

Then, there’s geography. Thanks to its fortuitous location on the western side of the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has means to retaliate against the US by blocking shipping through the world’s most important energy chokepoint, driving up oil prices. Venezuela may have the world’s largest oil reserves, but it doesn’t have anywhere near the ability to disrupt global energy flows. 

Iran was able to attack US allies throughout the Gulf with both its own missiles and via the military groups it supports throughout the region. Despite Trump’s misleading claims that Maduro’s government was in direct control of gangs in the US or weaponizing migration, Venezuela simply didn’t have the same kind of leverage with which to fight back. 

There’s history, too. Even at the nadir of relations with the US, when Venezuela was under heavy American sanctions and formal diplomatic contacts were cut off, there were still periodic talks over energy issues and prisoner releases. The US oil company Chevron continued to operate inside the country. Rodriguez herself was a familiar figure to US officials, having participated in talks with both the Biden and Trump administrations. 

And finally, there’s ideology. Venezuela’s rulers may still be publicly committed to the “Bolivarian” socialist vision of former leader Hugo Chávez, but, in reality, the regime operates as “an extreme form of crony capitalism with some pretenses of redistribution of oil windfalls to the poor,” said Chris Sabatini, director of the Latin America program at the think tank Chatham House. Senior civilian and military officials were heavily involved in a range of enterprises of varying degrees of legality from the oil industry, from gold mining to drug trafficking. When push came to shove, they were more interested in preserving their fiefdoms than standing up for a long-dead revolution. 

According to some reporting, denied by the Venezuelan government, Rodríguez had been in direct contact with US officials prior to Maduro’s capture, assuring them of her cooperation, which would make this less a regime change invasion than a US-enabled coup. Even Interior Minister Diasdello Cabello, considered the hardest of the hardline Chavistas with a US price on his head, has been more than happy to play ball with the country’s new American overlords. 

Iran has widespread corruption, as well, but the regime is far more organized, disciplined, and committed to the radical Islamist ideology of the 1979 revolution. Iran’s leaders had long been planning for invasion and had detailed succession plans in place for when top leaders were eliminated.  The fact that the US’s Israeli partners were reportedly cultivating Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former president best remembered for calling for Israel to be wiped off the map and promoting a long-shot plan to arm Kurdish rebels to mount a ground invasion, is an indication that there were simply no plausible candidates for an “Iranian Delcy.” 

It should have been obvious from the start that a quick and easy operation that would replace Iran’s top leaders with more cooperative ones without requiring a dangerous and costly ground invasion by US troops was never a realistic prospect. It’s notable that the administration sidelined many of its own Iran experts ahead of the war, but, in fairness, Trump’s own CIA director dismissed Israel’s optimistic regime change scenarios as “farcical.” 

“President Trump has not really taken the time to study the history of Iran-US relations going back to 1979, or even earlier,” said the Middle East Institute’s Alex Vatanka. “If he had studied that relationship, I think he would have taken a different approach.” But Trump may have been thinking less about what happened in Tehran in 1979 than what had happened in Caracas just a few weeks earlier. 

The end of hubris?

Many scoffed in January when Trump suggested that the US would be “running” Venezuela for the foreseeable future, but that appears to be more or less what’s happening now. It’s not clear how long this arrangement can last. Discontent with both Rodríguez and Trump is growing in Venezuela, and many in the opposition accuse the government of using the recent devastating earthquake as a pretext to delay called-for democratic reforms. Venezuelans may come to hold the United States responsible for the failures of the government it is remotely controlling. 

But the initial success of the Venezuela operation was a vindication for a president who often sees himself as running the world in addition to the United States.

Has Trump faith in his ability to bend other countries to his will been shaken at all by the Iran experience? He has frequently described Cuba as “next” on the list of countries he’d like to “take” after Venezuela and Cuba.

In terms of culture and geography, Cuba may look more like Venezuela. But in terms of its political system, it’s “more like Iran,” said Sabatini. “It’s completely state-centric, vertical, disciplined.” Dealing with a system still fiercely devoted to its founding revolutionary ideology that has been largely isolated from the US for decades, the administration may have no better luck finding a “Cuban Delcy” than it did finding an Iranian one. 

Trump still hasn’t ruled out taking over Cuba in some fashion, and Pentagon planners are reportedly examining a range of options for action against the island, though he claimed Rubio wants to “get [Iran] finished first.” If that’s true, it may be a long wait until Iran is “finished.” 

