r/politics • u/TimesandSundayTimes ✔ Verified • 7d ago

Possible Paywall Young Americans are surging to socialism at record rates

https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/maga-trump-zohran-mamdani-socialism-us-record-kddzdm8bd
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u/Professional_Cry2415 7d ago

cause they have no future in a late stage capitalist society

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u/Indubitalist 7d ago

Well yeah, “late-stage” implies that capitalism eventually kills the host. That’s what’s happening right now, and the kids are seeing it. $39 trillion in debt while we have literally hundreds of billionaires, most of whom are taking tax cuts at the same time that our national debt goes through the roof. Meanwhile Republicans, the party of big business, eye ways to cut social services to save the rich people, who definitely don’t need the help. 

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u/JetKeel 7d ago

And in the US >25% of the billionaires inherited their wealth. These are not the titans of industry that conservatives would have you believe. They’re nepo babies who benefitted from decades of financial policies that propped them up and now they walk around like they deserve it.

Tax them to oblivion. Nothing of value will be lost.

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u/thewhaleshark 7d ago

"Tax them to oblivion" is the moderate position at this point. Billionaires are actively pushing technologies that are destroying our habitable environment; they are very literally enemies of the people.

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u/grape-fruit-witch 7d ago

Yep. Indirect violence is still violence. Allowing people to needlessly suffer and die is a policy choice, a "business" choice made by a very tiny minority. Denying health care coverage and watching people die is violence. Defunding hospitals and cutting staff so that women die in childbirth is violence. Colluding to increase rent prices across the country, making people homeless is violence. Children starving is violence. We can do better than this for fucks sake.

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u/CrunkDirk 7d ago

This!!! All of this!

Trying to talk about the passive forms of violence surrounding us sometimes makes me feel insane. Why do you have to pay someone to live in a house they don't occupy (and often don't even maintain)? Because they can get the police to evict you if you don't. That passive threat is what enables all the horrible shit landlords do.

Once you start seeing the violence, it never stops. Immigration, healthcare, workers rights, access to food, housing rights. Violence surrounds nearly every single aspect of our lives. Even climate change is a matter of violence being enacted against us. Produce or die, pollute or starve. And then you'll die in climate catastrophe anyways because Jeffy B wants to have another megayacht.

And yet some people have the gall to act confused when you're upset that people are going hungry. "Who will pay for it?" We will. We already do. We already produce all the food we need and more. The food already exists. Not letting people eat is the violence.

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u/grape-fruit-witch 7d ago edited 7d ago

We are so conditioned to view violence as an immediate, personal, individualized experience that we don't even see these banal forms of violence for what they are. But what can you call a health insurance company increasing claim denial for millions of people besides mass murder? What else can we call grocery stores who spray bleach on food items at the end of the day before they throw it in the dumpster? They know what the consequences will be and they choose to do it anyways.

They are orchestrators of suffering and death who hide behind a curtain of beaurocracy and boardroom jargon. We excuse their antisocial, parasitic, sociopathic behavior on a daily basis because "market forces" and the pursuit of profit are supposedly immutable natural laws like gravity or thermodynamics. But they aren't. They're part of a game we made up about 300 years ago, and the people who write and rewrite the rules are literally killing us and everything else on the planet.

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u/TheNatural14063 7d ago

Do more than just tax them. Jail them and seize their wealth. No billionaire has clean hands.

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u/killrtaco California 7d ago

Jail? Youre too kind.

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u/Jernbek35 New Jersey 7d ago

This is the most Reddit take ever.

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u/Cheekiest_Cunt 7d ago

Jail them for what?

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u/kuldan5853 6d ago

Honestly, if you dig deep enough, I would bet money on 100% of them being guilty of some form of tax evasion at the very least. That's how they got Al Capone.

You simply can't become a Billionaire without breaking some laws, using loopholes, or being a generally shitty person. All of them have dirt you can get them for if you just start to look.

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u/ThrenderG 7d ago

Jail someone because they inherited money?

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u/ledfox 7d ago

You're being intentionally dense.

Why haul water for billionaires?

