#27 Why Young Americans Are Turning to Socialism
A poll landed this week. Nearly half of Americans between eighteen and thirty four say they have a favorable view of democratic socialism. A year ago the Democratic Socialists of America had two members of Congress. They are now on track for five.
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One of their brand new congressional nominees was asked to name a country where socialism has actually worked. She named two capitalist ones. A Danish head of government once flew to Harvard and asked Americans to quit doing exactly that.
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And the top financial worry for Americans under thirty five is not billionaires and it is not inequality. It is the cost of a place to live. Almost nobody under thirty five is voting for bread lines and secret police. They are voting against a math problem that neither party solved, and both parties are about to find out what that costs.
On Wednesday, CNBC and Generation Lab published a survey of just over a thousand Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty four. Forty six percent said they view democratic socialism favorably or very favorably. Twenty three percent said unfavorably. Two to one in favor, among everybody under thirty five.
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That is one poll. It is not an outlier.
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Gallup has been asking Americans about economic systems since twenty ten. In their most recent read, fifty four percent of all Americans viewed capitalism positively. That is the lowest figure Gallup has ever recorded for it. It stood at sixty percent in twenty twenty one. Among adults eighteen to thirty four, it is forty three percent.
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The Cato Institute and YouGov went further down the age scale. Sixty two percent of Americans aged eighteen to twenty nine reported a favorable view of socialism. Thirty four percent reported a favorable view of communism. Not socialism. Communism.
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Big business took the same slide. Thirty seven percent of Americans rate it positively now. It was forty six percent in twenty twenty one and fifty two percent in twenty nineteen.
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Inside the parties the split is sharper than most people think. Among Republicans, seventy four percent view capitalism positively and fourteen percent view socialism positively. Among Democrats it has flipped. Forty two percent view capitalism positively, sixty six percent view socialism positively. That is the first time Gallup has recorded fewer than half of Democrats favorable toward capitalism.
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And it is not only the left drifting. Among registered voters, views of capitalism were thirty points net positive in twenty nineteen. Fifty seven percent favorable against twenty seven percent unfavorable. Today that margin is four points. Fifty against forty six. Republicans are part of that slide.
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Reuters and Ipsos published a poll this month putting Democrats one point ahead of Republicans on which party Americans trust more with the economy. One point is inside the error bar. It is also the first time in that survey since twenty seventeen that Democrats have led on the economy at all.
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Read those numbers together and the headline most outlets are running is slightly wrong. Socialism is not surging. It has hovered in the high thirties for over a decade. What is actually happening is that faith in capitalism is falling out from under it. The gap between the two has closed, and it closed from one side. Nobody converted. People quit.
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Polls measure mood. Elections measure movement, and the movement is where this gets serious.
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Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York with fifty six percent after the ranked choice tabulation, beating a former governor of the state. He was inaugurated on the first of January. A Siena poll in late June put his favorability across New York City at fifty eight percent.
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Since taking office he has run what his own people call pothole politics. Fill the holes, fix the buses, make the city work. It is a deliberate callback to what the old Wisconsin socialists a century ago called sewer socialism. Nothing radical on the surface. Competent government, delivered visibly, by a man who calls himself a socialist. That combination is the entire strategy.
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Then he went to work as a kingmaker. In the June primaries in New York he endorsed three candidates for Congress. All three won. Claire Valdez, a union organizer, took an open Brooklyn and Queens seat by more than twenty points. Darializa Avila Chevalier, thirty two years old, knocked out Adriano Espaillat, a five term incumbent and chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Brad Lander beat Dan Goldman by more than thirty points.
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A week later, in Denver, a twenty nine year old first time candidate named Melat Kiros beat Diana DeGette. DeGette has held that seat since nineteen ninety seven. Kiros was born four months after DeGette first took office.
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Every one of those districts is heavily Democratic. Winning the primary is winning the seat.
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In Wisconsin, state representative Francesca Hong is running for governor in the race to replace Tony Evers. After the New York results she posted that it is a great day to be a democratic socialist, and that Wisconsin is next.
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The organization behind this is not a mailing list. The New York City chapter put fifty thousand volunteers into the field for Mamdani. Their national leadership talks openly about running a competitive candidate for President in twenty twenty eight.
