The Real Reason Why Youth Are Turning to Socialism, and What We Must Do
The growing appeal of democratic socialism in the United States and the West, should not simply be dismissed as another outbreak of youthful ideological fashion. Something deeper is happening. Michael Snyder draws attention to the increasing popularity of socialism among younger Americans and connects it to widespread dissatisfaction with the existing economic order. Whatever one thinks of Snyder's rhetoric, that underlying point deserves serious consideration. Young Americans are not embracing socialism in an economic vacuum. They have come of age after decades in which the promises made on behalf of globalisation, free trade and ever-expanding prosperity have often seemed increasingly remote from their own lives.
The precise polling numbers vary considerably according to how questions are worded and, especially, what respondents understand by the word "socialism." That qualification matters. The 2025 Harvard Youth Poll, for example, found only 21 per cent of 18-to-29-year-olds expressing support for "socialism," although 29 per cent supported "democratic socialism." More strikingly, only 39 per cent supported "capitalism," while 52 per cent opposed it. Thus, even where young Americans are not lining up behind socialism as such, there is substantial evidence of disillusionment with capitalism as they presently experience it.
It is not particularly difficult to understand why. For millions of young people, the economic milestones that previous generations took for granted have moved further into the distance. Pew Research Center recently calculated that between 2019 and 2024 the inflation-adjusted median value of American homes increased by 30 per cent, while the median household income of households headed by someone under forty increased by only 9 per cent. The home-price-to-income ratio for these younger households consequently returned to levels last seen around the housing bubble of the mid-2000s. Meanwhile, around one in five Americans aged 25 to 34 now lives with his or her parents, with housing costs strongly associated with the phenomenon.
The problem extends beyond housing. A major 2026 survey of more than 30,000 Americans found the cost of living to be the most commonly identified obstacle to achieving a better life. Roughly 40 per cent described themselves as financially vulnerable or struggling with basic needs. Food, housing, transport and healthcare weigh heavily upon households even while stock markets, technological companies and asset owners can appear extraordinarily prosperous.
This is where the political significance of globalisation enters the picture. For decades, Americans were told that freer movement of capital, production and goods would make society as a whole richer. At the aggregate level there were enormous gains: consumers received inexpensive manufactured goods, corporations acquired global markets and supply chains became extraordinarily efficient. But aggregate wealth is not the same thing as evenly distributed economic security. Communities built around manufacturing could lose their economic foundations while shareholders and highly skilled metropolitan workers prospered. The winners could point to cheaper televisions and rising GDP while the losers looked at a closed factory, insecure employment and children who could not afford a house.
That is fertile soil for both the populist Right and the socialist Left. Indeed, the two insurgencies can be understood partly as rival responses to the same breakdown in confidence. The populist Right says that the economic system stopped serving the nation: rebuild domestic industry, control immigration, confront trade imbalances and put national workers ahead of the demands of global capital. The democratic socialist Left reaches a different conclusion: if markets have produced insecurity, unaffordable housing, medical bills and extraordinary concentrations of wealth, then government must take a much larger role in allocating resources and guaranteeing economic outcomes.
The socialist response therefore has an emotional logic even if its economic prescription is mistaken. A twenty-five-year-old who cannot buy a home, carries substantial educational debt and watches asset prices race beyond his reach is unlikely to be impressed by lectures about the magnificence of the economic system. If defenders of capitalism answer every complaint by saying that GDP has increased, they should not be surprised when younger voters decide that capitalism means prosperity for somebody else.
But recognising the causes of socialism's renewed appeal does not require accepting socialism as the solution. This is precisely where the debate too often becomes confused. There is an enormous difference between regulating capitalism, maintaining a social safety net and replacing market allocation and private ownership with extensive state control of production. Virtually every successful advanced economy is already a mixed economy of some sort, combining markets with government regulation and social provision.
The Scandinavian example is particularly revealing because it is routinely invoked as proof that socialism works. Denmark, Sweden, Norway and their neighbours certainly maintain larger welfare states than the United States, but their economies continue to depend heavily upon private property, competitive businesses, international trade and market pricing. What Americans frequently call "Nordic socialism" is much closer to capitalist social democracy than to the traditional socialist project of replacing private ownership of the means of production.
History gives little reason to believe that moving from a mixed economy to undiluted socialism would repair America's problems. Systems that attempted comprehensive central planning repeatedly encountered problems of information, incentives, productivity and political concentration. Prices perform an informational function that bureaucratic allocation has great difficulty reproducing: they communicate scarcity and changing demand across millions of transactions without requiring a central authority to know everything occurring throughout an economy. Remove that mechanism extensively enough and economic errors cease being dispersed mistakes made by individual firms and can become mistakes imposed upon an entire society.
There is also a political danger. The greater the proportion of economic life allocated by government, the greater the political stakes involved in controlling government. Economic power does not disappear when it is taken from corporations. It moves somewhere else. If the state becomes employer, financier, landlord, healthcare provider and principal allocator of investment, political power and economic power increasingly reside in the same hands. That is hardly an obvious recipe for liberty.
Yet defenders of the present order make an equally serious mistake if they believe that pointing toward Venezuela or the Soviet Union ends the argument. A generation that believes it has little prospect of owning property is unlikely to become passionate about defending property rights. If capitalism is to retain legitimacy, it must again demonstrate that ordinary people can acquire capital themselves: a home, savings, productive employment, a small business and enough economic independence to build a family without permanent financial anxiety.
The answer to the socialist resurgence therefore cannot simply be "more of the same." The West needs to address the conditions that created the revolt: the loss of productive industry, declining economic security, excessive housing costs, government-created barriers to home construction and enterprise, financialisation, monopoly power where it exists, and an economic model in which the interests of globally mobile capital can diverge sharply from those of geographically rooted citizens.
There is an irony here. The young Americans attracted to democratic socialism may have correctly diagnosed something that many establishment economists were too slow to acknowledge: the economic settlement of recent decades has not worked equally well for everybody. Their mistake is believing that vastly expanding political control over economic life will restore what was lost.
The West does not need to abolish capitalism. It needs to recover a capitalism in which productive work, ownership, family formation and upward mobility are once again realistically connected. Markets need not be worshipped, and governments need not be powerless. The relevant question is whether economic institutions serve human beings and their communities rather than demanding that communities continually reorganise themselves around the requirements of an abstract global economy.
The rise of democratic socialism is therefore best understood as a warning. When young people cease believing that the existing economic system offers them a future, they will search for another system. Socialism is waiting with an answer, and its promises become increasingly attractive as economic insecurity increases. But an ideology's ability to diagnose genuine grievances does not establish the wisdom of its cure. The challenge is to repair the economic conditions that made socialism attractive before another generation concludes that the only alternative to a failing globalised capitalism is a system whose undiluted forms have produced failures of their own.
https://michaeltsnyder.substack.com/p/socialism-a-system-where-the-government
