Why an entire generation is rejecting capitalism, and what Labor already built to answer them
I actually did learn what capitalism was from a textbook. I also learned it living inside an America where the earmarks of prosperity, civil service, community, and social capital were not slogans. They were simply how life worked. I am a baby boomer. I am a progressive. And I have had the rare vantage point of watching capitalism in two of its versions, not one, because I was alive and paying attention while it changed from the first into the second.
My parents met in the military during World War Two. When the war ended, they settled in Gallipolis, Ohio, a small Appalachian town in the heart of the Rust Belt where my mother was born and always called home. They raised fourteen children there, eleven boys and three girls. Six of us sons served this country in uniform, and one gave the full measure of devotion this country can ask of anyone. That is not abstraction to me. That was my home.
That home, and the country that understood that the GI Bill made it possible for more than 25 million veterans to go to college or obtain real craft and trades training. It was the home and the country that, spurred on by an exploding post-war car culture, through the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act, transformed its vast landscape, forged a monumental 41,000-mile network of concrete and steel that physically united a continent. That home, that nation, supercharged our modern commerce and forever reshaped American freedom, building a middle class wide enough to hold a family like ours.
It was not an accident. We had civics classes that were not decorative. We studied geography and learned about the nations of the world. We studied economics because it was considered necessary to a free world economy. And, we read newspapers daily and discussed what was in them to gain knowledge about our world and its current events.
The world of that time was replete with organizations that have since severely dwindled, including traditional fraternal orders (such as Freemasonry, the Elks, and the Lions Club), women’s federations, labor unions, parent-teacher associations (PTAs), and grassroots community leagues like bowling and bridge clubs. Labor unions were part of that vast civic fabric, as trusted as the school board or the church.
Harvard’s Robert Putnam later put a name and a data set to what I lived: social capital, the networks of trust that let strangers cooperate. He found that for two-thirds of the twentieth century, civic participation in this country rose, and then, quietly, sometime around the nineteen sixties and seventies, it reversed. Newspaper readership fell. Union membership fell. The whole machinery of showing up fell. That is not a nostalgia trip. That is capitalism, functioning the way it was supposed to function, and then, slowly, it stopped.
You see, I watched two versions of Capitalism. One in the community and the family I just spoke of. The one that raised me. And again, for the better part of the last ten years, the one sitting across the table, on behalf of the people who do the actual work. I am not writing this from a boardroom, and I am not writing it from a picket line alone, though I have stood on plenty. I am writing it from a home community that lived this argument before I did, and from the years since spent where the theory stops and the contract gets signed.
Capitalism did something no other economic system in human history has done. It pulled billions of people out of poverty. It funded the mightiest force for freedom and democracy the world has ever seen, the same industrial capacity that built the arsenal that defeated fascism in World War II. For most of a century, that was the deal. Free enterprise built the wealth, and that wealth defended liberty, at home and abroad.
But somewhere in the last forty or fifty years, the deal quietly changed. The same system that built the arsenal of democracy is now at risk of being repurposed as a shield for a new American oligarchy, and anyone who notices the switch gets shamed for it, blamed for it, called ungrateful or radical for pointing at the very cronyism that is hollowing out the thing capitalism actually built.
For a long time, that change stayed hidden. Cronyism wore a suit, calling itself free market orthodoxy, hiding in footnotes nobody outside Washington ever read. Labor unions were only one piece of what it dismantled while it hid. What used to be community dialogue, the kind that happened in a union hall or a civics class, got handed instead to marketers and political strategists, tested in focus groups, sold back to us as though it were our own idea all along.
The people did not lose the final say in their own communities all at once. It was licensed away from them, one consulting contract at a time. You do not have to go looking for any of this anymore. The mask is off. Bailouts get announced instead of buried, favors get live-tweeted instead of laundered through committee, and for a generation raised watching all of this on a screen before breakfast, the system is rigged is not a theory. It is just what the news looks like, every single day.
Now do the math on that. And this is important… Forty or fifty years ago lands you in the late nineteen seventies, the early nineteen eighties. Anyone under forty today was born after that shift had already begun, most of them well after. That means the very generation this argument is about has never once seen the other version of Capitalism. They have no experience with “The American Dream.” They were not around when the deal still held. They grew up watching bailouts get announced like victories, monopolies get shrugged at, executives walk away richer for running a company into the ground rather than operating it for the good and welfare of the market, the community, and the employees. All they know is a housing market that looks like a toll booth, and a student loan bill that looks like a life sentence.
To them, this is not a corruption of capitalism. This is capitalism, full stop. It’s the only version they have ever experienced and the one they have been handed. Ask a twenty-five-year-old to defend a version of the system he has never once been allowed to see, and you are not asking him to defend an idea. You are asking him to defend a stranger. That is not a rhetorical trick on their part. It is an honest account of their own lived experience, and before anyone argues with it, it deserves to be believed.
Look at the numbers, because they say the same thing in a different language. Gallup has tracked how Americans feel about capitalism since 2010, and this year that number hit its lowest point in fifteen years of asking, fifty-four percent favorable, down from sixty just four years ago. Among Democrats, it is forty-two percent favorable to capitalism against sixty-six percent favorable to socialism, the first time either number has crossed the other. Among Democrats under fifty, the ones driving the whole collapse, it is just thirty-one percent, down from fifty-four percent when Gallup first asked in 2010. That is not a generation drifting left on a whim.