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Their method is worth understanding, because it is not a media strategy. A DSA organizer described it as millions of one on one conversations. They attach themselves to local fights that already exist, over rent, over a bus line, over a building, and they recruit their candidates out of those fights rather than out of law schools and consulting firms. That is why the candidates sound like the neighborhood. They came from the neighborhood.
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Bernie Sanders has been on the road with them. He campaigned in Detroit alongside Abdul El Sayed, who is running for Senate in Michigan. He appeared at the get out the vote rally in Brooklyn with the New York slate in June.
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Melat Kiros, the one who beat DeGette in Denver, is worth a second look. She is a first time candidate and a former attorney who lost a job in New York after writing an essay critical of Israel. She was backed by the DSA and by Justice Democrats, the outfit that put Ocasio Cortez in Congress eight years ago. That is two generations of the same insurgency stacked on one candidate.
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And notice what Mamdani was willing to spend to do this. Espaillat had backed Andrew Cuomo against him in the mayoral primary and only came around for the general. Mamdani endorsed the woman running against him anyway. That decision cost him standing with Hispanic leaders, with parts of organized labor, with pro Israel Democrats, and with the veteran incumbents who normally form the base of any Democratic coalition in that city. He did it and he won anyway. That is a man who has decided he does not need the coalition.
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So set aside whether you like it and count it. One year. Two members of Congress became five. The largest city in America has a socialist mayor sitting at fifty eight percent approval. The same operation is now running candidates in Colorado, Michigan and Wisconsin off the same playbook.
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The Democratic establishment did not choose this. It lost to it. Espaillat and DeGette were not fringe figures. They were the institution, and the institution went down in its own primaries with the party machinery behind it.
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Republicans watch this and reach for the word socialist as an insult, the way it worked in nineteen eighty and again in twenty twenty. The President has said plainly that calling Democrats socialists is the midterm strategy. Look at the numbers above and ask whether that still bites. You cannot frighten a twenty six year old with a word that half his friends already like.
Ask those same young Americans about free enterprise instead, and eighty three percent of them view it positively. That is close to what you get from Gen X and from the boomers.
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Same people. Different word. A forty point swing.
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Gallup also asked an open question with no answers supplied. Name something good about socialism. The most common response, at thirty percent, was nothing. Second, at twenty six percent, was basic services and a safety net. Health care, education, housing. Third, at twenty three percent, equality and fairness.
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Nobody volunteered state ownership of industry. Nobody said central planning. Nobody said a five year plan.
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Run the same question on capitalism and Americans name greed and ethical failure first, at twenty four percent, then inequality at twenty three percent, then corporate power and market abuse at twenty one percent. On socialism they name inefficiency at twenty one percent, government overreach at nineteen percent, and dependency at eighteen percent.
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Read those two lists together and the picture is clear enough. People are not describing two economic systems. They are describing two complaints. One about greed, one about government.
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Gallup's own read of it is that inequality is the specific problem socialism's supporters are trying to solve. Not ownership of factories. Not planning. The gap. And what most of them appear to want is a hybrid, something that narrows the gap without killing off the incentives that make an economy run. That is a coherent thing to want. It is also not what the word on the ballot means.
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For most people under thirty five, socialism does not mean what the word means. It means a country where the government pays for your doctor and your college and your rent does not eat your paycheck. They have a picture in their head, and the picture is Scandinavia.
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So look at Scandinavia.
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In July, Darializa Avila Chevalier, the woman who just took out a five term congressman in Manhattan and the Bronx, was asked directly whether there is a successful model of socialism anywhere outside the United States, judged on human rights and on economic justice. She named Sweden and Norway.
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Denmark, Sweden and Norway are not socialist countries. Their own leaders say so, on the record, and they have been saying it for years.
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In twenty fifteen the Prime Minister of Denmark, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, gave a lecture at Harvard's Kennedy School. His words. Some people in the United States associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism, so I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.
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He did not soften it. He flew to America and corrected the record in person because the misuse of his country had gotten that far out of hand.