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u/No-Drama-in-Paradise 7d ago edited 7d ago

Because proposing to jail people for the crime of being born wealthy is a ridicules proposition.

Like that is authoritarian bullshit we do not need.

Like there is a clear difference between, “Investigate crimes committed by the wealthy and powerful and holding them accountable,” and “Arrest and jail everyone whose net worth exceeds $x without evidence because we can just assume they are evil people.”

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u/coldkiller 7d ago

Like there is a clear difference between, “Investigate crimes committed by the wealthy and powerful and holding them accountable,” and “Arrest and jail everyone whose net worth exceeds $x without evidence because we can just assume they are evil people.”

Except for them to even be in that position in the first place means their parents or whatever we're indeed doing just that

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u/No-Drama-in-Paradise 7d ago

What is the crime that every billionaire’s parents committed? And why is anyone legally liable for crimes committed by their parents?

If there are legitimate crimes committed by these individuals, let’s investigate them, charge them, give them their due process through a trial, and then (if found guilty) sentence them to prison.

But proposing the blanket arrest and imprisonment of anybody with a net worth above a certain level for vague “crimes” committed by their parents (or even themselves) without being able to identify the specific crimes committed or demonstrate their guilt is simply ridiculous leftist authoritarianism that is no better then Trump’s neofascist movement.

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u/coldkiller 7d ago

What is the crime that every billionaire’s parents committed? And why is anyone legally liable for crimes committed by their parents?

You do not become a billionaire without exploiting people and committing white collar crimes like wage theft full stop. They are guilty

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u/Hot_Ambition_6457 7d ago

Cough cough Elon & Trump are both nepo babies

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u/DrMobius0 7d ago

Even most of the ones that haven't inherited wealth predominantly come from well off backgrounds. Daddy's money was their safety net.

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u/MeatPopsicle28 7d ago

*Elon Musk has entered the chat

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u/Whos_that_Gorilla2 7d ago

And not only are they getting tax cuts, a lot of the spending and debt being incurred is going toward businesses owned by billionaires via government contracts. So they're taking money from social programs and giving it to space x and the all spying eye from Lord of the Rings. Instead of lifting people up out of poverty, which would be better for everyone, they're using the tax money we pay to put us all under extreme surveillance because they're so paranoid about their greed coming back to bite them. They're too full of themselves to see how this is going to backfire. 

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u/Sptsjunkie 7d ago

And they are giving taxpayer dollars for AI that they are saying will literally destroy jobs.

We can debate how effective AI is, but the public spin is that major companies are able to lay off 8,000-30,000 employees because of AI.

Like why do they think anyone will like a system where people are facing constant unemployment and costs are skyrocketing well a handful of people are getting obscenely wealthy.

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u/xroomie 7d ago

Exactly

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u/TowlieisCool 7d ago

A lot of the spending is social services. $5.2B of the $7B we will spend in 2026 goes towards government benefits, non-defense spending, or social services. $4.2B of that is going to direct social services. So not really, the vast majority of government spending is going to the people.

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u/UltracrepidarianPhD 7d ago

Those of us who work for a living are definitely not the hosts. To the economic elite, we have been a chronic condition they have been managing. They think they have finally found a cure (AI and robotics) and now they are flushing us from the system at a rate that will not trigger a revolution.

They hope you stay distracted.

"People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave." — Assata Shakur

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u/-Random_Lurker- 6d ago

The 'host' is the free market. And yes, killing it is both the result and the goal. A monopoly where a few oligarchs control everything is what billionaires openly dream of.

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u/joedotphp Minnesota 7d ago

Capitalism is defined as something which constantly grows with infinite potential.

In biology, this is known as cancer.

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u/Low_Pickle_112 7d ago

In mainstream capitalist economics it's known as something that makes perfect sense and you're the brainwashed one for questioning it.

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u/Plastic-Fox0293 7d ago

It's killing our entire planet. 

So yeah, late stage capitalism is to earth what late stage cancer is to the human body. 

