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We think of capitalism as being locked in an ideological battle with socialism, but we never really saw that capitalism might be defeated by its own child technology.

This is how Eric Weinstein, a mathematician and a managing director of Peter Thiels investment firm, Thiel Capital, began a recent video for BigThink.com. In it he argues that technology has so transformed our world that we may need a hybrid model in the future which is paradoxically more capitalistic than our capitalism today and perhaps even more socialistic than our communism of yesteryear.

Which is another way of saying that socialist principles might be the only thing that can save capitalism.

Weinsteins thinking reflects a growing awareness in Silicon Valley of the challenges faced by capitalist society. Technology will continue to upend careers, workers across fields will be increasingly displaced, and its likely that many jobs lost will not be replaced.

Hence many technologists and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are converging on ideas like universal basic income as a way to mitigate the adverse effects of technological innovation.

The greatest danger, he told me, is that, the truly rich are increasingly separated from the lives of the rest of us so that they become largely insensitive to the concerns of those who still earn by the hour. If that happens, he warns, they will probably not anticipate many of the changes, and we will see the beginning stirrings of revolution as the cost for this insensitivity.

You can read our lightly edited conversation below.

The phrase late capitalism is in vogue these days. Do you find it analytically useful?

I find it linguistically accurate and politically provocative. I don't think that what is to follow is going to be an absence of markets. I don't think the implications are that capitalism is failing and will be replaced by anarchy or socialism. I think it's possible that this is merely the end of the beginning of capitalism, and that its next stage will continue many of its basic tenets, but in an almost unrecognizable form.

I want to ask you about what that next stage might look like, but first I wonder if you think market capitalism has outlived its utility?

I believe that market capitalism, as we've come to understand it, was actually tied to a particular period of time where certain coincidences were present. There's a coincidence between the marginal product of one's labor and one's marginal needs to consume at a socially appropriate level. There's also the match between an economy mostly consisting of private goods and services that can be taxed to pay for the minority of public goods and services, where the market price of those public goods would be far below the collective value of those goods.

Beyond that, there's also a coincidence between the ability to train briefly in one's youth so as to acquire a reliable skill that can be repeated consistently with small variance throughout a lifetime, leading to what we've typically called a career or profession, and I believe that many of those coincidences are now breaking, because they were actually never tied together by any fundamental law.

A big part of this breakdown is technology, which you rightly describe as a child of capitalism. Is it possible the child of capitalism might also become its destroyer?

Its an important question. Since the Industrial Revolution, technology has been a helpful pursuer, chasing workers from the activities of lowest value into repetitive behaviors of far higher value. The problem with computer technology is that it would appear to target all repetitive behaviors. If you break up all human activity into behaviors that happen only once and do not reset themselves, together with those that cycle on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis, you see that technology is in danger of removing the cyclic behaviors rather than chasing us from cyclic behaviors of low importance to ones of high value.

That trend seems objectively bad for most people, whose work consists largely of routinized actions.

I think this means we have an advantage over the computers, specifically in the region of the economy which is based on one-off opportunities. Typically, this is the province of hedge fund managers, creatives, engineers, anyone who's actually trying to do something that they've never done before. What we've never considered is how to move an entire society, dominated by routine, on to a one-off economy in which we compete, where we have a specific advantage over the machines, and our ability to do what has never been done.

This raises a thorny question: The kinds of skills this technological economy rewards are not skills that a majority of the population possesses. Perhaps a significant number of people simply cant thrive in this space, no matter how much training or education we provide.

I think that's an interesting question, and it depends a lot on your view of education. Buckminster Fuller (a prominent American author and architect who died in 1983) said something to the effect of, "We're all born geniuses, but something in the process of living de-geniuses us." I think with several years more hindsight, we can see that the thing that de-geniuses us is actually our education.

The problem is that we have an educational system that's based on taking our natural penchant for exploration and fashioning it into a willingness to take on mind-numbing routine. This is because our educational system was designed to produce employable products suitable for jobs, but it is jobs that are precisely going to give way to an economy increasingly based on one-off opportunities.

Thats a problem with a definable but immensely complicated solution.

Part of the question is, how do we disable an educational system that is uniformizing people across the socioeconomic spectrum in order to remind ourselves that the hotel maid who makes up our bed may in fact be an amateur painter? The accountant who does our taxes may well have a screenplay that he works on after the midnight hour? I think what is less clear to many of our bureaucrats in Washington is just how much talent and creativity exists through all walks of life.