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A former Swedish finance minister, Kjell Olof Feldt, put it shorter. That whole thing with democratic socialism was absolutely impossible. It just did not work.
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Now look at what those countries actually do. Denmark has no national minimum wage. Neither does Sweden. Neither does Norway. Wages there are set by bargaining between unions and employers, not set by law.
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Danish employers can hire and fire faster and with less legal friction than an American company faces in California or New York. The Danes built that flexibility deliberately and paired it with retraining and unemployment support. The purpose of the design is to move people between jobs quickly, not to protect any single job forever.
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On the Fraser Institute's economic freedom index, Denmark sits inside the top twenty of one hundred and sixty two countries. On the Heritage Foundation's index it has ranked ahead of the United States. Those are not accidents. They are open trading economies with strong property rights and light regulation on business.
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What they also have is enormous taxes, and not only on the rich. The average Dane pays an income tax rate that would start a riot in this country, plus a twenty five percent tax on nearly everything he buys. A cashier pays that. A nurse pays that. There is no version of the Nordic model where the bill goes to a hundred wealthy people.
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There is a history under that too, and it is the part nobody quotes. These countries did not get rich by building welfare states. They got rich first, on open trade and light regulation, and built the welfare state afterward with the proceeds. Then in the nineteen seventies they ran the thing too far and hit a wall. What followed was a round of reforms that no American democratic socialist would campaign on. Benefits cut. Pensions partly privatized. Regulation reduced. That correction is why the model still stands today.
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And these are small countries with populations that look like each other. Denmark has under six million people. Norway has under six million. Sweden has about ten and a half million. Each is smaller than Michigan.
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So when a candidate says Sweden and Norway, she is not describing socialism. She is describing capitalism carrying a very large welfare state, funded by a heavy tax bill spread across everybody who works. Americans can argue about whether they want that. It is a real argument. It is just not the argument she thinks she is making, and it is not what the word means.
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Even the people who carry the banner know which examples to avoid. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez went on national television years ago and reassured the audience that her version of democratic socialism looks more like Denmark than Venezuela. She picked the country that is not socialist and ruled out the one that is. That is the whole intellectual position in one sentence, said out loud by the movement's most famous member.
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Then there is the question that rarely gets asked out loud. What did the real thing produce.
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Not the Nordic welfare state. The actual article. State ownership, price controls, and a government that prints what it needs.
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Take the one closest to us. In the nineteen fifties Venezuela was one of the wealthiest countries on the planet, with a standard of living in the neighborhood of the United States, New Zealand and Switzerland. It sits on the largest proven oil reserves on earth. Then it nationalized, it controlled prices, and when the money ran out it printed more. The central bank was expanding the money supply twenty to thirty percent a month.
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The result was an eighty percent collapse in gross domestic product in under a decade. That is the worst economic collapse ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere. Prices rose fifty percent a month. By twenty eighteen inflation ran past one hundred and thirty thousand percent, and that was before any American oil sanctions existed. Nearly ninety percent of the population ended up in poverty. Fuel lines in an oil country ran forty eight hours long.
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Then people voted with their feet. Around eight million Venezuelans have left. That is close to a quarter of the country. Colombia alone absorbed nearly three million of them. It is one of the largest migration crises of the past fifty years, and it happened in a country that had oil, farmland and a functioning middle class inside living memory.
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Cuba still rations food after six decades. The Soviet Union killed millions of its own citizens and still could not reliably get bread into the capital of a superpower.
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Every time a country has actually done it, the same three things showed up. Shortages. A ruling class eating better than everyone else. And a police force to stop people from leaving.
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Now be honest about the other side of that. A twenty four year old in Nashville did not live through any of it. The Berlin Wall came down long before he was born. He has no memory of the Soviet Union and no particular reason to have one. The word carries no weight for him because he has never watched the bill come due on it.
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And when the people carrying that word into Congress get asked to name a success, they name two capitalist countries with high taxes. Even the true believers cannot point to a working example of the thing they say they want.
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On Chevalier specifically, none of this is guesswork about her views. CNN went through her archived account from twenty twenty to twenty twenty two. Repeated sympathetic references to communism, to Marxist ideology, to Lenin. Calls to seize the means of production. Calls to abolish police, prisons and borders. She deleted the account in June of twenty twenty two. Asked afterward whether she is a communist, she said no, she is a democratic socialist.
