ideas

Why Gen Z Is turning to socialism

"It's much more stigmatized to say you're a capitalist, in my experience."

"It's much more stigmatized to say you're a capitalist, in my experience."

He agreed that health care was a human right, that politicians should take action on climate change, and that cost shouldn’t be a barrier to receiving a college education. Here was a political ideology that reflected all those things.
Burriel is part of a growing group of young people who say they hate capitalism. They’ve come of age amid the ruins of Obama-era liberalism, and their political icons are members of Congress like Sanders or New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They’ve joined walkouts for gun violence and climate change.
2018 Gallup poll found that the majority of Americans ages 18-29—no matter their party affiliation—had a positive view of socialism.
To Burriel, democratic socialism means taking power away from corporations and the elite, and returning it to working people.
Socialism may boil down to a mood, or a structure of feeling, rather than a politics to adopt wholesale, for members of Gen Z. Though they might hold inconsistent positions—as so many of us do—zoomers grasp the core essence of socialism, and are finding that it provides them with an intuitive way of making sense of the world.