The strangest political comeback of my generation isn’t by any one politician, but an ideology many politicians are using to win.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is converting social media views into votes across elections from Colorado to Michigan. And it tells me something extraordinary has happened to my generation.
Socialism, the ideology responsible for the greatest economic failures and deaths of millions of people just in the last century, has become fashionable again. Not that my generation was ever taught that record.
Ask a 22-year-old what socialism means, and you won’t hear about state control, central planning, shortages, confiscation, or concentrated political and economic power. You will hear about affordable housing, “free” healthcare, student-loan forgiveness, higher wages, and about taxing billionaires.
This may be the most successful rebranding campaign in political history.
Only 40 percent of Americans under 30 told Pew Research they view capitalism positively — an astonishing judgment from a generation benefiting daily from technologies created by free enterprise.
How did we get here? Education, or rather, the lack of it.
A young American graduates from college with an increasingly useless degree and increasingly unending debt. She must pay for rent, groceries, health insurance, and transportation. She quickly realizes the home her parents bought when they were 27 may be beyond her reach at 30. Social media algorithms provide a daily parade of rage-bait directed at billionaires.
Then someone offers an explanation seductive in its simplicity: socialism is the cure.
Except it is the disease, with better marketing. The promise of socialism is intoxicating
This is where the lack of education becomes most apparent. Children are not taught about the realities of socialism. Who decides what housing should cost, what doctors should be paid, what constitutes a fair wage, and how much wealth is too much? Government does, and that is the trick buried inside the socialist promise: It claims to transfer power from the powerful to “the people” while actually transferring it from millions of individuals to a small group controlling the state. Socialism doesn’t eliminate power, greed, or elites; it concentrates power, gives greed government authority, and creates elites you cannot escape by taking your business elsewhere.
Eventually, socialism collides with a stubborn reality: Government can redistribute wealth, but it cannot redistribute wealth nobody has created. Its defenders point to Denmark, Sweden, or Norway. These are countries with private property, private companies, market pricing, and entrepreneurship, and they are called socialist. Except that’s not quite true. They are capitalist economies with large welfare states, where capitalism creates the wealth and government chooses how much to redistribute.
Conservatives nevertheless make a mistake when we simply yell “Venezuela!” and consider the argument finished, because Gen Z’s frustrations are real even while the socialist explanation is false.
Housing, college, and healthcare are expensive, and young Americans understandably fear homeownership, marriage, children, and financial security are moving beyond their reach. The question isn’t whether the problems exist, but what actually caused them.
Many of America’s most dysfunctional markets are those where government interference is most disruptive. Housing is scarce where government makes building homes difficult; college prices exploded when the federal government loaned more money; and healthcare operates inside a labyrinth of mandates, subsidies, and regulations nobody would mistake for a free market.
Yet capitalism is indicted, and the proposed cure for markets disrupted by government is… somehow more government.
What Gen Z actually wants is not what socialism is but what socialism promises: Security, opportunity, a home, a family, and a life in which hard work produces progress. Those aspirations are profoundly human, and no economic system has come remotely close to capitalism’s ability to satisfy them on a mass scale. Free enterprise transformed luxuries into ordinary conveniences, inventions into industries, and human imagination into wealth on a scale our ancestors could scarcely comprehend.
Gen Z has every right to be angry about the economy it inherited, but anger is not an economic system, and socialism is not compassion. It is an old idea with an old record, sold to a generation encouraged to judge it by its intentions rather than its consequences.
My generation should know better than to buy something simply because the packaging changed.
Shabbos Kestenbaum, a PragerU personality, is the host of “The Brief" and “Theological.”
Editor's Note: The Democrat Party has been infected by socialism, and it's spreading FAST. Democrats are claiming there's nothing to worry about, but we know the truth.
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