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It is not only her. The New York Times described her as running to the left of her opponent on the strength of supporting the abolition of police, borders and prisons, and seizing property from landlords. Those are her stated positions, not opposition research. She also attended a DSA rally for the Palestinian cause the day after the October seventh massacre in Israel.
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Hours before she won, she walked out of a live Spanish language radio interview on La Mega when three hosts pressed her about those posts, including one where she said she would not use the Dominican flag because she considers nationalism violent. She told them she was not going to sit there and be yelled at. She left. She won anyway, in a district that is heavily Dominican.
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She is going to Congress. That seat is safe. In January she will be voting on the federal budget.
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So why now.
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The easy answer on the right is that the schools did it. Kids were taught to hate their own country, nobody made them learn what Stalin did, and now they vote like it. There is something to that. But it does not explain the timing. Universities have leaned left since the nineteen sixties. That tells you nothing about why the number moved in twenty twenty five and twenty twenty six in particular.
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The polling answers it, if you read past the headline.
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In that same CNBC survey this week, nearly eighty percent of respondents under thirty five said the American economy is bad. Forty five percent said bad. Twenty seven percent said really bad. Six percent said it could not be worse. Half of them expect it to get worse from here.
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Asked what is squeezing them personally, the top answer was housing, at forty five percent. More than any other item on the list.
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So put a number on housing.
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The National Association of Realtors reports the median first time home buyer in America is forty years old. That is an all time high in a series running back decades. In nineteen ninety one it was twenty eight. The milestone moved twelve years inside one generation.
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First time buyers are now about one in five of all home purchases. That is the lowest share since the Realtors began tracking it in nineteen eighty one. The long running norm was closer to four in ten.
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The ratio underneath it is the part that does the damage. In nineteen eighty, the median American home cost about three point two times median household income. By two thousand three it was four point three times. Today, depending on the market, it runs from five times to more than ten.
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When a house costs three times what you make, a young man with a steady job and some savings can buy it. When it costs eight or ten times, the only people who can buy are people who already own something. That is not a preference. It is arithmetic, and it shuts out an entire age bracket automatically.
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The ownership numbers show the same split by age. Just over twenty seven percent of Gen Z owns a home. For millennials it is about fifty five percent. For everyone older than that it runs far higher. Ownership in this country is now mostly a function of when you were born, not how hard you work.
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Now break that out by state, because this is where it stops being a national story and starts being a policy story. The youngest first time buyers in America are in Mississippi at thirty, Iowa at thirty one, Kansas at thirty one, Indiana at thirty two, Ohio at thirty two. The oldest are in Hawaii at forty two, California at thirty nine, New York at thirty eight, Massachusetts at thirty seven.
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A young man in Ohio buys a house eight years before a young man in California does. Same country, same generation, same work ethic. Different laws. The places that regulate building the hardest are the places where the young cannot buy, and those are also the places electing socialists. That is not a coincidence and it is not an accident.
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The rate environment sealed it. In twenty twenty and twenty twenty one you could get a thirty year mortgage under three percent. Everybody who already owned a home refinanced into that and locked it in for thirty years. The people who were too young or too broke to buy in those two years missed the cheapest money in American history and now face a rate above six percent on a house that costs far more than it did then. One narrow window, and which side of it you were standing on decided the next thirty years of your finances.
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The country is short somewhere between four and seven million housing units against the number of households being formed. That shortage did not fall out of the sky. Single family zoning in the places where the jobs are made it illegal to build the small starter home that the previous generation bought first.
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Layer the debt on top of it. The average borrower takes nineteen years to pay off student loans. Payments of three to five hundred dollars a month, every month, through the exact years a person would otherwise be building a down payment. Roughly four in ten millennials say student debt pushed back their home purchase.
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And look at how the ones who make it in are managing it. About one in five millennials who recently bought a home got a cash gift from family for the down payment. Roughly one in five sold stock. Thirteen percent pulled money out of a retirement account early and paid the penalty to do it.
