Five days ago, Hillary Clinton explained why democratic socialism has become attractive to young Americans. Their prospects, she said, look bleak. They can’t get ahead. The economy isn’t working for them.
This week, her office posted an internship. It pays nothing.
The listing, for a position at her Madison Avenue office, asks for 25 to 29 hours a week of research, memo drafting, office management, speech transcription, mail handling, and archive maintenance. Compensation: academic credit. In Manhattan. Where the median studio apartment costs more per month than most of these applicants will earn all year.
Bill’s side of the operation is technically more generous. The Clinton Foundation is looking for a “special projects associate” to draft meeting agendas, edit briefs, and coordinate between his office and the foundation. The posted salary range is $50,000 to $55,000. In New York City, that’s a number that qualifies you for a roommate and a long commute, not an apartment. This is a foundation that has moved billions of dollars over its lifetime and hosted heads of state on three continents.
Set aside the jokes. There are plenty circulating, and most of them write themselves, given the history. The substantive point is more interesting and considerably less forgiving.
The Clintons have spent thirty years as the institutional face of a party that lectures corporate America about living wages. They have headlined conferences on economic inequality. They have delivered paid speeches — Bill’s ran into the hundreds of thousands per appearance — about the moral obligation to compensate workers fairly. And when it comes time to staff their own shop, the offer is: work a near-full-time schedule for free, or take a salary that doesn’t clear the cost of living in the city where the job is located.
Unpaid internships are one of the more effective class filters in American professional life. They screen out anyone whose parents can’t subsidize a year of Manhattan rent. The people who can afford to work for free are, almost by definition, the people who least need the leg up. Every progressive who has ever written about credentialism and inherited advantage knows this. It has been a standard critique on the left for two decades.
So when Hillary Clinton wonders aloud why young people are drifting toward socialism, she might consider that they have looked closely at the arrangement she and her husband are offering and concluded — correctly — that the establishment version of the Democratic Party asks them to work for exposure while its principals fly private.
That doesn’t make the socialists right. Mamdani is currently in court trying to stop a raise for teachers’ aides, so the alternative isn’t exactly delivering either.
But it does explain the appeal. Nothing radicalizes a 22-year-old faster than watching people worth nine figures ‘hire’ for a job that is unpaid.
