Young Americans are rejecting capitalism at alarming rates.
The shift is reshaping American politics.
And Ron DeSantis exposed the one ugly truth about America that has Socialists fuming.
Young voters embrace socialism at record pace
The numbers are staggering and they should terrify every American who values freedom.
A Cato Institute poll from May found that 62% of Americans under 30 now view socialism favorably.¹
Even worse, 34% of young adults said they had positive views of communism.¹
That's one-third of an entire generation saying they're fine with an ideology responsible for 100 million deaths in the 20th century.²
The same poll revealed Democrats view socialism more favorably than capitalism, with 67% supporting socialist policies.³
Republicans thankfully still support free markets at 75%, but the generational divide should set off alarm bells.³
These aren't just abstract numbers from some academic survey.
Young voters in New York City just elected an open Democratic Socialist to a major mayoral primary by overwhelming margins.
The socialist candidate won voters under 45 by a crushing 2-to-1 ratio.
This isn't some fringe movement anymore – it's becoming mainstream among an entire generation.
DeSantis calls out the real problem
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appeared on Fox News and didn't mince words about why young people are turning to socialism.
He told host Kayleigh McEnany that young Americans "have never actually lived under capitalism in a pure form."⁴
"When they say they prefer socialism to capitalism, some of the things they've seen in our economy, in their lifetimes really isn't true capitalism," DeSantis explained.⁴
https://twitter.com/GovRonDeSantis/status/1987201779553960044?s=20
He pointed to Wall Street bank bailouts, corporate welfare, and rampant cronyism as examples.
"Some of the things that they're told is capitalism is actually not free enterprise. It's a perversion of capitalism," DeSantis said.⁴
The Governor's right, and the evidence backs him up.
During the 2008 financial crisis, banks like Citigroup borrowed $99 billion over six days while posting $18.7 billion in losses.
Morgan Stanley grabbed $107 billion in Federal Reserve loans and still reported massive losses.
These weren't free market outcomes – they were government-orchestrated wealth transfers from taxpayers to wealthy executives who gambled and lost.
The Federal Reserve handed out over $7 trillion through "quantitative easing" that mostly inflated asset prices for the rich while working Americans saw their wages stagnate and their homes foreclosed.
Young people watched their parents lose jobs and homes while Wall Street executives got bonuses.
They were told this was "capitalism" – and they correctly recognized it as corrupt.
The crony capitalism problem no one wants to fix
Both parties have their fingerprints all over this mess.
George W. Bush's Treasury Secretary pushed through the $700 billion TARP bailout in 2008.
Barack Obama continued the bailout bonanza and let not a single major banker face prosecution for fraud.
Donald Trump correctly opposed bailouts during the 2008 crisis, calling them corporate welfare.
But young voters who came of age during the financial crisis watched supposed "free market" Republicans defend bailing out banks while lecturing them about personal responsibility.
The cognitive dissonance was impossible to ignore.
Senator Bernie Sanders – a literal socialist – called the 2008 bailout "the most extreme example that I can recall of socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor."
https://twitter.com/RonDeSantis/status/1987208772918354295?s=20
When a communist is making more sense than Wall Street Republicans, you've got a serious credibility problem.
Corporate welfare costs taxpayers about $100 billion per year according to the Cato Institute – but that doesn't include indirect subsidies through favorable regulations and government-granted monopolies.
Export-Import Bank loans funnel money to Boeing and other mega-corporations.
Renewable energy subsidies create billionaires like Elon Musk who claim to support free markets while gorging at the government trough.
The pharmaceutical industry writes its own regulations and blocks generic competition.
Big Tech companies worked hand-in-glove with the government to censor Americans during COVID.
DeSantis identified the core issue – young people aren't rejecting actual free market capitalism.
They're rejecting the corrupt system of cronyism and bailouts they've witnessed their entire lives.
What real capitalism looks like
True free market capitalism means companies that make bad decisions fail.
Their executives lose their jobs and their investors lose money.
Resources get reallocated to better-run companies.
It's the "creative destruction" that Joseph Schumpeter described – painful in the short term but necessary for long-term prosperity.
The 2008 crisis should have seen failed banks go through bankruptcy, their toxic assets sold for pennies, and new management installed.
Instead, Washington decided these institutions were "too big to fail" – which really meant "too big to hold accountable."
The five largest banks controlled about 40% of the banking sector before 2008.
After the bailouts, that swelled to nearly 60% as regulators rewarded the worst actors by making them even bigger and more powerful.
That's not capitalism – that's feudalism with better PR.
DeSantis understands what many Republicans have forgotten.
You can't defend free markets while simultaneously supporting corporate bailouts and subsidies.
You can't lecture people about personal responsibility while handing billions to failed executives.
Young voters see the hypocrisy and they're rejecting the whole rotten system.
The tragedy is they're turning to socialism – an ideology that's failed catastrophically everywhere it's been tried – because the alternative they've been shown looks equally corrupt.
DeSantis has built his reputation fighting corporate welfare in Florida, from battling Disney's special tax district to opposing COVID lockdowns that destroyed small businesses while enriching Amazon and Walmart.
He's shown what principled free market governance actually looks like.
The question is whether enough Republicans will follow his lead before an entire generation embraces socialism out of justified disgust with crony capitalism.
¹ Campus Reform, "Survey: Nearly two-thirds of young Americans support socialism," June 20, 2025.
² The Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press.
³ Newsweek, "American Faith in Capitalism Is Declining," September 9, 2025.
⁴ Florida Politics, "Ron DeSantis says US isn't practicing 'true capitalism'," November 8, 2025.