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That is not a functioning market. That is a market where the price of entry is either a parent with money or robbing your own old age.
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Then add the thing sitting on top of all of it, which is new. In the same survey, forty five percent of those young Americans said artificial intelligence will hurt their careers. Ten percent said it will help. Asked about nine of the biggest names in the AI industry and whether they trust them to act responsibly, a majority said no to every single one.
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So this is a group of people who cannot buy the house, are still paying for the degree, and now believe the technology their bosses are buying is coming for the job that pays for both. That is the context the word socialism is landing in.
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Take the young man in that poll. He was told to go to college. He went. He borrowed to do it. He got the job. He shows up every day. A house costs eight times what he makes, his loan payment is four hundred a month, and the typical person buying a first home in this country is now the age his father was when he was in middle school.
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He did what he was told and the arithmetic did not work. Then somebody stood on a stage and told him the system is rigged against him, and for the first time in his adult life a politician was describing something he could actually see out the window.
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He is not wrong that something is broken. He is wrong about what broke it.
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Because not one thing I just listed is capitalism. Zoning that forbids building is not a free market. It is a law. Federal student lending that handed universities unlimited money and then watched tuition triple is not a free market. It is a subsidy. Printing trillions of dollars and holding interest rates near zero for a decade, which lifted the price of every asset held by people who already owned assets, is not a free market. That is a central bank.
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Every one of those was a government decision. Most carried both parties' fingerprints.
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JD Vance has made this case from the right and the diagnosis is correct. Decades of bipartisan policy hollowed out the middle class and this is the bill arriving. Where it gets serious is what comes next.
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His answer is to push harder on economic nationalism. Bring the factories home, tax the imports, rebuild the kind of job a man can raise a family on. Reasonable people on the right disagree about whether tariffs get you there. Nobody serious on the right disagrees anymore that the middle of this country got stripped and that somebody has to say so out loud.
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He looked at a system that promised him a house if he worked and did not produce one, and he concluded the answer is more government. That is the step that does not follow. Government is what closed the door. Handing it the keys to the rest of the building does not open it.
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And there is a cost to getting this wrong that his generation pays, not mine. Rent control does not create apartments. It freezes the ones that exist and stops anyone from building more. Government grocery stores do not lower food prices. They lose money and close. Taxing the people who finance construction does not produce construction. Every one of those tools has been tried in an American city inside living memory and the results are on the books.
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Which brings me to where I land on it.
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Mocking these kids is not an argument. Calling them communists is not an argument, it is not accurate for most of them, and they stopped flinching at it a while ago. Forty six percent is not a fringe. It is a coalition, and it is beating people who have been in Congress since before those voters could read.
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If the right wants to beat this, it has to answer the thing actually driving it. Build the houses. Break the zoning. Shut down the federal lending machine that inflated tuition. Stop protecting the people who already hold the assets at the expense of the people trying to become people who hold assets. That is a conservative argument. It always was. Somewhere along the way our side stopped making it and started defending whatever the market happened to produce, including the parts government rigged.
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And I mean specific things, not slogans. Let people build by right instead of making every project beg a zoning board for three years. End the rules that make it illegal to put a small house or a duplex on a lot in the parts of town where the jobs are. Cap what the federal government will lend an eighteen year old for a degree, because the unlimited line of credit is what let tuition triple in the first place. Stop treating rising home prices as good news in the economic reports, because a rising home price is a young family being priced out.
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None of that is charity and none of it is redistribution. It is getting government out of the way of supply, which is the oldest conservative idea there is.
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A generation that cannot buy a house is not going to defend a system that will not sell them one. That is not ideology. That is a man doing the math on his own life.
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The votes this year were in New York, Denver and Wisconsin. The numbers behind those votes were in a housing report and a student loan statement. Whichever side takes that seriously first wins the next four years.
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AND THAT'S IT.
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That is everyone knows. The hard truth, the stuff nobody else will say, and the thing that keeps you going.
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I am Brian Bullock of starborn studios. Find me on X at Everyoneknows1. If this hits you share it with someone who needs to hear it. Subscribe. leave a review. Come find us at brianbullockwriter.com
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Because everyone knows. Your silence is your consent