WE SHOULDN’T BE surprised that people are turning to radical solutions like socialism, considering how many are finding modern life in America so wanting. Just because most economic indicators are good doesn’t mean this sense of lack is imagined. It turns out there’s a lot more to the good life than shows up in the reports of the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
The real reason American socialists are enjoying a moment today is social and cultural poverty. To borrow a term from Marx himself, you could blame alienation. The root cause of both Occupy Wall Street and Bernie 2016 was a prevailing sense of political alienation. Young people felt they had lost the ability to make a difference in the world, and so they turned to movements that, in addition to peddling a socialist policy agenda, promised political empowerment.
And while both movements placed their hope of re-enfranchisement in an impossible dream (believing that, somehow, loud-enough protests or restrictive-enough campaign-finance regulations would give ordinary people a voice in Washington), the problem they identified was real: Young Americans had lost agency, the ability to make a difference, in modern society.
Put another way, modern American society, in which community is weaker and people are more alienated, has proven a fertile ground for socialism.
“In a cross section of countries,” four economists wrote in The Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2010, “government regulation is strongly negatively correlated with measures of trust.”
The causality goes both ways, the study suggests. “Distrust creates public demand for regulation, whereas regulation in turn discourages formation of trust.”
In western Michigan, I saw the flipside of this dynamic firsthand.
When you think of Michigan, you may think of union workers in Detroit and Flint. But western Michigan traditionally has had far lower rates of unionization, while still being dominated by manufacturing and connected to the auto industry. At a McDonald’s in Holland, Michigan, in April, I asked a couple of retirees why that was.
“A lot of these businesses are started by local people,” explained Gary Gunnich over his breakfast, pointing toward the many small manufacturing plants in the small city.
“A community like this,” Gunnich said, “you’re not going to screw people over and then survive. It’s gonna get out in a hurry.”
But fewer and fewer Americans live in a community like that today. More and more live in an alienated landscape where it’s more likely that someone will try to “screw people over.” When the choice appears to be between getting screwed and getting socialism, it’s not a hard call.
The less we’re connected to one another via community institutions, and the more isolated we are, the more we grasp for something big to protect us. For young Americans, that’s often the state.
This piece is excerpted with permission from National Review.
Timothy P. Carney is the author of Alienated America, the Commentary Editor of The Washington Examiner, and a Visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.