Why Is Communism Is Cool Again
Young People Don't Care About the U.South.S.R.
Older people still meet socialism and communism equally dangerous, authoritarian political systems, whereas younger people are more likely to see them as economic systems, and to care far less one way or another.
Near the author: Annie Lowrey is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
In a grainy video, a shirtless Bernie Sanders sings "This State Is Your Land" at a crowded tabular array during a honeymoon visit to the Soviet Union in 1988. In a printing briefing held subsequently, he praises the Moscow metro system and Soviet arts programs. In a recording from the early on 1970s, Sanders says, "I don't heed people coming up and calling me a Communist."
The candidate's analogousness for Big Red has been on more than recent brandish, too, such as when he praised certain Cuban social achievements. "It'due south unfair to simply say everything is bad," he told Anderson Cooper on threescore Minutes concluding month. "When Fidel Castro came to office, you lot know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?"
Until recently, these comments wouldn't have been divisive: They would take led to near-universal condemnation, and might fifty-fifty have torpedoed his presidential candidacy. The American public was solidly, ardently anti-communist, informed past the realities of the Cold War. Not so much today, as Sanders tries to solidify his position as the Autonomous front-runner in part by dominating the youth vote. (In South Carolina, where he finished second on Saturday, he still won a comfortable majority of voters under 30.) A striking generational divide has emerged. Older people withal see socialism and communism as unsafe, authoritarian political systems, whereas younger people are more likely to see them every bit economic systems, and to care far less one manner or another. For millions of potential voters, the Blood-red Scare is no longer so scary.
"It's playing all the old hits and seeing if any of them will strike up that erstwhile feeling," Micah Uetricht, the managing editor at Jacobin magazine and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, told me. But "these attacks just don't land the way they used to," he said, summing upward how many younger Americans feel about communism as a political cudgel.
The elementary passage of fourth dimension explains a lot. Millions of Millennials and Gen Zers were never exposed to the threats of the Soviet Union; they did not live through the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev; they practice non remember the Mariel boatlift or the Salt treaties or the Cuban missile crisis. They grew up with the threat of terrorism predominant, with both Republican and Democratic administrations focusing on nonstate actors such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic Land and violent dictatorships in the Middle East.
The right has also, inadvertently peradventure, softened the sting of the communist label by spending decades associating progressivism with socialism and socialism with communism, and arguing that complimentary-market commercialism in a democratic framework is the merely way to deliver prosperity. A "binary framing" dominated 20th-century politics, Lawrence Glickman, a historian at Cornell, told me, in which redistributive policies "might through the glace gradient lead to something dangerous, fifty-fifty totalitarianism." The New Deal was oftentimes described in the 1930s and '40s as a "wolf in sheep's clothing" or a "Trojan horse," he said.
Now that kind of argument sounds more like crying wolf. Facing yawning inequality, heavy debt burdens, obscene costs of living, and stagnant wages, young people have warmed upwards to redistributive politics. "People empathize that countries like the United kingdom and Canada have free public-wellness systems," Uetricht told me. "They think, 'Nosotros're rich! We could take that!' If y'all respond, 'Authoritarianism is scary!' information technology sounds like you lot're using the threat of authoritarianism to tell me why we can't have a nice public-health system."
That sectionalization between socialism and authoritarianism is one that Sanders, unlike many of his peers, has e'er fabricated: He has been consistent in his support for redistributive, worker-centered social-welfare states, and consequent in his opposition to totalitarianism and autocracy and state violence. The guy has always been articulate that he wants the U.s. to become more like Denmark, not Cuba.
Millions of young people accept joined him in thinking that sounds like a skilful idea. A recent poll conducted by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation showed that 36 percent of Millennials have a favorable opinion of communism, every bit do a quarter of Gen Zers. Roughly half of the members of those two generations accept a favorable view of socialism and thinks the government should act every bit an employer of terminal resort. Ane in 5 Millennials thinks the Communist Manifesto better "guarantees freedom and equality" than the Declaration of Independence and thinks society would be better off if the government abolished private property; 1 in six thinks the world would be ameliorate off if the Soviet Spousal relationship were still around.
In dissimilarity, Baby Boomers and members of the Greatest Generation have deeply unfavorable views of all these ideologies or ideas—again, associating communism and socialism with horrific atrocities and autocratic states. "The historical amnesia about the dangers of communism and socialism is on total display," Marion Smith, the executive managing director of the foundation, said upon releasing the results of the poll. "When nosotros don't brainwash our youngest generations about the historical truth of 100 million victims murdered at the hands of communist regimes over the past century, nosotros shouldn't be surprised at their willingness to encompass Marxist ideas."
Red-baiting might not piece of work with Millennials. But it might piece of work with Boomers. And, unfortunately for Sanders, it is Boomers who usually show up and vote.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/youngs-dont-care-about-ussr/607249/
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