The Marxists have been telling us for 150 years that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. Based on what the socialists are up to, I think I’ll just keep placing my chips on capital, thanks.

A story in New York magazine last week, teased on the cover as “When Did Everyone Become a Socialist?” and inside as “Pinkos Have More Fun,” was not convincing about either of these notions. Far from seizing the reins of power, I’d say the socialist movement is a little more like the Marilyn Manson craze. Highly visible, but not particularly scary. To put it another way, if your revolution assumes an army of male-feminist Pajama Boys coming to get me and my friends, I like our chances.

The article is by Brown graduate Simon van Zuylen-Wood, who somewhat sheepishly admits running into an awful lot of other Brown graduates while researching his tale of adorable young Marxists dreaming of class war while sipping (I am not making this up) frozé in (I am not making this up) Bushwick. He focuses on the Democratic Socialists of America. The DSA, we are told, is both a rising political force and also has one-fifth the membership of the Rotary Club. Anyone who thinks the Rotary Club is powerful also probably thinks “I Love Lucy” is the hottest thing on television, but picture something one-fifth as powerful as that. For comparison, keep in mind that Peter Dinklage is two-thirds as tall as LeBron James.

Even that is overstating the importance of the DSA. It’s pretty much exclusively a Brown-Brooklyn — call it Brownklyn — phenomenon, unnoticed by normal Americans. There’s a scene in the article in which young, excitable white people who made it 30 pages into “The Marx-Engels Reader” try to get a black bartender in Brooklyn excited about the socialism of then-gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon.

“Who?” replies the barkeep.

You don’t stand to exert much influence by replacing liberal Democrats like Joe Crowley with socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A movement to replace Democrats with socialists is indeed underway, and who knows? The number of socialists in Congress may leap to as high as eight, or 15.

But Americans are pretty clear about not wanting socialist leadership. Last week an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll measured voter sentiment on 11 different characteristics. The two least popular were being over 75 (37 percent favorability) and being a socialist (25 percent). Good luck, Bernie Bros! If the average voter in North Carolina or Pennsylvania starts to think the Democrats are being ruled by socialists, the party’s level of popularity is going to approach that of gangrene.

A lot of the Bushwick Bolsheviks are too young to remember any of this, but memory turns up innumerable examples of leftist movements that got lots of media attention at the time but fizzled out without accomplishing anything. Occupy Wall Street was a national obsession eight years ago; actual results were nada. In 2008, Barack Obama thrilled the left when he said he was on the brink of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Didn’t happen, and pretty much his only accomplishment, ObamaCare, is now implicitly dismissed by the left when they call for replacing it with Medicare For All. Before Obama, there were the Howard Deaniacs and the Nader Nerds and before that, there were the anti-globalist window-smashers of the 1990s and before that, there were the Summer Vacation Sandinistas and Fidel Castro fanboys … like Bill de Blasio and Bernie Sanders.

De Blasio was last seen begging the world’s richest man to come build a huge non-union facility in Queens, and Sanders is the personification of the Old Man Yells at Cloud gag on “The Simpsons.” A movement built around forgiving college debt for unemployed global-justice twerps doing podcasts at sustainable brewpubs in poseur Brooklyn is going to run out of steam before its influence spreads past Hoboken.

Kyle Smith is critic-at-large for National Review