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Two writers at The Federalist, Emily Ekins and Joy Pullmann, have an excellent essay looking to explain why so many young people find socialism appealing these days. Part of the reason is that they were born or came of age after the end of the Cold War and so have little idea what socialism has meant for countries in the modern world. They know that there was something called the Cold War, but they don't know much about the horrors of the system. My AP European History students, who are all very bright and engaged 12th graders, are amazed when we cover the horrors of the Soviet Union. They'd vaguely heard that Stalin was a Bad Guy, but they really didn't know any details. When they learn about the state-induced Ukrainian famine,they're shocked and can't believe that they had never heard that story before. I often spend a whole period just telling them some of my experiences from spending a summer in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev in 1979. Hearing what everyday life was like and how pervasive the sense of being spied on was from a person whom they know brings it all home for them.
The authors point to survey data that finds that while surveys have favorable opinions of socialism compared to other age groups, they can't define it.
It's also ironic, as Ekins and Pullman remind us, that Democrats don't seem to be able to define the difference between socialism and what their Democratic Party stands for. Like Bernie Sanders, millennials associate socialism with Scandinavia and that makes it nice-sounding for them.
The other problem is that young people have no idea of the effect that the massive debts that states are piling up to pay for all these nice benefits will have on their future.
So I can will understand the appeal of Bernie Sanders' message to my students. Quite a few of them are very intrigued by his candidacy. And, of course, Hillary Clinton's message is not far behind. I think we need someone to take the approach Ross Perot did in 1992 when he'd just sit before a TV camera and spend a half hour going over charts demonstrating what government spending was going towards and how the growing government debt was going to affect ordinary people.
Some people compare Donald Trump to Ross Perot, but his actual message is nowhere as down-to-earth as Perot's was. I probably wouldn't detest him as much if he were actually about making the sort of decisions to address these problems as Perot promised to do. Instead, Trump seems to believe that he can fix Social Security, for example, by cutting "waste, fraud, and abuse." We've been promised that for decades now and politicians just don't want to admit that there isn't enough waste, fraud, and abuse to address the real imbalance in spending.
Paul Ryan did something like Perot's commercials when he gave the answer to the State of the Union. But we need it done over and over again in clear, simple language if that message is ever going to take hold over the popularity of promising lots of free stuff. As long as liberals pretend that everything can be paid for by taxing "millionaires and billionaires," they'll keep falling for the lure of socialism. Reality is just not as appealing as the cupcakes and unicorns that they're being promised.
I still find it hard to believe that a third of the voters in South Carolina's GOP primary voted for Donald Trump. If blaming George W. Bush for 9/11 and claiming Bush lied to get us into Iraq while telling us how he likes the individual mandate and thinks Planned Parenthood does great stuff for women, and being exposed as a liar for his claims of having opposed the Iraq War before it startedas well as reiterating his call for George W. Bush's impeachment all in the week before the vote didn't sway his voters away, I guess nothing will. Because "he tells it like it is" or whatever. Except for when he's saying something just the opposite of what he said before. And then he lies about it. But hey, he's politically incorrect so it doesn't matter that he's lying to the public.
All I can hope is that the opposition to Trump will coalesce around someone else and do it fast. Jeb Bush dropping out is the first step. But things don't look auspicious after that. As John Podhoretz puts it,....(go to link to read more):
The authors point to survey data that finds that while surveys have favorable opinions of socialism compared to other age groups, they can't define it.
So what do millennials think socialism is? A 2014 Reason-Rupe survey asked respondents to use their own words to describe socialism and found millennials who viewed it favorably were more likely to think of it as just people being kind or “being together,” as one millennial put it. Others thought of socialism as just a more generous social safety net where “the government pays for our own needs,” as another explained it.That sounds about right from what I've observed from my high school students. And the next point that the authors make also sounds true. When asked questions about a government-managed economy versus a free-market economy, they still prefer the free market. They just don't know that socialism involves the government running the economy. As Ekins and Pullmann point out, young people have experienced government-run organizations and they much prefer those run by private businesses. When I teach the unit on the Bureaucracy, I give them a passage from James Q. Wilson's classic work, Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do And Why They Do It , which contrasts service at the DMV and McDonald's and then explains why the structure of government agencies and the role of incentives create that difference. There is also a section on how Donald Trump was able to come in and build an ice-skating rink at Rockefeller Center so much more quickly and cheaply than the city government could do it and why that was. And my students all get the difference. And they all have stories about how horrible the DMV can be. As teenagers, dealing with the DMV has been one of the few times they've actually had to deal much with a government bureaucracy. And it hasn't been a pleasant experience.
If socialism is framed the way Sanders does, as just being a generous social safety net, it’s much harder to undermine among millennials. This narrative says government is a benevolent caretaker and pays for everybody’s needs (from everybody’s pockets), along the lines of the Obama administration’s Life of Julia montage.