What we don't know yet is how to pay people for those behaviors, because many of those screenplays and books and inventions will not be able to command a sufficiently high market price, but this is where the issue of some kind of hybridization of hypercapitalism and hypersocialism must enter the discussion.

We will see the beginning stirrings of revolution as the cost for this continuing insensitivity

Let's talk about that. What does a hybrid of capitalism and socialism look like?

I don't think we know what it looks like. I believe capitalism will need to be much more unfettered. Certain fields will need to undergo a process of radical deregulation in order to give the minority of minds that are capable of our greatest feats of creation the leeway to experiment and to play, as they deliver us the wonders on which our future economy will be based.

By the same token, we have to understand that our population is not a collection of workers to be input to the machine of capitalism, but rather a nation of souls whose dignity, well-being, and health must be considered on independent, humanitarian terms. Now, that does not mean we can afford to indulge in national welfare of a kind that would rob our most vulnerable of a dignity that has previously been supplied by the workplace.

People will have to be engaged in socially positive activities, but not all of those socially positive activities may be able to command a sufficient share of the market to consume at an appropriate level, and so I think we're going to have to augment the hypercapitalism which will provide the growth of the hypersocialism based on both dignity and need.

I agree with most of that, but Im not sure were prepared to adapt to these new circumstances quickly enough to matter. What youre describing is a near-revolutionary shift in politics and culture, and thats not something we can do on command.

I believe that once our top creative class is unshackled from those impediments which are socially negative, they will be able to choose whether capitalism proceeds by evolution or revolution, and I am hopeful that the enlightened self-interest of the billionaire class will cause them to take the enlightened path toward finding a rethinking of work that honors the vast majority of fellow citizens and humans on which their country depends.

Are you confident that the billionaire class is so enlightened? Because I'm not. All of these changes were perceptible years ago, and yet the billionaire class failed to take any of this seriously enough. The impulse to innovate and profit subsumes all other concerns as far as I can tell.

That's curious. There was a quiet shift several years ago where the smoke-filled rooms stopped laughing about inequality concerns and started taking them on as their own even in private. I wish I could say that change was mediated out of the goodness of the hearts of the most successful, but I think it was actually a recognition that we had gone from a world in which people were complaining about inequality that should be present based on differential success to an economy which cannot possibly defend the level of inequality based on human souls and their needs.

I think it's a combination of both embarrassment and enlightened self-interest that this class several rungs above my own is trying to make sure it does not sow the seeds of a highly destructive societal collapse, and I believe I have seen an actual personal transformation in many of the leading thinkers among the technologists, where they have come to care deeply about the effects of their work. Few of them want to be remembered as job killers who destroyed the gains that have accumulated since the Industrial Revolution.

So I think that in terms of wanting to leave a socially positive legacy, many of them are motivated to innovate through concepts like universal basic income, finding that Washington is as bereft of new ideas in social terms as it is of new technological ones.

But how did we allow things to get so bad? Weve known for a long time that political systems tend to collapse without a robust middle class acting as a buffer between the poor and the rich, and yet weve rushed headlong into this unsustainable climate.

I reached a bizarre stage of my life in which I am equally likely to fly either economy or private. As such, I have a unique lens on this question. A friend of mine said to me, "The modern airport is the perfect metaphor for the class warfare to come." And I asked, "How do you see it that way?" He said, "The rich in first and business class are seated first so that the poor may be paraded past them into economy to note their privilege." I said, "I think the metaphor is better than you give it credit for, because those people in first and business are actually the fake rich. The real rich are in another terminal or in another airport altogether."

It seems to me that the greatest danger is that the truly rich, Im talking nine and 10 figures rich, are increasingly separated from the lives of the rest of us so that they become largely insensitive to the concerns of those who still earn by the hour. As such, they will probably not anticipate many of the changes, and we will see the beginning stirrings of revolution as the cost for this insensitivity.

However, I am hopeful that as social unrest grows, the current political system of throwing the upper middle class and lower rungs of the rich to the resentful lower middle class and poor will come to an end if only for the desire of the truly well-off to avoid a genuine threat to the stability on which they depend, and the social stability on which they depend.