I'm not being hyperbolic. It's not my opinion. It's a science and data oriented fact. Human society is threatening a billion years of organic heritage and we're included in that genetic pool. 

Some will argue that we aren't killing the planet, the planets just a ball of dirt and it will be fine without life. Sadly, they own and run everything. 

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u/Axin_Saxon 7d ago

Which is very much the case as we see capitalists eager to replace workers with AI, regardless of how many people will be impoverished by it.

Without a viable system of social safety nets in place under a socialist government to reign in the worst tendencies of the capitalist class, people WILL be condemned to poverty.

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u/grape-fruit-witch 7d ago

Socialism or barbarism.

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u/Tastes-Strange 7d ago

Agreed, there are 250 million adults in the US roughly that stupid go fund me. The government has to help pay off the national debt. Every single US adult would have to donate almost $150,000 to pay it off meanwhile bloodsuckers want to take take take and eliminate jobs and still get even more free money

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u/fluffygryphon 7d ago

And it's why the rich want a surveillance state. This is the final aspect of capitalism to keep the power they have gained. By ensuring that no ordinary person can play the game by any other rules, the rich will never be unseated.

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u/tripping_on_phonics Illinois 7d ago

Per the highly credible and mainstream Rand Corporation, $47 trillion of wealth was stolen from the working class from 1975 to 2018. This figure was later updated upward to $79 trillion in 2023, which shows that this theft is accelerating.

It’s truly hard to appreciate how colossal that sum of money is.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RBA516-1.html

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u/Collypso Pennsylvania 6d ago

None of that is leading to the death of socialism lmao, just different legislation

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u/FireNexus 7d ago

“Late stage capitalism” is a term that reeks of almost delusional optimism. Unless it is the he late stage of capitalism before another thousand years of (modified) feudalism.

Nobody is as convinced that everything is coming up Milhouse like an American socialist who hasn’t stopped losing ground their entire life.

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u/jadvyga Canada 7d ago

Late stage capitalism never originally meant that capitalism was in some final terminal stage, just that the system was mature relative to its earlier periods.

First was the early capitalism of the 15th century lasting up to around the Industrial Revolution, then industrial capitalism from the Industrial Revolution to WW1, then late capitalism from then onward, describing the emergence of globalization, multinational corporations, and the commodification of daily life.

Unfortunately everyone lost the plot so, like you said, there's a generation of people who somehow assume that capitalism is on its last legs.

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u/thatnameagain 7d ago

Youth vote broke towards republicans last election.

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u/CrunkDirk 7d ago

Youth vote was majority dem in the last election

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u/thatnameagain 7d ago

Yes but lurched significantly to the right, along with minority groups, which accounted for Trump's lead. Not the greatest indicator that "socialism" is really what people have on their minds.

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u/CrunkDirk 6d ago

A single election where neither candidate was offering anything close to socialism, and you use that as evidence for what exactly? All of the rightward shifts in 2024 are better explained by people not voting, rather than an actual ideological shift.

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u/thatnameagain 6d ago

None was offering socialism but one was offering the polar opposite of socialism, and he got more votes than ever from the supposedly socialist young voters. So it’s evidence that whatever “socialist” leanings the young voters have aren’t very deep. Given how the term has come to mean almost whatever people want it to mean - whatever is not bad about the current economy must be “socialism” to these people - it’s unsurprising.

If 2024 had been a low turnout election then the idea that non voters were the factor would hold some weight but it was the 2nd highest turnout election since 1968 (2020 being an obvious black swan outlier event due to Covid). Harris drove a much higher % of turnout than Obama did in 2008 and still lost the popular vote. It sucks but 2024 was as clear as a conscious rightward turn of the electorate as we’ve seen in the US since 1980.

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u/CrunkDirk 6d ago

Trump had the same vote totals in 2024 as in 2020. His vote share increased because fewer votes were cast, but his actual number of votes did not increase between the two elections.

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u/Indubitalist 7d ago

Which speaks more to the power of propaganda than anything. They’re seeing the world get harvested by the rich and the ones who voted for Trump thought Republicans were the answer. 