On the other hand, Trump is once again talking about taking over Greenland and posting memes referencing his desire to annex Canada. Iran may have proven that Venezuela was the exception, not the rule, when it comes to regime change, but Trump’s ambitions for world domination do not seem to have disappeared. 

The Democratic Socialists of America say they are fighting for “a government by, for, and of the working class.” 

Yet the organization’s membership and candidates consist largely of educated professionals. As of 2021, 80 percent of DSA members over 25 were college-educated, while 28 percent earned more than $100,000 a year (putting them in roughly the top 15 percent of America’s income distribution), according to a DSA internal survey. Among the group’s most prominent politicians, meanwhile, is an Ivy League graduate student, a lawyer, and the well-educated son of a Hollywood director and famous academic. 

In recent weeks, as the DSA has racked up victories in Democratic primary elections, the apparent tension between the group’s self-conception and demographics has attracted critical scrutiny.

In the New York Times, Thomas Edsall argues that most of the DSA’s members and supporters in the electorate are “in no way working class.” The libertarian commentator Robby Soave, right-wing pundit Batya Ungar-Sargon, and liberal economics writer Noah Smith have all voiced similar sentiments. 

There are many cogent ways for socialists to respond to such criticism. One would be to note that an organization doesn’t need to have a uniformly working-class membership in order to fight for working-class interests. Another would be to observe that not all college graduates are well-heeled professionals, even as pundits often use educational attainment as a stand-in for class in political analysis. 

But some socialists prefer a simpler retort: The DSA’s critics are simply mistaken; in reality, the group’s membership is more or less entirely “working class” — because that term describes everyone who must sell their labor in order to meet their needs. 

This conception of the “working class” has deep roots on the left. As Jacobin’s Ben Burgis explains, orthodox socialists subscribe to a “two-class map of capitalist society,” in which “Some people are capitalists who own their own ‘means of production’ (like factories, farms, offices, or grocery stores) and other people work for the capitalists.”

Many contemporary socialists (including Burgis) find this dichotomy reductive, and endorse more nuanced portraits of America’s class structure. But the orthodox, “two-class” model informs a great deal of the modern left’s rhetoric, among both socialists and progressives. And the notion that lawyers and day laborers both belong to the “working class” is widely held among anti-capitalists. 

There’s something to be said for this idea. Educated professionals and manual workers surely do have some shared interests, due to their common status as laborers. For example, both benefit from the existence of a well-funded unemployment insurance system, in a way that the Elon Musks of the world do not. 

For the most part though, orthodox socialism’s “map” is badly out of date. And its expansive conception of “the working class” does less to illuminate modern America’s economic divisions than to obscure them.  

The long afterlife of Marx’s failed prophesies

Karl Marx and Frederich Engels laid the foundations for the modern left’s conception of class in The Communist Manifesto of 1848. 

In that book, the claim that there were just two important classes under capitalism — capitalists and workers — rested on a set of grim predictions about where industrialization was headed. 

According to Marx’s analysis, technological progress was in the process of obliterating “all distinctions” between different strata of working people, as automation was driving virtually everyone’s wages down to “the same low level.” The middle class of small manufacturers and shopkeepers, meanwhile, was poised to “decay and finally disappear,” as more productive, large-scale enterprises left them in the dust.

Society was therefore splitting into “two great hostile camps” — the capitalist and working classes, whose interests were impossible to reconcile. 

Under these conditions, a binary conception of class makes perfect sense. If all workers will soon be condemned to low wages, then there’s little point in dwelling on the (temporary) distinctions between them. Likewise, if shopkeepers and small-time capitalists have gone the way of the triceratops, one can more comfortably cast all business owners as members of the ruling elite.

You can’t navigate modern capitalism with a 19th-century map

But we don’t live in the future that Marx foresaw. 

Rather than melting all workers into a uniform proletariat, capitalism cultivated a kaleidoscopically diverse laborforce — one segmented by countless fine-grained distinctions of pay and prestige. And instead of immiserating ordinary people, industrial development brought unprecedented mass prosperity (albeit, with the aid of many socialistic reforms). 

As a result, old-school socialists’ “two-class map” makes for a poor guide to modern capitalism’s terrain. And anyone trying to impose Marx’s cartography onto the landscape will encounter several problems.

For one, in a world where some workers earn as much in a year as others do in a lifetime, the idea that there is only one fundamental class division — that between laborers and capitalists — becomes unconvincing. 