I suppose thats my point. If the people with the power to change things are sufficiently cocooned that they fail to realize the emergency while theres still time to act, where does that leave us?

Well, the claim there is that there will be no warning shots across the bow. I guarantee you that when the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators left the confines of Zuccotti Park and came to visit the Upper East Side homes of Manhattan, it had an immediate focusing on the mind of those who could deploy a great deal of capital. Thankfully, those protesters were smart enough to realize that a peaceful demonstration is the best way to advertise the potential for instability to those who have yet to do the computation.

We have a system-wide problem with embedded growth hypotheses that is turning us all into scoundrels and liars

But if you're one of those Occupy Wall Street protesters who fired off that peaceful warning shot across the bow six years ago, and you reflect on whats happened since, do have any reason to think the message was received? Do you not look around and say, Nothing much has changed? The casino economy on Wall Street is still humming along. What lesson is to be drawn in that case?

Well, that's putting too much blame on the bankers. I mean, the problem is that the Occupy Wall Street protesters and the bankers share a common delusion. Both of them believe the bankers are more powerful in the story than they actually are. The real problem, which our society has yet to face up to, is that sometime around 1970, we ended several periods of legitimate exponential growth in science, technology, and economics. Since that time, we have struggled with the fact that almost all of our institutions that thrived during the post-World War II period of growth have embedded growth hypotheses into their very foundation.

What does that mean, exactly?

That means that all of those institutions, whether they're law firms or universities or the military, have to reckon with steady state [meaning an economy with mild fluctuations in growth and productivity] by admitting that growth cannot be sustained, by running a Ponzi scheme, or by attempting to cannibalize others to achieve a kind of fake growth to keep those particular institutions running. This is the big story that nobody reports. We have a system-wide problem with embedded growth hypotheses that is turning us all into scoundrels and liars.

Could you expound on that, because this is a foundational problem and I want to make sure the reader knows exactly what you mean when you say embedded growth hypotheses are turning us into scoundrels and liars.

Sure. Let's say, for example, that I have a growing law firm in which there are five associates at any given time supporting every partner, and those associates hope to become partners so that they can hire five associates in turn. That formula of hierarchical labor works well while the law firm is growing, but as soon as the law firm hits steady state, each partner can really only have one associate, who must wait many years before becoming partner for that partner to retire. That economic model doesn't work, because the long hours and decreased pay that one is willing to accept at an entry-level position is predicated on taking over a higher-lever position in short order. That's repeated with professors and their graduate students. It's often repeated in military hierarchies.

It takes place just about everywhere, and when exponential growth ran out, each of these institutions had to find some way of either owning up to a new business model or continuing the old one with smoke mirrors and the cannibalization of someone else's source of income.

So our entire economy is essentially a house of cards, built on outdated assumptions and pushed along with gimmicks like quantitative easing. It seems weve gotten quite good at avoiding facing up to the contradictions of our civilization.

Well, this is the problem. I sometimes call this the Wile E. Coyote effect because as long as Wile E. Coyote doesn't look down, he's suspended in air, even if he has just run off a cliff. But the great danger is understanding that everything is flipped. During the 2008 crisis, many commentators said the markets have suddenly gone crazy, and it was exactly the reverse. The so-called great moderation that was pushed by Alan Greenspan, Timothy Geithner, and others was in fact a kind of madness, and the 2008 crisis represented a rare break in the insanity, where the market suddenly woke up to see what was actually going on. So the acute danger is not madness but sanity.

The problem is that prolonged madness simply compounds the disaster to come when sanity finally sets in.

Original post:
Why capitalism needs socialism to survive - Vox

By Robert Higgs Monday July 24, 2017 5:10 PM PDT

Socialism with Chinese characteristics = Chinese fascism American capitalism = American fascism Post-Communism in Russia = Russian fascism Scandinavian Third Way = Scandinavian fascism Italian fascism = Italian fascism German fascism = German fascismSpanish fascism = Spanish fascism European corporatism = European fascism

Are you starting to see a pattern?

Many people continue to perceive the presence or impending advent of socialism here, there, and everywhere and to lament the prospect. But full-fledged socialism is almost extinct. Aside from North Korea, hardly any country now has socialisms essential attributes: government ownership, management, and direct control of all the major means of production; central planning of resource allocation and income distribution; and an almost complete absence of private property rights except for very small properties and some personal items. Almost all countries on earth now permit major elements of private property, combined with extensive government intervention and regulation of private property use and extensive taxation, subsidization, and government provision of a variety of public goods, welfare, infrastructure, and many other types of goods and services.

