July 24, 2017
by theawakenedzombie
Are millennials increasingly anti-capitalist? That’s the question Chicago public radio station WBEZ posed recently to me and The Nation‘s Sarah Leonard. (You can listen to the whole thing here.)
“The explosive popularity of Bernie Sanders in the U.S. and Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K. among younger voters revealed millennials’ desire for a new economic system,” states the promo for the segment on WBEZ program Worldview. “It’s no wonder, as millennials are likely to be economically worse off than their parents or grandparents, especially those who became job-seeking adults after the Great Recession of 2008.”
That all makes for a tidy narrative, but it’s one built on the flimsiest of evidence. The main data offered during the Worldview segment was a 2016 Harvard poll, in which 51 percent of 18- to 29-year-old respondents had an unfavorable view of capitalism. But as I pointed out at the time (and on the show), the same poll showed that an even greater number of young people—59 percent—had an unfavorable view of socialism.
And while 42 percent of the millennials that Harvard surveyed had a positive view of capitalism, just 33 percent had a positive view of socialism.
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