By Jimmy Quinn
Thursday, May 02, 2019
The prognosis was dark, the response fast and furious.
“People our age have never experienced American prosperity in our adult lives —
which is why so many millennials are embracing Democratic socialism,” wrote
journalist Charlotte Alter, sharing her Time
profile of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter. Her reformulation of the
congresswoman’s words quickly became a flashpoint online.
Point: The economy’s booming. Millennials are lazy, vain
things that pay up for Instagrammable experiences and anything avocado. They
live in their parents’ basements because they can’t be bothered to pay rent, or
a mortgage. Counterpoint (offered by AOC and crew): Millennials are destitute
because they’ve been screwed by the Boomers. They’re strangled by the high cost
of education and health care, and by an uneven economic recovery. Business is
roaring, but only a select few enjoy its fruits.
Which do you think resonates more with young Americans?
Defenders of free markets could win this debate on the merits. Unemployment is
down, and GDP growth last year was around 3 percent, the precise number
depending on which measure you prefer to use. Yet anyone paying attention knows
that Millennials aren’t buying it. Their skepticism of capitalism is now common
knowledge.
At least partly because of this, some business leaders,
such as Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio, are hedging their bets. Absent significant
reforms to capitalism, “some form of revolution” might be around the corner. Is
that wrong? A seemingly endless series of polls would appear to show growing
support for socialism (and declining support for capitalism) among the
Millennial generation and the similarly liberal college students and teenagers
who compose Generation Z. In 2020, these two cohorts will account for 37
percent of the voting-age population.
However, polls that suggest growing Millennial support
for socialism seem to generate more alarm than the truth would warrant. Take,
for instance, an Axios survey that
found in January that 61 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds and 51 percent of 25-
to 34-year-olds had a positive reaction to socialism. While this result
indicates the dissipation of a taboo on the use of that label, 58 percent of
both cohorts also viewed capitalism in a favorable light. Along similar lines,
an Axios/Harris Survey in February
showed that 49.6 percent of Millennials and Gen Zers would prefer to live in a
socialist country — much lower than the 73.2 percent and the 67.1 percent, who,
respectively, support universal health care and free college tuition.
This presents a mixed bag. There is stronger support for
expanding government programs than for “socialism,” which might just be another
buzzword for progressive policies anyway. And as striking as high levels of
support for those policies may be, it’s not unreasonable to predict that survey
questions framed in terms of their cost could significantly lower those
numbers. Still, the general Millennial preference for these proposals cannot
just be wished away.
The conservative response has largely been to say something
about Venezuela or the Soviet Union. Although this is, again, correct on the
merits, anyone who has talked socialism with a left-wing college student knows
to expect a familiar rejoinder: Venezuela and the USSR don’t represent true socialism, and instead we should
look to Sweden and Denmark. The more daring might even counter that Stalinism
was bad but capitalism has its own body count, as author Mike Davis claimed in
a Jacobin interview last October.
So if socialism to Millennials is Denmark, not Venezuela,
“the right answer is not that Denmark is hell — it is not hell — but the right
answer is that in fact for Denmark to work, the whole original socialist model
had to be reformed in a way that empowered entrepreneurship,” argued the
economist Edward Glaeser during a lecture last year. To boot, these
Millennials, he said, are awfully confident that we’d resemble Sweden more than
we would Greece. Disabusing them of these misconceptions is a logical first
step.
But it would be a mistake to ignore the general
Millennial dissatisfaction with current economic conditions. As Michael Hobbes
has noted at HuffPost, studies link
higher unemployment with notably lower starting salaries; members of the class
of 2009 could expect to earn close to $60,000 less over ten years than those
who graduated before the financial crisis. Ocasio-Cortez, Boston University
’11, speaks for the generation that ventured into the job market during the
recession. Recovery be damned, that leaves an impression near impossible to erase
from the political consciousness of that generation, which maybe explains the
nearly tenfold increase in membership that the Democratic Socialists of America
have enjoyed over the past three years.
Interestingly, dissatisfaction with the status quo hasn’t
benefited the DSA only; it’s also put wind in the sails of Millennial advocates
of urban development. CityLab called
2018 “the Year of the YIMBY,” referring to pro-development activists who push
their local officials to approve zoning deregulation in hopes of increasing the
supply of housing and therefore lowering rents. Minneapolis became the
movement’s first success when its city council voted to eliminate single-family
zoning in December. Progressive supporters touted the plan’s potential to fight
racism, climate change, and economic inequality — but that shouldn’t obscure a
clear victory for free markets.
The national conversation about Millennials and
capitalism surrounds the big-ticket items that we hear about all the time.
However, Millennials also care strongly about pocketbook expenses and everyday
conveniences, something that proponents of capitalism would be well advised to
exploit. If Amazon stifles competition and mistreats its workers, you wouldn’t
know it based on Gen Z and Millennial spending habits. According to one survey,
77 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds would give up alcohol if they had to choose
between that and an Amazon subscription. A litany of scandals appears incapable
of putting an end to Uber’s popularity with Millennials. And although teens
might describe the owners of Chick-fil-A as homophobic, the fast-food chain
toppled Starbucks as their favorite restaurant across all levels of income last
year.
The disconnect between that urban-Millennial libertarian
impulse and the generation’s leftist inclinations offers a tantalizing
opportunity. Leaders willing to go to bat for the gig economy might reap
political rewards. That said, Gen Z might be even more socially progressive
than the Millennials. Gen Zers show up at the march, shift consumer preferences
to match their values (even if that’s not always true), and view politics in
terms of justice. To them, for instance, climate change isn’t just an
existential threat to the planet; it’s also a source of racial and economic
inequality.
The Green New Deal pledges — among many other things — a
new social contract to roll back these injustices. It also throws into relief
the trade-off between free markets, on the one hand, and significant government
action to restrict carbon emissions in the United States, on the other.
Generation Z might get on board with the latter option, perhaps without really
considering the alternatives. And that is in part because few alternatives
existed until Republican members of Congress had to start rebutting arguments
for the GND, even as young voters across both parties were significantly more
likely than older ones to consider climate change a problem. Failure on the
right to coalesce around market-friendly solutions — such as a version of Lamar
Alexander’s “New Manhattan Project” or even the carbon-dividends plan endorsed
by thousands of economists — might just push young voters toward the GND by
default.
More than political necessity, though, the moral case for
capitalism must take center stage. Teenagers coming of age in today’s political
climate know only an ascendant socialist Left and a conservative movement
increasingly influenced by skeptics of free markets, such as Tucker Carlson,
who see many of capitalism’s proponents as obsequious worshipers of free
markets. It has become clear that capitalism needs defenders from the left and
the right, especially given that three in ten Republican 18- to 24-year-olds
hold a positive view of socialism. The critics provide food for thought and
ideas for reform. But what remains practically ignored in today’s politics is
the most essential argument of all, that free-market capitalism has drastically
improved the standard of living, especially for the poor.
And so, even as Millennials see themselves rowing against
the current with Gatsbyesque futility, they might still be receptive to a
message that favors capitalism. Gen Z, maybe more so. An episode from another
Fitzgerald novel, This Side of Paradise,
shows why. Toward the end of the book, disaffected protagonist Amory Blaine
expounds on the virtues of socialism during a brief car-ride-turned-debate with
a capitalist. Probed about the sincerity of his views, he admits, “Until I
talked to you I hadn’t thought seriously about it. I wasn’t sure of half of
what I said.”
Responding again to his interlocutor, he continues, “I
simply state that I’m a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation —
every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals.”
The argument for capitalism is not lost as long as young
voters are still forming their views. They can be persuaded, but not if they
are written off.
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