Moreover, almost all countries have elections of public officials; hence the term Ive used for more than 30 years (borrowed from my Ph.D. student and friend Charlotte Twight), participatory fascism. (Never mind that the elections are often rigged and fraudulent.) Moreover, many countries have established institutions for permitting aggrieved citizens a measure of due process in contesting the governments treatment of their persons and property and allowing them a public voice in expressing their preferences for government action. (Never mind that this ostensible due process is largely spurious.)

This type of regime, amigos mios, is clearly the wave of the future. Unlike full-fledged socialism, which leads to totalitarian rule, mass poverty and economic decay, participatory fascism not only placates peoples wish to participate in the formal process of government decision-making, but also permits private entrepreneurs enough room for maneuver that they can in some cases get rich; also enough that they can keep national output at a tolerably high level and in some cases even generate positive economic growth. Hence this system, even if it contains the seeds of its own destruction, does not destroy itself nearly as quickly as full-fledged socialism does. And meanwhile the politicians and their cronies who dominate the system smile all the way to the bank.

Tags: central planning, cronyism, Elections, Fascism, income distribution, Socialism

Continued here:
Socialism Is Dead; Participatory Fascism Has Triumphed - The Beacon (blog)

The absolutely outstanding article by Diana Mahabir-Wyatt in the Express of July 21 should be required reading for all those persons who are so quick to berate Venezuela because they are of the view that the problem in the country is caused by socialism. Ms Mahabir-Wyatt was careful to note the statement by the eminent professor that there are many countries which follow the socialist path but have succeeded in providing a very high standard of living for their people. The reason for this is the maturity of the society, that the citizenry expect and accept that the State apparatus will work to their benefit. There is little interference by outside forces, maybe because of the distance from the superpower. But no, that cannot be the reason, because they are strategically located to be of use to the USSR, and as a result would have been coveted as satellites. So it cannot be simply location. The only undeniable reason for socialism not to succeed is the lure of money. Socialism attempts to afford a more egalitarian division of the wealth of the country while maintaining the rights of the individual.

Read more:
Don't blame socialism for Venezuela's woes* - Trinidad & Tobago Express

Jeffrey A. Rendall | 7/26/2017

The air was so thick you could cut it with a knife on Monday afternoon as leading Democrat politicians ventured outside the Washington Beltway to a public park in nearby Berryville, Virginia (in Rep. Barbara Comstocks 10th District) to reveal their new agenda aimed at winning back at least some of the traditional Democrats who dumped the party to vote for Donald Trump and Republican congressional and Senate candidates last November.

The sight of men and women in suits and button down shirts must have appeared awful strange to those park visitors who werent aware ahead of time that a gaggle of ruling class Democrats would be showing up to try, once again, to rebrand themselves into the champions of the common man.

Seeing Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer (and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, et al.) pontificating outdoors in the intense glare of the Virginia summer would be humorous under most circumstances but on Monday it was absolutely side-splitting laughable not only because they were sweating like the common man in direct sunlight but also because what they were trying to pitch wasnt all that fresh and wouldnt be spared from overexposure no matter how many layers of sunscreen were applied.

In all, it was just the latest Democrat bash on American individualism and capitalism.

Susan Ferrechio of the Washington Examiner reported, The Better Deal agenda regurgitates many of the old Democratic ideas of raising the minimum wage, increasing spending on infrastructure and penalizing companies that move overseas.

But it also emphasizes breaking up big companies such as airlines and cable companies and goes after the pharmaceutical industry with a requirement that companies justify their prices to consumers who are struggling to pay for medication.

Old-fashioned capitalism has broken down to the detriment of consumers, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Monday...

Old-fashioned capitalism has broken down, Chuck? Nonsense. If anything, old-fashioned capitalism has been weighted down by tens of thousands of pages of the federal register and a collection of politicians from both parties who believe a laissez-faire economic system needs to be fixed or transformed rather than lightly monitored to ensure fairness and a level playing field for all participants in the marketplace.

