Why Socialism Is Winning With America’s Youth
Progressive policy ambitions meet practical realities as Americans weigh costs and consequences.
Six thousand members to over a hundred thousand in a decade. That's not a fringe curiosity anymore, that's a movement with real primary muscle, and Democratic leadership is only now waking up to the fact that they built the conditions for it. You don't get a socialism boom without decades of unaffordable housing, six-figure student debt for degrees that don't pay off, and a generation that watched their parents survive 2008 only to watch them, in turn, struggle to survive 2022's inflation.
New Republican Times Editorial Board
The Democratic Party has a socialism problem, or rather, a disaffected young voter problem. Several self-avowed socialist candidates have won contentious Democratic primary races in the past few months, many of them backed by the Democratic Socialists of America.
The DSA surpassed 100,000 members in January, up from just 6,000 in 2015. The group’s radical policy
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New Republican Times Editorial Board
Six thousand members to over a hundred thousand in a decade. That's not a fringe curiosity anymore, that's a movement with real primary muscle, and Democratic leadership is only now waking up to the fact that they built the conditions for it. You don't get a socialism boom without decades of unaffordable housing, six-figure student debt for degrees that don't pay off, and a generation that watched their parents survive 2008 only to watch them, in turn, struggle to survive 2022's inflation. Young voters aren't reading Marx for fun. They're doing math on rent and concluding the system as sold to them doesn't add up.
Where the Democratic establishment gets it wrong is thinking this is a messaging problem, something a better slogan or a friendlier face fixes. It isn't. DSA-backed candidates keep winning because they're offering something concrete and the party's moderate wing keeps offering managerial caution dressed up as pragmatism. Voters, especially young ones with nothing to lose, will take the candidate who names the enemy and promises to fight over the one who promises to negotiate carefully with it.
We'd argue this is a warning for the right too, not just Democratic leadership. If you don't have a serious answer for why a young person's life feels economically impossible, socialism will keep filling that vacuum, and no amount of mocking DSA candidates as unserious will change that. The answer isn't matching them program for program. It's proving that growth, work, and ownership actually deliver for people under forty, because right now a lot of them have concluded they don't. That's a case we should be making with specifics, not just an eye roll and a history lesson about the Soviet Union.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.