In 2019, Gallup did a series of polls asking various age groups their views on socialism vs. capitalism, and the results came back as one might expect in 2025. 49% of Millennials/Gen Z had a favorable view of socialism, while 39% of Gen X had a favorable view. The Boomers, of which I am a member, favored socialism by some 32%. Interesting numbers for sure, but they don’t tell the entire story.

Yes, things are more expensive, and it is more difficult than ever to afford a home in certain areas. Interest rates are higher (although historically low still), and inflation is up year after year from what it was a few short years ago. Capitalism is taking a hit, it seems, and crony capitalism is a problem, so increasingly, younger generations are looking at alternatives like socialism, which seem reasonable on paper.

However, it always surprises me how little so many of these young people really know of what socialism is or its history. Most, especially those who believe they’re intellectually superior to the rest of us, those twentysomethings who attended a university, love to engage with economic theory, spouting Marxist tropes about the worker adding value to the product produced and how the evil corporatist is only out for their own economic satisfaction and not paying their “fair share” of the tax burden, never really able to define what a fair share of another’s wealth really is. 

They’ll grouse about corporate greed, lament the plight of the working class, and rail that the 1%, that imaginary group of wealthy people who are pulling all the strings, are hoarding it all as squirrels do before winter, not allowing the rest of us to acquire it. Finally, while they attend a school that costs upwards of $200,000 per year, they’ll tell us we’re the problem…that we’re not virtuous enough, not smart enough to understand the nuances of socialism, and that we’re being selfish and unfeeling, laying as much guilt upon us as they can while they point out the evils of capitalism in history, conveniently forgetting the devastation socialism wrought in the 20th century. 

They dismiss with waving hands Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the subsequent rule of Stalin where upwards of 26 million were killed and millions more locked away in gulags because they needed re-education or at the very least, to be removed from society as they were not true believers in the cause. 

They’ll tell us to ignore Maoist China and the millions killed there too, for many of the same reasons, the Cultural Revolution a massive failure and a death machine engineered by those rabid reds eager to spread the real truth of communism’s greatness while murdering their own.

“None of that was real socialism,” they’ll tell us. “Norway and Sweden and Finland are the true measures of socialism,” they’ll say, never once bothering to ask those nations if they’re socialist…which they are not. High taxation capitalist nations are they, with much smaller and more homogeneous populations, populations that would fit into one American city, and populations that are culturally alike, a major factor in the success of capitalist high social welfare nations.

They’ll also never tell us that in order for full cooperation, full engagement with socialism, the military must be called out to keep order, to remove those that don’t believe and might poison the well. Can’t have divergent ideas for the purity of it all must be maintained if this grand scheme is going to work. No independent thought…none. Should you have one, a new gulag will be your destination, or at the very least, a re-education camp. Did we not see this during the Covid adventure, with those on the left calling for “camps for the unvaccinated?”

And, they’ll forget about the Prague Spring in 1968 where Alexander Dubček attempted to put a better face on communism, a kinder, gentler communism, allowing freedom of speech along with political dissidents being “rehabilitated.” This was the Prague Spring, a time of hope for those poor souls caught behind the Iron Curtain, the echoes of the Hungarian Revolt in 1956 still ringing in the air, the sound of Soviet tanks rumbling through those cities and the cries of mothers as they watched their sons mowed down still able to be heard despite the years.

Prague was to suffer a similar fate in 1968, much to the chagrin of the Haight-Ashbury crowd of pot smoking, tie-dyed idealists who railed against any form of top-down government oppression only to support Marxian style government or even the idiocy of anarchist forms of government as the decade moved on.

See, it’s easy to be a revolutionary without the fear of death staring you in the face, or the malevolent mist of a far away gulag with your name on a bed as your destination. Safety in a free society is the warm blanket for the revolutionary, and often the match for his flame, the consequences of which pale in comparison to the real thing.

Sadly, no one heard the cries of fathers, sons, sisters, and mothers as they toiled away in the Soviet gulags, victims of neighbors, friends, and sometimes family members who turned them in to the authorities for the appearance of not supporting the Soviet government. All it took was a suspicion, a thought, or the notion of “getting even” for some slight, and one was turned in, disappearing overnight into the belly of Mother Russia, never to be seen again.

There was one voice in the wilderness, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose pen sought to expose the atrocities, but today, his warnings are as distant ripples from a pebble dropped in Lake Baikal long ago. No one is listening.

In the end, Prague’s Dubček was removed, and the Soviets replaced him with Gustav Husak, a more authoritarian representative who promptly removed Dubček’s reforms, while 137 civilians were killed and 500 were seriously injured throughout Czechoslovakia, many as they stood in front of the tanks attempting to block their way, the ghosts of Tiananmen Square still 21 years in the future. 

No, the many college professors whose lives are mostly lived as cloistered monks in the hallowed halls of academia, rarely exposed to the harsh realities of the world, rarely tell their students of the gulags or oppression or the murders which so often accompany socialism. They just fill their charges’ heads with theory, philosophy, and jargon accompanied by faulty Marxian tropes. And because it sounds so lofty and seems logical, the naive students lap it up as a thirsty dog after a long walk, rabid in their defense, and passionate about their new morality, their newfound “betterness,” as they go back to their dorms and eventually their more than middle-class lives, sure of their superiority.

They’re never told money always rises to the top, even in socialist/communist societies, the betters there living well above their own. Greed, they’ll tell us, is bad, and we should share, said sharing enforced by government. But, as Thomas Sowell once said, “I’ve never understood why it is “greed” to keep the money you’ve earned, but not greed to take someone else’s money.”

I haven’t figured that out either.