We like Radiohead, we like philosophy, we like traveling. Now we understand each other.” They may not agree but Chris’ views made sense, Mendiola then realized. “It’s easier to lean toward libertarian ideologies because it’s more familiar to the American way of life,” he allows – in a kind of living affront to Konst’s admonition that the era of compromise is over. Washington, D.C.’s typically conservative Catholic University of America has a fledgling democratic socialist club now, too. Second- semester senior Duane Patrick Murphy, 23, who founded it earlier this year, is still feeling out its utility on campus. “We need to have a serious discussion about what the ideology actual is in practice, a dialogue beyond just ’well look at Denmark,’” he tells me, sounding circumspect beyond his years. (And he has a point: As Danish Prime Minister Lars-Løkke Rasmussen told an audience at Harvard in 2015, “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”) Among campus socialists Murphy sounds like something of a rebel, but he comes by it naturally, having grown up in Orange County, California – with Fox News a more- or-less constant background presence in his parents’ house. “My dad is a Reaganite. He’s like, ’What’s going on here?’ And I’m like, ’This isn’t the Cold War.’” Murphy hopes to find work as a far-left political organizer after graduation but expects to move into a more remunerative field once he’s ready to start a family – by which point, Murphy’s dad believes, he’ll be ready to reconsider his worldview too.
Their eager embrace of socialist tenets – free health care, college, housing, and a universal basic income for all – has less to do with their having been born into a post-Cold-War world, and more to do with those millionaires and billionaires Bernie Sanders mentioned.
There might be something to that paternal prediction. Support for socialist programs is closely linked to age – with a majority of Americans under 35, those with no clear memories of 20th century communism in other words, increasingly favoring socialism. Gallup’s 2018 poll of Democrats breaks the spread at age 30, after which support for capitalism increases from 45% to 58%. And Axios’ data show that older millennials polled across party lines tend to soften on capitalism, which six out of 10 25-to-34-year- old respondents view positively, compared to five in 10 with a favorable view of socialism. Respondents in their late twenties and early thirties don’t remember Reagan any better. But they have been living and working in American society longer than their college- aged counterparts – and, not unlike DSA Diego meeting libertarian Chris, they must have found something that made sense.
Alice Lloyd is a writer in Washington, D.C. and a Weekly Standard widow.
American Consequences
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