There are problems with American capitalism, and ignorant college graduates are only one of them.
After all, a whole generation of people have learned nothing about rationing, the gulag, the Cultural Revolution, the Berlin Wall or the reliability of late-Soviet-era nuclear power plants and can’t be expected to have discovered the history of failure for themselves. In the ivy-clad cocoons of intellectual solipsism where the latest crop of socialist leaders learned their history, Marxism never went out of fashion and was passed reverentially from generation to generation like a sacred fragment of Chairman Mao’s tunic.
But world-weary cynicism about the revival of a discredited dogma must not blind us to the perils it poses, nor deafen us to the reasons it is seemingly back with a vengeance.
Four in 10 Americans say they have a favorable view of socialism, according to Gallup. One-third of Democrats describe themselves as “democratic socialists.”
It’s tempting to dismiss the latest hot summer fad as the product of a postadolescent psychopathology. Recent college graduates are coming to the terrifying realization that artificial intelligence and their degrees in gender decolonization studies make them unfit for gainful employment. Yet ascribing this political disposition to academic garbage-in-garbage-out misses something important.
There’s a simpler possibility: The widespread popular dissatisfaction with the working of modern American capitalism may be the product of some real, objective problems in the way American capitalism is working: income and wealth inequality on a scale not seen in a century; the concentration of economic, cultural and increasingly political power in a class of technology leaders whose products are dissolving the bonds that keep society together; the tightening nexus between business elites and the people who control the political process; rampant corruption and a political establishment that doesn’t seem interested in accountability; the revival, after decades of stable prices, of inflationary pressures that are pushing the cost of living to painful levels—and not only for those with a taste for luxury burritos.
