The
topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday concerns socialism and “the recent
rise in democratic socialists winning primary elections.” In an article published
at the Deseret News, opinion editor Jay Evensen wrote the following:
I’ve
been around long enough to see how most long-term political plans eventually
crack and disintegrate under the harsh heat of reality. So, I try not to get
too worked up over the recent rise in democratic socialist winning primary
elections, or over the movement’s supposed aims, which sound closer to Marx
than to Jefferson or Madison.
But
those who hope a post-Trump future might revert to the calmer political days of
our youth may be disappointed. The far left seems to be on the rise to compete
with the far right.
And
while that rise is still small, if politicians don’t stem the fearsome rise in
the national debt, a possible economic collapse and the chaos it could cause
might bolster all kinds of radical ideologies….
Democracy
has a way of taking the sharp edges off radical ideologies, eventually. The
MAGA movement benefited from a charismatic leader, which the far left currently
lacks.
A
Gallup poll last year found a majority of Americans still feel favorably toward
capitalism, but support is waning.
As
I said, that trend could accelerate if the economy collapses under the weight
of the national debt and its annual interest payments, which already exceed the
nation’s military budget.
Samuel J. Abrams (professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at
the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute)
agreed with Evensen in his column for Deseret News. “… Evensen is right not to
panic [about] the recent string of democratic socialist primary victories
nationwide.” Why young Americans are turning to socialism | Opinion –
Deseret News
This
is all true, but there is a deeper story that must be told as to why these radical
ideologies have begun to win and why these politicians have been able to
organize so effectively. It begins with the question of why so many young
Americans are drawn to them.
The
answer can be found in a book published a quarter century ago by a late mentor
of mine – Seymour Martin Lipset. Writing with Gary Marks, Lipset wrote “It Didn’t
Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States” and asked why America,
alone among industrial democracies, never developed a serious socialist
movement.
The socialists trying to reshape the Democratic Party
The
answers Lipset and Marks offered were partly structural – our two-party system
and winner-take-all elections punished third parties – but they were also,
crucially, experiential. So many Americans lived capitalism’s promise and
positive realities.
America’s
workforce saw real mobility for themselves and their children and an
individualist, antistatist creed ran deep. Moreover, Americans were formidable
joiners – as observed by Alexis de Tocqueville decades earlier – and they were
deeply embedded in churches, lodges, unions, clubs and neighborhood
associations that gave them belonging, status and voice without any need for a
revolutionary party to supply it.
Lipset
and Marks argued that socialism did not fail in the United States because
Americans read the right rebuttals to Marx. Rather, it failed because the
conditions present nationwide never let it take hold. This points to the
uncomfortable truth of 2026: Almost every immunity Lipset and Marks identified
in their book has now degraded – particularly for young adults.
A misunderstanding of market economics
Start
with young Americans’ lived experience of markets and capitalism. In cities where
socialism has gained political traction – Chicago, Seattle, New York and San
Francisco – many younger Americans are living through soaring housing costs,
shrinking opportunities and dysfunctional markets. Their frustrations are real.
This
mistake is not in recognizing the problems but in misidentifying their causes.
Too often, however, they are seeing the consequences of regulation, restrictive
zoning and poor governance as if they were failures of capitalism itself.
That
confusion is hardly surprising. Most young Americans have never been taught how
markets create prosperity. Significant numbers graduate from college without
taking a single economics course….
A lack of strong social structures
Moving
beyond economic systems, Lipset and Marks would point to the recent real
decline of associational life as a major cause of socialism’s ascent. Theorists
from Alexis de Tocqueville and Edmund Burke to Robert Nisbet and Richard John
Neuhaus have long marveled at Americans’ art of association. Lipset understood
that these institutions kept radicalism marginal by meeting fundamental human
needs for fellowship, purpose and recognition.
Those
institutions have been hollowed out, and young adults are the loneliest
Americans on record. They may be digitally connected and habitually online, but
few join congregations, civic clubs, scouting or recreational leagues. They are
not merely under-informed; so many younger Americans are isolated,
under-formed, unattached and without a social core….
What can be done?
If
we consider this framing, it radically changes how we think about this
so-called socialist surge. If the problem were socialism as an ideology itself,
the answer would be rebuttal with more op-eds, more education and
public-focused work, and more warnings about Venezuela and countless failed
states. But reason and evidence alone do not persuade or work on people whose
initial attraction was rooted less in ideas than belonging.
If
the problem is formation – and that certainly appears to be the case – the real
answer is to rebuild what once formed young Americans into confident, connected
participants in a free society.
That
means teaching economics so that graduates understand scarcity, trade-offs,
incentives and the astonishing record of market economies, along with their
real failures. It also means rebuilding our social associations where young
people find the belonging they now seek in ideological movements like the DSA….
Finally,
I should note that Lipset’s title contained a quiet warning that his admirers
sometimes miss. Socialism didn’t happen here in the past tense because a
particular America existed: prosperous, mobile, religious, fraternal and thick
with institutions that formed citizens and demonstrated capitalism’s promise in
daily life. That America was not an accident, and its immunities are not permanent
as we see now – our nation’s immunities to socialism were built and then
regularly reaffirmed.
Evensen
is right that we need not fear the socialists. What we should fear and then fix
is the loneliness and disconnection as well as the ignorance that make
socialism feel like an answer for so many young people. Restore formation,
purpose, community, and belonging and this socialist impulse will fade the way
of every American socialist movement before it did.