That is a generation reaching the opposite conclusion their parents did, because they were handed the opposite version of the system. You can watch that exact math play out in Michigan. On August 4, Abdul El-Sayed, backed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, beat Congresswoman Haley Stevens for the Democratic Senate nomination, outspent roughly eight to one, much of it AIPAC money against him, and won anyway, by about a point, in a state that has voted for Trump twice.
And here is the detail that belongs at the center of this whole argument. El-Sayed insists, in interview after interview, that he is not a socialist. I believe in capitalism, he has said plainly; I just believe that capitalism has to be regulated against monopoly and corporate consolidation, not against markets themselves. He says this despite years at Democratic Socialists of America events, despite headlining their fundraiser, despite Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez putting their names behind him anyway. I think he is telling the truth, and the label everyone keeps reaching for does not fit what he is actually selling. He is not selling socialism. He is selling capitalism with the cronyism regulated back out of it. He just does not have an institution old enough, or trusted enough yet, to make people believe the fix is real.
And something is stirring because of it. For cycle after cycle, this country has watched apathy win: fewer voters, fewer volunteers, fewer people who believed showing up still meant something. But that tide may be turning, and it is turning first on the edges, not the middle. The energy that actually gets a twenty-five-year-old off the couch and into a canvassing shift is showing up on the far left and the far right, and the sensible, competent middle is starting to feel like it got left at the station.
The Democratic Socialists are not winning young people with charisma alone. They are winning them with a promise: somebody will name the villain, fight the villain, and not apologize for it. Moderate leadership, for a decade now, has offered competence, and competence keeps the lights on, but it does not feel like hope, and it never has. Naming the villain is not the same thing as building the machine that beats the villain, and a movement built on urgency owes itself a reckoning with whether urgency alone can govern. That does not make the diagnosis wrong. The rigging is real. That reckoning is where Labor comes in.
Here is what nobody says loudly enough. This is not just an answer for young Democratic Socialists. Ask an Independent what they actually want, and it is not more government; it is a fair shot and someone who will not sell them out. Ask a conservative who still believes in limited, honest government, not a rigged one, and you get the same list: a real voice in your own community, equal law applied equally, and an end to the oligarchy picking the country’s pocket while the political elites just look away.
That list- civic voice, balance, equity under the law, the cessation of the pilfering- is not a partisan wish list. It is what Labor has been building, testing, and delivering for a hundred years, diminished as it may be today. It is the one throughline that runs under all of this. Not cronyism, not the state, but the men and women of the Labor movement and the apparatus they built, still standing, and still the only practical, tested, operating model this country has for putting the final say back in the hands of the people who do the work.
Labor’s answer was never “hand the power to the state.” It has always been “force the market to share the table.” A union does not abolish the employer or nationalize the factory. It sits down across from capital and says, you do not get to decide this alone anymore, not the wages, not the safety standards, not the person who gets protected when the company decides a person is disposable.
That is not anti-capitalist. That is capitalism with a second party in the room who can say no and make it stick. Economists have a name for this, going back to John Kenneth Galbraith: countervailing power, a third force that belongs to neither the boardroom nor the state. Labor was never the alternative to capitalism. Labor is the thing that keeps capitalism honest enough to keep believing in.
And here is what should stop every one of us in Labor leadership cold. We already built the machine the DSA is promising to build from scratch: grievance procedures that outlast a single term in office, pension funds that pay out on the day you retire, apprenticeship pipelines that turn a nineteen-year-old with nothing into a thirty-year-old with a trade and a voice. We built all of it. But we have not made it feel alive to the twenty-five-year-old who has never held a union card, who has never watched a picket line win. To that kid, Labor sounds like their grandfather’s factory. The DSA sounds like tomorrow, even when tomorrow is still just a promise nobody has had to keep yet.
That is the gap we can close, because we are not selling a promise. We are selling a receipt. A union contract is not a fight somebody says they are going to have someday. It is a fight that already happened and already won something you can hold in your hand: a raise, a grievance procedure, a pension, a say. That is a harder story to tell in ninety seconds on a debate stage. It is also a truer one, and truer stories, told with the same fire currently lighting up the far left, do not lose that fight. They win it, the same way they have been winning it since before any of us were born.
Because here is the real distinction that actually matters. Cronyism concentrates power in the hands of the connected. Socialism proposes to concentrate power in the hands of the state. Labor does neither. Labor distributes power to the people who are actually doing the work, without asking anyone to place their faith in a boardroom they cannot see or a bureaucracy they cannot vote out. It deserves the same hope, the same electricity, the same twenty-five-year-olds showing up, that the far left has managed to borrow for a season.
It is time we took it back. Not with a slogan. Not with a promise nobody has had to keep yet. With the same tool that built the arsenal of democracy in the first place: ordinary people, standing together, refusing to be told what they are worth by someone who has never done the work. That is not nostalgia. That is not history. That is the oldest, truest fight there is, older than the DSA, older than the oligarchs, older than the mask that just came off. And it is not finished. It is still being fought, in this hall, in this union, in every twenty-five-year-old we have not reached yet.
So let the far left have its moment and let the far right have its noise. Labor never promised to abolish capitalism. It promised to make capitalism answer to the people who create its wealth, and that promise is no less true today than it was a hundred years ago. The only thing that has changed is whether we still have the nerve to say it out loud, with the same fire everyone else has been borrowing from us all along.
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