In the United States, some convenience store owners make $70,000 a year, while many surgeons earn upward of $600,000. It would be odd to say that the former are members of society’s dominant class (since they live off business income), while the latter belong to its subordinate one (since they live off salaries). After all, the minimart owner and Musk do not have especially similar material interests. Nor, for that matter, do the impoverished farmworker and high-earning neurosurgeon (much less, the superstar athlete with a $40 million salary). Yet this is what orthodox socialism’s binary would suggest. 

Ultimately, in a modern capitalist society, it makes a lot more sense to see class as a multidimensional continuum than as a binary.

A second, related difficulty is that the border between labor and capital has grown fuzzier since Marx’s time. Today, American workers often own both a home and some share of their nation’s financial assets, like a 401(k) filled with stock from major corporations. Many billionaires, meanwhile, choose to work. 

Socialists are well aware of this reality, which is why they define a person’s class status by their dependence on labor: The typical white-collar worker may own a little stock, but not enough to quit her job and live off dividends. Unlike a billionaire CEO, such a professional must work in order to meet her needs. 

This is a sound distinction. But it does not actually resolve the challenge of distinguishing the working class from the ruling one. This is because, in an advanced economy, whether someone “needs” to work is partly subjective. Millions of Americans survive on less than $25,000 a year in market income. If upper-middle-class families were willing to accept a similarly austere living standard, many would be able to live entirely off their investments.

Of course, Americans shouldn’t be content to live in poverty. But it is harder to say precisely what standard of living qualifies as “enough.” In Marx’s time, a relatively good life for a wage worker might have meant reliable access to food and shelter for one’s family and a little time and money left for simple leisure. Today, the list includes high-quality education for one’s children, access to advanced medical treatments, modern home appliances for cooking and cleaning, Internet-connected devices for entertainment, and often personal transportation, like a car — all of which are typically (and justifiably) treated as basic necessities.

This raises the question: At what level of wealth does a person stop needing to work — even if they must keep clocking in to achieve their desired lifestyle? The socialist writer Matt Bruenig has proposed drawing the line at about $1.4 million (or roughly 20 times America’s average wage): Once you’ve accrued that much in housing and financial assets, your decision to sell your labor becomes voluntary and you cease to be working-class. 

This is a reasonable cut-off. But it’s still fairly arbitrary. Ask an American with a net worth of $1.4 million whether they need to work, and they’re liable to say yes. And typically, they will be correct — at least, in the sense that they could not sustain their way of life without earning a paycheck. You could say that their present lifestyle is too lavish — and that $1.4 million in assets is all that’s required to generate the amount of income one truly needs. But it’s not obvious why this threshold doesn’t actually lie at $1.6 million, or $800,000, or $500,000.

As a result, the only way to draw the upper boundary on who “needs” to work — without making arbitrary judgments about what standard of living is necessary — is to place it extremely far up the class hierarchy: The superrich generally don’t need to choose between sustaining their lifestyles and abstaining from work. But once your definition of “working class” becomes capacious enough to include low-end multimillionaires, it loses all plausibility. 

Ultimately, in a modern capitalist society, it makes a lot more sense to see class as a multidimensional continuum than as a binary. An individual’s degree of economic freedom and power is determined by a host of factors — above all, their household incomes and net worths, but also the market value of their skills (which shapes their future earning prospects) and familial wealth and connections. Even one’s eligibility for social welfare benefits can matter; after all, the largest group of Americans who don’t need to work to meet their needs are Social Security recipients.

Precisely how we should weigh these different sources of advantage is a tricky question. And implicit disagreements over it shapes our discourse about “the working class.” 

Take Graham Platner, the former Democratic Senate candidate in Maine. To his champions, Platner was a working-class candidate, due to his lack of a college diploma, years of service in the military, and low-income, physically demanding job farming oysters (along with his gravelly voice and tattoos). To his detractors, meanwhile, Platner was a pseudo-proletarian due to his upper-middle-class childhood, prep school education, and receipt of steady financial help from his father and mother, a lawyer and entrepreneur. Meanwhile, Platner probably would not qualify as “working class” under the orthodox socialist definition for multiple reasons: For one, he does not need to work in order to get by, thanks to his disability benefits and family support. For another, he is the owner of his oyster business, rather than a salaried worker who answers to a boss. 

