JD Vance warns Republicans not to blame young Americans for the appeal of socialism

Vance is right about this, and it's worth sitting with why. A twenty-six-year-old who can't afford an apartment in a city where his parents bought a house on one income isn't confused about economics. He's looking at the math and drawing a conclusion. Telling him to read more Hayek doesn't fix the fact that rent ate forty percent of his paycheck this month.

The easy move for Republicans has always been to treat socialism's appeal as a messaging failure or a campus indoctrination problem. Sometimes it is. But Vance is pointing at something the party has been slow to admit: a lot of the anxiety driving young voters toward Bernie Sanders-style politics is downstream of decisions this country made about housing supply, zoning, and who gets to build what where. That's not a woke professor's fault. That's a policy choice, made mostly by people who already own homes and have no urgency about fixing it.

There's a real opening here if the GOP takes it seriously instead of treating it as a talking point. Build more, permit faster, stop letting NIMBY city councils strangle supply in the name of "neighborhood character." Give young people a reason to believe the system can work for them without redistributing their way there. If Republicans keep answering economic despair with lectures about self-reliance, they shouldn't be shocked when the other side's answer, however unworkable, sounds more like an actual plan.