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Kids today love socialism not because of their radical professors, but because of their radical politicians - namely, those devoting their political careers to
by beat 9y ago
Kids today love socialism not because of their radical professors, but because of their radical politicians - namely, those devoting their political careers to destroying what little safety net remains.
It's a generation that has watched health care become utterly unaffordable, that no longer have any hope of the lifelong job security their grandparents often enjoyed, who are taking on a lifetime of debt in terms of student loans so they can ever hope to make much more than minimum wage, who despair of ever owning a home, who have watched more than 100% of all economic growth for their entire lives go to a handful of extremely wealthy people at the top of the chain.
Capitalism has nothing to offer them but chains at this point. The market has failed in one of its most fundamental tasks - getting people to have faith in the market. If an entire generation starts thinking that there's nothing in it for them... sooner or later, they'll fight back.
My biggest fear is that the fight could be a lot messier than mere single payer health care and free college.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> Kids today love socialism not because of their radical professors, but because of their radical politicians - namely, those devoting their political careers to destroying what little safety net remains. That's true, both in part for the reason you describe and also in part because those same politicians have driven a linguistic drift where what would previously be described as “preserving the modern mixed economy against a regress to 19th Century capitalism” is now often , in American political vernacular, “socialism”. While, sure, that scares some people into conformance with the right-wing program, it also reduces the cognitive distance between preserving the status quo, social democracy, democratic socialism, and even harder-left forms of socialism. When everything they isn't right-wing extremism is “socialism”, the term becomes less scary.