In any event, whichever factors one emphasizes, it’s clear that a person’s class privilege increases continuously as their income, net worth, familial wealth, and “human capital” rises. There is no single point on any of these scales past which a person’s class position is abruptly transformed. The gap between “the 99 percent” and the billionaire class matters — but so does that between the top 15 percent and the working poor.

Of course, in ordinary political discourse, we inevitably need to boil down reality’s intricacies into rough categories. No politician will ever promise to fight for the “bottom six deciles in combined SES score, nor will any labor activists ever chant, “The 30th to 60th percentiles in household income, united, will never be defeated.” 

But a taxonomy of classes with several subcategories (such as “the poor,” “the working class,” “the middle class,” “the upper-middle class,” “the rich,” and “the superrich”) will capture a bit more of reality than a taxonomy with only two. 

“Working-class” rhetoric can camouflage professional-class interests

All this said, even if orthodox socialism’s “two-class map” is analytically flawed, it could still be politically beneficial. Perhaps, when affluent professionals decide that they belong to the same class as the working poor, they become more inclined to fight for the latter’s interests. 

Some of the DSA’s own activities lend credence to this theory: Despite its largely white-collar membership, the organization advocates for many policies that would principally benefit America’s most disadvantaged. More broadly, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, many college-educated millennials came to identify with “the 99 percent.” And as this cohort has grown more influential in Blue America, the Democratic Party has embraced more ambitious anti-poverty policies, such as a guaranteed monthly income for working-class families. 

The main fiscal barrier to American social democracy is that our middle class in general — and upper middle-class in particular — pays much lower taxes than their peers in Western Europe.

And yet, socialists’ expansive conception of “the working class” can be put to more dubious uses. Specifically, it can help relatively well-off professionals disguise their class’s particular interests as those of all working people.  

The left’s push to cancel all graduate student debt is arguably a case in point. During Joe Biden’s presidency, the DSA criticized the White House for attempting to forgive only $10,000 of most borrowers’ student loans (a plan that was ultimately blocked by the Supreme Court). Instead, the socialists called on Biden to cancel all student debt, including the balances accrued by the graduates of elite medical schools and MBA programs. 

On its face, the idea that the US government should transfer tens of thousands of dollars to young doctors and Harvard MBAs would seem wildly regressive. The median US physician can expect to earn more than $6.5 million over the course of their lifetime, while the median graduate of a top-five business school can expect to earn more than $8 million. Virtually all Americans have worse prospects than this. And in the inflationary conditions of the Biden era, increasing young professionals’ disposable income was liable to push up prices for everyone else. In other words, blanket student debt forgiveness would have likely transferred purchasing power from low-income workers to early-career physicians and management consultants.

Many socialists would struggle to defend such a policy, were it presented in these terms. But by eliding the class distinctions between low- and high-income borrowers,  the DSA was able to convince itself (if not the public) that across-the-board forgiveness was in the interest of “the working class.”

The socialist framework is similarly unhelpful in the realm of tax policy. 

In recent years, as socialist and progressive politicians have grown more dependent on professional class support, they’ve become more averse to endorsing broad-based tax increases.

From Zohran Mamdani to Chris Van Hollen, the Democratic left tends to reserve its tax hike proposals for the superrich. And yet, the reason that America lacks a comprehensive welfare state is not that our billionaires pay unusually little in taxes; to the contrary, our top rates are comparable to those of some Scandinavian countries. The main fiscal barrier to American social democracy is that our middle class in general — and upper middle-class in particular — pays much lower taxes than their peers in Western Europe. Simply maintaining our existing programs, like Social Security, will likely require a major tax increase on higher-end salaried workers. 

In this context, binary conceptions of America’s class structure — which pit an undifferentiated “working class” against the capitalist elite, or the 99 percent against the 1 percent — can help educated professionals evade responsibility for bankrolling a more egalitarian economic system.

Check your class privilege

Ultimately, the DSA’s ability to serve working-class interests hinges less on its own demographics than its policies and politics. When an organization mistakes the preferences of its most privileged members for those of all working people, however, its campaigning and policymaking is liable to suffer. 

Perhaps, before this century’s end, AI will bring about the calamity that Marx prophesied — and Ivy League lawyers and delivery drivers will find their skills equally devalued by an all-powerful ownership class. Until the robot apocalypse, however, educated professionals and low-wage workers will live in very different circumstances — and harbor distinct economic interests. To safeguard the wellbeing of the disadvantaged, well-off egalitarians need to mind these gaps, not paper over them with obsolete class categories.