Young Americans are not drifting toward socialism because their high schools skipped a chapter. They are drifting because rent eats half their paycheck, health insurance costs more than a used car, and a summer job no longer pays for a semester of textbooks. That is the real story behind a recent Fox News Opinion column, Socialism looks appealing when schools refuse to teach its horrific, real-world cost, which blames America’s classrooms for the appeal of socialist ideas and insists the cure is a stronger lesson on the body count of communist regimes.
Here is the mechanism in plain numbers. In 1985 the median house in this country cost about three times a median yearly wage. Today it costs roughly six. Real weekly earnings for workers without a four-year degree have been flat for forty years. Health insurance premiums for a single person have tripled since 2000 and now run close to a month’s rent for the median worker. None of this is in the college curriculum. All of it is on the kitchen table.
The Fox column treats the youth-leftward tilt as a knowledge problem. The argument runs: students do not learn about the gulag, therefore students should learn about the gulag, therefore the polling will change. But you cannot lecture your way out of a pay stub. When a twenty-two-year-old finishes an internship and gets an offer that pays less than her mother’s secretary job paid in 1998, the first thing she does is look up what the word “exploitation” means. The second thing she does is find out who wrote about it. That is not a curriculum gap. That is forty years of flat pay, met by runaway costs, landing on a generation that did not sign up for it.
The number the column leans on is real. The 2025 Cato/YouGov survey did find sixty-two percent of Americans under thirty view socialism favorably, and more than a third view communism favorably. That number should worry every adult in the country. But what the number measures is not ignorance of the Soviet Union. It measures exposure to the American economy of the past twenty years. Young people who watched the foreclosure maps of their childhood block, who owe more on a student loan than the car they drive, who cannot afford the dentist and cannot afford the down payment, are not wrong to suspect the system they were handed is broken. They are reading the receipts.
The concession is this: comparative study of political and economic systems has thinned out of American schools, and that is a real loss. Students should know what the Soviet collectivization did, what the Great Leap Forward cost, what the Khmer Rouge did to its own people. That history is not optional and should be taught without flinching. But the column mistakes the diagnosis. The hunger for an alternative is not born in the absence of a lecture. It is born in the presence of a paycheck that does not stretch and a landlord who will not wait.
So build the thing that competes with the fantasy. Build enough housing in the cities where the jobs are that a starter apartment stops a luxury. Break the medical monopoly that drives premiums skyward. Restore unions and sectoral bargaining so wages track productivity the way they did for the thirty years after 1945. Pay teachers enough that the best college graduates choose classrooms over consulting, and the history will not need to be shoved into a “Dear Colleague” letter; it will be taught by people who know what they are talking about. The Soviet record is worth teaching. The American record of the past forty years is worth teaching even more, because it is the one the next generation is living in.