It's also ironic, as Ekins and Pullman remind us, that Democrats don't seem to be able to define the difference between socialism and what their Democratic Party stands for. Like Bernie Sanders, millennials associate socialism with Scandinavia and that makes it nice-sounding for them.
Perhaps the most important reason millennials are less concerned about socialism is that they associate socialism with Scandinavia, not the Soviet Union. Modern “socialism” today appears to be a gentler, kinder version. For instance, countries like Denmark, Sweden, and Norway offer a far more generous social safety net with much higher taxes.But of course, the image of Scandinavia as a socialist paradise persists to this day. Neither Bernie Sanders or any of the Democrats or Donald Trump have caught up on the changes in the past two decades.
In this view, government just covers people’s basic needs (from everybody’s pockets, of course), but doesn’t seize all the businesses and try to run them, or overtly attempt to control people’s consciences.
These countries actually are not socialist, but “socialistic.” To accommodate their massive social welfare spending, these countries opened their economies to free-market forces in the 1990s, sold off state-owned companies, eased restrictions on business start-ups, reduced barriers to trade and business regulation, and introduced more competition into health care and public services.
In fact, today these countries outrank the United States on business freedom, investment freedom, and property rights, according to the Heritage Economic Freedom Index. So, if anything, the lesson from Scandinavian countries is that market reforms, not socialist ones, explain their prosperity.
The other problem is that young people have no idea of the effect that the massive debts that states are piling up to pay for all these nice benefits will have on their future.
The consequences of slower economic growth, lower productivity, and relatively lower standards of living are opaque unless you have something to compare it to (Norway is an exception here, because they have oil to sell to support their welfare apparatus). Ironically, the consequences of socialist-type policies inside the United States include the very economic effects millennials are so angry about: high college tuition, a rotten job market (especially for those on the bottom rungs of the career ladder), expensive health care, and expensive housing.My students are often outraged when we get to the unit on economic policy and I show them a few charts indicating the impact of government spending on entitlements in the years when they will hope to be in their prime-earning years. They're horrified and suddenly quite willing to cut entitlements for the elderly and other government spending. Suddenly all those government programs that they have been supporting all year in class discussions no longer seem so worthwhile.
If young people had to pay for all the socialist schemes they ostensibly support, their support might rapidly erode. Take, for example, Joy’s brother, a millennial, who recently earned an $8,000 year-end productivity bonus. He was incensed to learn that he would take home only $5,000 of that after taxes. That’s the way most of us feel at tax time, and it’s a major reason politicians keep kicking the can down the road on things like Social Security and Medicare bankruptcy—because they understand people will be furious once they fully realize the costs of these government programs are too high for us all to afford.
Indeed millennials, like generations before them, become more averse to government social spending as their own income rises and have to pay more in taxes.
So I can will understand the appeal of Bernie Sanders' message to my students. Quite a few of them are very intrigued by his candidacy. And, of course, Hillary Clinton's message is not far behind. I think we need someone to take the approach Ross Perot did in 1992 when he'd just sit before a TV camera and spend a half hour going over charts demonstrating what government spending was going towards and how the growing government debt was going to affect ordinary people.
Some people compare Donald Trump to Ross Perot, but his actual message is nowhere as down-to-earth as Perot's was. I probably wouldn't detest him as much if he were actually about making the sort of decisions to address these problems as Perot promised to do. Instead, Trump seems to believe that he can fix Social Security, for example, by cutting "waste, fraud, and abuse." We've been promised that for decades now and politicians just don't want to admit that there isn't enough waste, fraud, and abuse to address the real imbalance in spending.
Paul Ryan did something like Perot's commercials when he gave the answer to the State of the Union. But we need it done over and over again in clear, simple language if that message is ever going to take hold over the popularity of promising lots of free stuff. As long as liberals pretend that everything can be paid for by taxing "millionaires and billionaires," they'll keep falling for the lure of socialism. Reality is just not as appealing as the cupcakes and unicorns that they're being promised.
I still find it hard to believe that a third of the voters in South Carolina's GOP primary voted for Donald Trump. If blaming George W. Bush for 9/11 and claiming Bush lied to get us into Iraq while telling us how he likes the individual mandate and thinks Planned Parenthood does great stuff for women, and being exposed as a liar for his claims of having opposed the Iraq War before it startedas well as reiterating his call for George W. Bush's impeachment all in the week before the vote didn't sway his voters away, I guess nothing will. Because "he tells it like it is" or whatever. Except for when he's saying something just the opposite of what he said before. And then he lies about it. But hey, he's politically incorrect so it doesn't matter that he's lying to the public.
All I can hope is that the opposition to Trump will coalesce around someone else and do it fast. Jeb Bush dropping out is the first step. But things don't look auspicious after that. As John Podhoretz puts it,....(go to link to read more):
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