Millennials and socialism: What’s the attraction?

A financial expert laments that millennials are leaning more towards socialism, arguing that that particular age group is doing so without foresight and a full understanding of the ideology.

“I think they move more toward socialism unknowing,” says Dan Celia of Financial Issues Stewardship Ministries. “I think that they hear some of the programs of the ideology of socialism – such as ‘free college’ – and because of that they lean towards a particular socialist candidate because that’s as far as it goes; they don’t look any further than a couple of talking points from that socialist candidate.”

In a recent op-ed for The Orange County Register, Joel Kotkin, presidential fellow in urban studies at Chapman University, writes that the biggest and most important development of this election season has been the “massive support among the new generation of voters for Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and his open embrace of socialism.” [Editor’s note: Sanders has described himself as a “democratic socialist.”]

For example, Kotkin says young people in Iowa opted for Sanders at a rate of 84 to 14 – and he points out that some polls find more than one-third of people 18 to 29 favor socialism, while other polls consistently show that economic issues such as jobs and college debt are the dominant concerns of millennials.

Dan CeliaIn a recent column in one of his newsletters, Celia contends that most voters – not just millennials – tend to look only to their own personal gratification.

“They are too busy clamoring to put into place whatever their itching ears have heard and their feet rush to vote for,” he writes. “Morality and the Judeo-Christian values, which the average millennial has learned so little about, mean nothing in their grand scheme of governing a society. This Millennial economy that some are so excited about may result in the loss of the greatest republic in the world.”

Another problem, according to Celia, is that many young Americans today feel entitled in a number of different ways.

“So the idea of further entitlement is not something that is scary to them,” he continues. “They haven’t had an opportunity to really live and work in a free-market economy, in a free-flowing process where thoughts, entrepreneurship, innovativeness …. They don’t know about those things and they’re not taught those things in school.”

Indeed, Kotkin writes that few millennials remember the collapse of the Soviet Union’s “evil empire,” which occurred when the oldest of them were barely out of diapers. Meanwhile, Kotkin writes that conservative academics place blame on a lack of teaching about the realities of socialism by generally left-leaning instructors at universities or high schools.

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