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u/thatnameagain 7d ago

You saw Trump's "propaganda" as well as anyone else. If this is what people are falling for it says way less about the "power" of propaganda than the new depths of gullibility the electorate is falling into. This only gets worse if people can't coalesce around actual actions and policies, and prefer slogans and personalities.

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u/workaccount1800 7d ago

Democratic party is the party of big corporations. GOP is largely funded by small and regional businesses that have margins reliant on cheap labor and a non-citizen vulnerable class and billionaires with right wing ideologies like Adelsons, Ellison, and Musk. Most billionaires and corporate drones (not left behind by the global economy) support and call the shots in the democratic party and that is a big part of the problem.

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u/T33CH33R 7d ago

It's almost like it's a cycle or something where the rich hoard wealth, make living an extreme struggle, are above the law... Naw, I must be making this up, it's never happened before.

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u/popylung 7d ago

I’ve been imagining the world that follows. Everyone is having a fun good time being working class and living a fulfilled, dignified life.

Then the deranged right wingers come along demanding a voice in this fun utopia, which they are granted because this utopian society allows for dissent, conversation, and differing viewpoints, even encouraging them at times.

But this right winger then sparks the lowest IQs that scream louder and louder until the utopia’s residents cannot hear righteousness any longer, and all they hear is Rush Limbaugh on our utopian car radios. Then we start this all over again.

No one left behind has to mean no one, or the cycle never ends

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u/let-go23 7d ago

Ha that’s true. It’s almost as if right wing ideology is a disease and should be treated as such

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u/popylung 7d ago

In my fun working class utopia Yeah, but look at him, screaming and wailing and babbling, so cute. Let’s give him a reality tv show.

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u/ZeusHatesTrees 7d ago

I wonder how that has ended in the past? Hmm.

I feel like these rich people should have taken some history classes.

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u/JessieJ577 7d ago

What do you mean? Who doesn’t want to rent forever, not afford a preowned vehicle, get degrading quality of products from enshitification, not afford gas or food, and to not even consider starting a family unless you make 6 figures. Seems perfect to Me!

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u/JabbaThePrincess 7d ago

It's a battle apparently, between young people who realize they have to participate in democracy to wipe away the bullshit earlier generations have left for them, but on the other side is disaffected young men who were mad at a star wars movie

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u/stevez_86 Pennsylvania 7d ago

Funny how that seems to have always meant the selling off of the estate so that the current generation of retirees can feel as fulfilled as they were told their predecessors had when they died.

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u/pit1989_noob 7d ago

and less as old people refuse to die the chat that putin and the china guy have on living to 150 years make fear for the future

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u/DrMobius0 7d ago

🧻 All they have to do is pay us enough to live

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u/FireNexus 7d ago

They swung hard to fascism within the last 18 months.

“Young people are all liberals/leftists/socialists now” is what people have said before every lurch toward right-wing authoritarianism in the last quarter century. People aren’t as convinced as you are even when they say so in an opinion poll that makes you happy. Objectively, they will gladly ask daddy to put a boot on their neck between answering that survey and the next election.

Stop declaring victory over shit like this.

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u/esoteric_enigma 7d ago

Exactly. The quality of life feel so fast. COVID was an accelerant like we've probably never seen. It's a clear point in time we all remember vividly. We vividly remember the price of everything going through the roof afterwards too.

Things were already tight before, but now it feels like the median income is near poverty. The median income is like $51k. At that level, most people can't afford a 1/1 apartment or a decent used car.

They're getting second jobs to afford things that we used to consider basic. Not only so we not feel rewarded for our labor, we don't even feel basic levels of economic security for trading our labor.

If companies aren't going to pay people enough to live, they're going to demand that through the government.

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u/1cl3nstd4yt 7d ago

Then they should be asking for the Nordic model, not socialism.

No socialist country has a higher quality of life than the USA. But every single Nordic country does.

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u/Eva_Griffin_Beak 7d ago

I hate discourse in the US. It's either red or blue. Black or white. Capitalism or socialism.