The truth is, capitalism would work swimmingly if given the chance. Neither party especially Democrats would stoop to offering people the trust and opportunity to make their own economic choices. If you dont believe it, just look at Obamacare. The best health system in the world is collapsing because most or all of the capitalism has been removed from it.

We wont address the Republicans recent failures to deal with Obamacare in this space right now were focusing on the wretched Democrats and their hopeless party remake.

The Democrats attempt to rebrand themselves as heroes to the struggling isnt going to convince anyone with common sense or knowledge of history to give them another try. A snake periodically sheds its skin, but its still a snake. A chameleon lizard changes colors but its still a chameleon lizard. A Democrat can claim he or she is for middle class families and helping people improve their economic situations but at the core he or she is still... a socialist.

Lets not forget Hillary Clinton tried to heap the same better deal sell-job on Americans last year just as Pelosi, Schumer and Warren (et. al) did in Virginia a couple days ago and it turned people off. The problem is the Democrats just emerged from two terms of Obama, including a couple years of complete Democrat congressional control, and their better deal agenda didnt improve things for anyone.

The message might enjoy at least a token bit of credibility if it werent articulated by the same liberal leadership thats become the figurehead of the post-Obama Democrat Party. Is anyone seriously going to believe Schumer and Pelosi have changed their thinking on empowering Americans to succeed? Hardly. By all appearances Democrats are solely interested in restraining people who have ideas in order to secure goodies for their dedicated followers.

Theyre redistributionists of the highest order.

Further, contrast the Democrats gloomy anti-freedom and liberty message with that of candidate Trump last year. The Democrats relentlessly blast successful Americans (the rich) in order to lure the weak-minded and uninformed into supporting them. Trump attacked the unfairness of the system the elites stole from the people and the elites themselves to appeal to Americans displaced by decades of broken federal promises (like not enforcing the immigration laws and trade deals that sent their jobs overseas and using the political system to enrich themselves).

Democrats want more rules, more regulations and more federal bureaucrats looking over the shoulders of people doing business in order to dictate equity in the workplace. It wont succeed. Most Americans simply want to be left alone, not to be placed in the shackles of more central planning and command control located in the far off Capitol.

Understandably, Republicans were less than impressed by the Democrats display of America/capitalist-bashing.

Pete Kasperowicz of the Washington Examiner reported, Democrats announced their new Better Deal campaign, which will focus on helping average Americans instead of the rich and special interest groups.

But AshLee Strong, [Speaker Paul] Ryan's press secretary, noted that Republicans came out with the Better Way campaign last year.

Have you seen this creative, innovative, totally unique Better Deal messaging campaign ... the Democrats unveiled this morning for the 2018 cycle, she asked in an email that was interspersed with links to the GOP's Better Way website.

Instead of suggesting were seeing a fresh coat of paint on the same old Democrat socialist ideas, however, the Republican leadership seems to be taking offense at the minority partys ostensible stealing of their own marketing strategy.

Therein lies the problem the ideas themselves arent being attacked as much as the Republicans object to the Democrats perceptible plagiarism. The GOP has its own host of impotence issues, mostly having to do with the establishment party leadership not really standing for anything and a lasting image problem with the voters who rightly see that Republicans are great in the opposition but cant enact a conservative agenda once theyre handed the quill and ink to write up laws.

In the end it doesnt really matter whether either party calls their program a Better Deal or a Better Way if they wont assume the necessary political risks to actually pass laws or cut the budget or stand up for a set of principles beyond whatever it takes to win a majority or get them through the next election.

Both parties are capitalism bashers in their own specific ways. Where the free market is concerned, politicians want to tinker with the entire engine to fix a few bad spark plugs.

Its also to these politicians personal advantage to attack the very foundations of the American economic system. After all, theres always a reason why someone succeeds and others dont, and theyre more than happy to supply the cause. Its much easier to point the finger at someone else rather than taking responsibility for ones failures. Your gain is my loss; its the basis for their governing philosophy. Their reason for existence is to make the underachievers of the world feel empowered.

And just when the Democrats appeared to be taking responsibility for their poor electoral plight in recent times, they resort back to their old tricks again.

Tyler ONeil of PJ Media reported, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) told The Washington Post that Democrats should blame themselves for losing last November, rather than pinning their defeat on former FBI Director James Comey or the Trump campaign's supposed collusion with Russia. In a tweet Monday morning, President Trump heartily agreed.

