One in five Americans now says they view communism favourably. Among those aged 18 to 29 the figure is 38 percent, higher than unfavourable views in that cohort, and only seven points behind capitalism. Socialism, softer in name but overlapping in practice, outpolls capitalism among the young. These numbers come from a 2026 Cato Institute survey. They are not an outlier. A year earlier a similar poll found 34 percent of under-30s favourable toward communism and 62 percent toward socialism.
This is not the America of the Cold War consensus. For decades anti-communism was one of the few bipartisan fixtures of national life. The Communist Control Act of 1954 treated the ideology as a threat to the constitutional order. Loyalty oaths, blacklists, and the House Un-American Activities Committee made open sympathy professionally toxic. After the Soviet collapse the question seemed settled. "Socialist" was an epithet hurled by the Right and denied by the centre-Left. Gallup's tracking of the word showed steady majority preference for capitalism until the late 2010s. Then the numbers shifted, first among Democrats, then among the young, and they have not recovered.
The shift has material foundations. For Americans born after the mid-1980s, the post-war ownership society has become harder to enter. The median first-time homebuyer is now 40. Student debt roughly doubled in real terms over two decades. Housing and health-insurance costs for young workers rose faster than wages. Asset inflation after 2008 rewarded those who already held property and stocks while raising the entry price for everyone else. University credentials became more expensive and less reliable as a ticket to secure middle-class status. Measured against their parents' trajectories at the same age, many young Americans feel blocked. They reach for the strongest available word to name the system they blame. That word is increasingly "capitalism," and its opposite is increasingly spoken without embarrassment.
Memory has also failed. A twenty-year-old in 2026 was born a decade after the Berlin Wall fell. Living memory of the Soviet Union, Mao's China, or the Cambodian killing fields, has largely expired. School curricula reduced communism to a Cold War unit. Surveys by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation have long shown large majorities of young people unable to estimate the death toll within an order of magnitude or to define the ideology with any precision. Collective memory of catastrophe runs on an approximately eighty-year cycle; once the last witnesses leave the stage, the experiment becomes available again as an abstract moral alternative.
Politics has begun to register the change. The Democratic Socialists of America has grown into a tangible force inside the Democratic Party's urban strongholds. In 2025–2026 its candidates or close allies won the mayoralty of New York City, made serious runs or wins in Seattle and Washington, D.C., and swept several New York congressional primaries against establishment incumbents. The rhetoric is no longer limited to higher taxes or expanded welfare. Candidates speak of abolishing ICE, seizing means of production, and framing American power as an empire to be dismantled. "Democratic socialist" has become a viable brand among younger and foreign-born voters in deep-blue districts even as the national Democratic Party remains more cautious.
None of this means a Bolshevik party is about to seize power in Washington, just yet. Favourable poll numbers for an abstract noun do not equal disciplined cadres, a coherent theory of the state, or majority support for nationalising industry. Much of the sentiment is protest, ignorance, or a desire for stronger redistribution dressed in transgressive language. Yet the trend is real, generational, and now electorally consequential in the places where the cultural left is strongest. The country that once organized its foreign policy, its security state, and much of its self-understanding around the defeat of communism has produced a rising cohort for whom the word no longer carries automatic stigma.
History suggests that when the stigma dissolves and the material grievances persist, the ideology does not remain a pure abstraction. It acquires institutions, candidates, and demands, and begins its march.
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/07/state-department-addresses-international-resurgence-of-far-left-political-terrorism