Unaffordability, not naivete, is what’s driving young voters left, and the piece that misses it is Socialists May Prove Surprisingly Strong in November, Wall Street Journal columnist Jason L. Riley arguing that younger voters are warming to socialism, the word has lost its sting, and the parties are now fighting over ground once conceded to the left. He points to Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Socialists of America, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani, polling among young people, and the history of Marxist movements. The history is real. The category is a mess.
There’s a tell in Riley’s argument he doesn’t seem to notice he’s making. He is certain young Americans turning left are naive, and certain at the same time that those same young Americans can’t tell the difference between Denmark and the Politburo. The two beliefs can’t both be true, and the second one is more interesting than the first.
I will concede the central point plainly. Communism as built in the twentieth century was a catastrophe. One-party rule crushed free unions, free newspapers, independent courts, and the right to remove rulers peacefully. Central planning produced shortages and stagnation. The gulag is not a misunderstood version of a public library. “Real socialism has never been tried” is the sentence that ends my interest in a conversation.
But a command economy is not the same thing as a welfare state. A worker cooperative is not the same thing as a one-party state. Medicare is not the Politburo. Riley’s argument depends on placing all of them under one alarming label and letting the label do the work. That is not analysis. That is a filing cabinet with a siren attached.
The dividing line is not how much government spends. It is whether people can vote rulers out, print their mistakes, organize independently, and challenge power in court. Sweden has private property, open markets, private firms, and extensive trade. Denmark makes it relatively easy to fire workers, then cushions the fall with unemployment insurance and retraining. Norway owns a vast public investment fund without abolishing markets or elections. These countries are not command economies wearing nicer sweaters. They are capitalist economies with the trap doors welded shut.
What distinguishes democratic economic planning from the Politburo is not the absence of planning. It is that elected parliaments write the plan, free newspapers expose its failures, and voters can undo it at the next election.
Riley spends one paragraph on Sweden, noting it has been “privatizing key industries and reducing welfare benefits for more than 30 years.” True. But the welfare state Sweden trimmed is still vastly more generous than America’s. New parents in Sweden get 480 days of paid leave between them. University is free. Healthcare doesn’t produce bankruptcies. Some research suggests Sweden’s school voucher experiment increased segregation and coincided with slipping PISA scores, though the causal link is debated — and it did not produce collapse. Riley cites the trimming and leaves out the rest, because the rest would unmake his column.
Riley is right that the word “socialism” has lost some of its sting among young Americans. The more interesting question is why. The typical young worker has watched home prices rise by more than seventy percent over the past fifteen years while real wages have barely moved. A first-year teacher in a major city cannot afford a one-bedroom alone. A tradesman making twenty-eight dollars an hour may never be able to afford a median home in that same metro without family help. Health insurance premiums on the open market can top five hundred dollars a month before the deductible even kicks in.
That is not youthful ignorance. It is a bill.
Riley’s preferred explanation is that young people are inexperienced and idealistic. That may be comforting to people who already own homes, have stable healthcare, and remember when a paycheck could support a family. It is less persuasive to a worker deciding whether one illness will empty a savings account.
The 2021 Child Tax Credit offers a useful American test. Child poverty under the Supplemental Poverty Measure fell from 9.7 percent to 5.2 percent in one year, a forty-six percent decline. The expanded credit lifted millions of children out of poverty. When the expansion lapsed, child poverty rose again. No one needed to seize a factory. No one needed to abolish private property. Congress sent families money every month, and the poverty rate moved. Then Congress stopped sending it, and the poverty rate moved back.
We already do this. We just refuse to use the word Riley wants to fight about. Rural electric cooperatives serve forty-two million Americans across more than half the country’s landmass. Credit unions have roughly a hundred and forty-five million members. The Bank of North Dakota was established in 1919 and has been profitable. Alaska distributes oil wealth through a public fund. Nobody in North Dakota has been dragged before a planning committee for buying a sandwich. Nobody in Alaska has been forced to recite the party line before receiving a dividend. These are institutions, not ideological ghosts.
The question is not “markets or socialism.” The question is: who owns the thing, who governs it, and who gets the gains? Mondragon, the worker-cooperative federation in Spain, employs roughly seventy thousand people and generates more than eleven billion euros in revenue. Its member cooperatives compete in markets. Workers vote. Pay ratios are commonly around five to one, rather than the hundreds-to-one ratios defended as economic weather in American boardrooms. Mondragon is not magic. Its Fagor appliance cooperative went bankrupt in 2013 with roughly €1.1 billion in debt. About seventeen hundred of its roughly eighteen hundred Spanish worker-members were relocated, retrained, retired early, or otherwise supported into new work. Worker ownership did not repeal competition. It changed who carried the risk and what happened when the firm failed.
Riley’s strongest point is that some people calling themselves socialists do favor central planning or speak carelessly about the history of one-party regimes. They should be answered directly. The Soviet Union was not a rough draft of justice. Mao’s China was not a policy experiment that merely needed better messaging.
But the opposite escape hatch is just as convenient: call every public provision “socialism,” then use the crimes of dictatorships to defend private extraction. That is how a hungry child becomes a warning about Marx while a private equity firm buys a nursing home, loads it with debt, sells the building, and leaves the residents with fewer nurses. The label is doing impressive work. The residents are still short a nurse.
I am not anti-market. I am anti-extraction and anti-ruin. Markets are excellent at allocating sandwiches, sneakers, restaurants, and many ordinary goods. Sick people make terrible shoppers. Childcare cannot be cheap for parents, well-paid for workers, and profitable for owners without public support. Pick two.
So build the public option in healthcare. Put it alongside private insurers. Let people choose their coverage without tying their doctor and insurance card to their employer. No factory seizure required. Expand the Child Tax Credit. Subsidize childcare because the arithmetic requires it. Give workers sector-wide bargaining power instead of forcing them to organize one company at a time. Support worker ownership, credit unions, community land trusts, and public banks. Let firms fail without letting workers fall.
The economy is a set of choices, not the weather. Central planning failed, and the record is settled. That does not leave us with the strip-mine as the only alternative. It leaves us with work to do — and with a menu, in Riley’s own country, that includes Medicare, credit unions, the Bank of North Dakota, Alaska’s oil dividend, rural electric co-ops, and a child tax credit that cut child poverty nearly in half the year we tried it. The young aren’t naive. They’re reading the receipt.