When you lose to somebody who has 40 percent popularity, you don't blame other things Comey, Russia you blame yourself, Schumer told the Post. So what did we do wrong? People didn't know what we stood for, just that we were against Trump. And still believe that.

After seeing Mondays press event with a group of them wilting from exposure to the blistering Virginia sun its not at all clear the Democrats stand for anything apart from what they did yesterday or last week or last month or last year.

Their underlying message is all the same and can be summed up as thus: We know more than you and the American people cant be trusted to make decisions on personal financial matters or handling their own money.

Chuck Schumers right: American capitalism does need a reexamination. But the Democrats shouldnt be surprised when the people demand more of it, not the warmed-over rebranded Better Deal theyre offering to move attention away from their latest ploy to foster socialism.

Link:
Outsiders vs. Insiders: Democrats' 'Better Deal' is socialism repackaged in naked populist form - ConservativeHQ

Michael Nigro/ZUMA Press/NewscomAre 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 people59 percenthad 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.

In an array of other surveys from the past few years, millennial support for socialist and capitalist policies varies widely based on how poll questions are asked. For instance, socialism is much more popular than a government-managed economy, and a free-market economy is more popular than capitalism. And in policy-based polls, millennial economic preferences run the gamut. Yes, many support student-loan forgiveness programs and government-managed health care, but they also express strong support for entrepreneurship, dream of owning their own small businesses, and reject hypothetical government expansions when they come with personal tax hikes. In other words...they look a lot like Americans across the age spectrum.

Polls only tell part of the story, of course, but the part they do tell is not one of an increasingly socialist youth populace. That's probably important to keep in mind as the media coalesces on the Socialist Moment plot-line. Sure, the leftist podcast Chapo Trap House has a lot of fans, and more Twitter avatars now sport red roses (long a socialist symbol). But the subset of American young people poised to notice either of those things is infinitesimally smaller than those who aren't. These are the kinds of affectations and antiheroes that the media latch onto and elevate becauselike the Pepe the Frogtweeting alt-right accounts during the electionthey're very salient in online media and activism worlds. But it's a mistake to take that salience as indicative of actual numbers or influence.

So what about Bernie? Yes, young Americans vastly preferred the socialist-lite Vermont senator to Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, or any of the GOP-primary candidates. But their alternatives were Clinton, Trump, and the likes of Chris Christie and Jeb Bush. They are the most establishment of The Establishment, with the exception of Trumpwho, like Sanders, benefited from people's desperation to ditch this dynastic, cronyist electoral loop we seemed caught in. That Sanders secured so much millennial support doesn't necessarily equate to a full socialist embrace by these young folks, just that he was the best of exceedingly bad options.

To their credit, more committed and long-term leftists have managed to swing some of Bernie's millennial momentum into post-election momentum for leftist policies more broadly. And young people are certainlynow and at least throughout recent historymore receptive to redistributive economic policies and strict labor regulation. Perhaps the left can capture some of these tepid socialism supporters at the right moment to convert them for good, and this same discussion will look a lot different in a few years.

But I doubt it. Sandersand Trumpseem to me the 2016 heirs of the Hope and Change phenomenon, which propelled not just Barack Obama to 2008 victory but the rise of the Ron Paul movement. At its essence is the idea the system is fundamentally broken and only bold changes can begin to fix it. And the particulars of these bold changes seem to matter less than how convincing their messenger and the movement around them.

I was amazed talking to young people last year how many had been Paul and/or Obama fans in previous election cycles yet were now professing support for Sanders or Trump. The vast political gulfs between these candidates (especially on economic issues) didn't resonate as much as the areas and ways in which they promised reform.

Older folks and the extremely party-loyal tend to take this as youthful flakiness, a side-effect of unserious passions, hastily-conceived beliefs, or a juvenile contrarian streak. But perhaps a lot of younger Americansnot yet sold on the idea that it's one's civic duty to choose the lesser of two evils at election time, nor narcotized by years of show-pony partisanship into believing in vast differences between Democrats and Republicansare reacting rationally to the options presented to them. The good news for libertarians (and socialists) is that millennials are definitely dissatisfied with the centrist Republican-Democrat status quo. But as the 2016 election made clear, there's room for this dissatisfaction to go in all sorts of different and unexpected directions.

See original here:
Millennial Socialist Moment Mostly Media Hype - Reason (blog)