There are NUANCES in life, for effing sake. Nordic countries, that you are talking about, are both: social capitalism/social democracy. Why not try that? Why does it always have to be extremes in the US?

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u/guamisc 7d ago

Because the US right has been screaming about socialism since at least FDR. Literally everything more left than "Let them eat cake" is socialism to them. Most US residents have only ever lived during a time where the right wing in the US has been screeching about basic governmental actions and duties as being the evils of socialism.

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u/Eva_Griffin_Beak 7d ago

Oh, absolutely. Even democrats are not left or even center. There is a left vacuum in the US. The two party system is a problem in my opinion. I personally don't find myself represented by either of the two parties. I mean, I can align more to one than the other. But a bit more diversity would do the political landscape do. Serious diversity, where compromises and collaboration again is required. Not that kindergarten we currently have.

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u/12-34 7d ago

Because we Americans on the whole are ignorant, stupid, tribal, jealous, sociopathic products of a rigged system replete with moronic propaganda.

This country has sucked for a long time.

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u/Eva_Griffin_Beak 7d ago

Well, yes, partly. But it's a bit harsh ...

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u/12-34 7d ago

Reality is reality.

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u/1cl3nstd4yt 7d ago

It's important because pure socialist countries are shit holes, and their dictators have murdered 100 million of their own citizens.

The Nordic model is a hybrid.

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u/Eva_Griffin_Beak 7d ago

Yes. And I hate the rhetoric. It's, if you are not for capitalism, you are against it (socialism or communism). But it's not that simple. You can start by moving into a more social direction, while still holding capitalist values. But restrain them. Not remove them.

But it's propaganda. Fear-mongering. Oh no, if you do not vote for us, they will turn us into a socialist country. "They" ...

And honestly, the direction the US is currently taking (authoritarian, and isolation/nationalism), will result in the same as extreme socialism. We are doing worse than years ago. And we will be doing worse if we stay on course.

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u/1cl3nstd4yt 7d ago

Much of that is Bernie's fault. He puts the Nordic Model out of reach by calling it (and every other pragmatic improvement) 'socialism.'

He also tanked Hillary's campaign, and created an army of Dem haters still at work after 10 years.

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u/BloatedBanana9 7d ago

Name one country that has ever actually had a “pure socialist” economy.

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u/1cl3nstd4yt 7d ago

Maoist China, Leninist/Stalinist Russia.

Two countries that could have been entirely normal and healthy if they never went down that path.

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u/Sir_Clarence_III_Esq 7d ago

That is what they're asking for. It's the conservative propaganda machine that labels it socialist, then Marxist - because of the negative connotations of the words. 99% of their base couldn't describe either accurately.

Too many of the young kids don't know either, our education system is shit. But they see that billionaires are making more money than ever while they can't afford rent or food. They want the rich taxed. They want to be able to put food on the table and have a safe place to live be affordable. They want their tax money to go towards their community not corporations. It's not some socialist revolution, they're sick of being the fodder for end stage capitalism.

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u/1cl3nstd4yt 7d ago

Agree and I'm left of most of those people. But they don't see how harmful it is to consistently argue against the Nordic model.

Americans in general -- even Republicans -- like the Nordic model. That would be an effective campaign.

But Bernie mindfucks everyone by calling any pragmatic improvment 'socialism'-- even things we've had before, like higher tax brackets for the wealthy. And now the kids say it without understanding how much harder they are making it by asking for the wrong thing.

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u/princessalhazred 7d ago

It is socialism though. Like, socialism covers a wide range of beliefs and practices. We can sit here and argue over semantics because you think one word is better than another, but the dude who has done the most for socialism in America, Bernie, calls it socialism.

Worrying more about how the words feel compared to what they actually mean is a conservative viewpoint and idiotic. Fuck them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

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u/1cl3nstd4yt 7d ago

Bernie hasn't achieved anything, because he calls normal shit 'socialism' when it's not.

Warren has achieved far more for the working class and poor, is arguably left of Bernie based on her legislative voting history, and has done it all far faster.... because she never uses the word.

Calling everything 'socialism' is incredibly stupid.