Noam Scheiber

They're governed by MBAs and bean counters who are suddenly telling them how much time they can spend with their patients, how long they can keep patients in the hospital.

what they have to ask them when they talk to them.

And these are people who've often trained for years and years.

The thing that they pride themselves on is their professional judgment, the ability to evaluate a situation, to apply the best treatment.

And suddenly they feel like they're being micromanaged by people who have no medical expertise to speak of.

So it's incredibly alienating.

Yeah.

And what you start to see is that a lot of highly trained white collar workers who at one point had thought of themselves as management adjacent, they start to, in a lot of cases, identify as just kind of rank and file employees who were bossed around by management.

It's at this point in 2016 that all these grievances start to coalesce into a mainstream political figure.

And that figure, at least on the left, is Bernie Sanders.

Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, comes along and sort of enters the stage talking about the 99% versus the 1% and how the bosses and the billionaires are dominating the political system in ways that are not aligned with the interests of ordinary workers.

And in ways that might not have been imaginable a few decades earlier, a lot of college grads, and especially younger college grads, really start to identify with that language.

I think that's right.

Of course, we all know that Hillary Clinton goes on to win the Democratic presidential nomination.

But you see Sanders really outperform with young people and especially with young college graduates.

Overall, he loses to Hillary Clinton by a small margin among college grads.

But among young college grads, college grads under 30, he crushes her by a two to one margin.

And more broadly, what you see Sanders doing is really giving voice to this sense of grievance on the national political stage, this sense that the economy just isn't working for them.

It's not too long after Bernie that we see Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez win a congressional seat in New York City.

Yep.