Not Good: Nearly Half of Millennials Want to Scrap Capitalism for Socialism

If you’ve had a sinking feeling that America’s young adults are a little too comfortable with socialism, you don’t need to adjust your television. According to a new survey by YouGov and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, that sinking feeling is merely an indication that you’re paying close attention. Nearly 45% of millennials in the U.S. say they would rather live in a socialist country than a capitalist democracy, a sobering statistic that is like nothing we’ve seen from any American generation in history.

The survey has some even stranger news: 7% of millennials would actually rather live under a Communist regime than in the democracy they currently enjoy.

YouGov notes that the percentage of millennials that would prefer socialism to capitalism is ten points higher than the general U.S. population.

“Millennials now make up the largest generation in America, and we’re seeing some deeply worrisome trends,” said Marion Smith, the executive director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in an interview with Fox News. “Millennials are increasingly turning away from capitalism and toward socialism and even communism as a viable alternative.”

That isn’t the end of the survey’s grim revelations. One in five Americans in their 20s believes that former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin is a hero to be revered and more than 25% think the same of Lenin and current North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

A Disease Waiting to Reappear

Some in the medical community have expressed concern in recent years that the “anti-vaxxer” movement will lead to the return of deadly diseases that were thought to be obsolete in the current era of vaccines. Doctors and social scientists believe that the long-term absence of diseases like measles and polio has led Americans to grow complacent about the threat of these illnesses, which in turn inspires them to be far too casual about the importance of modern medicine.

Perhaps the same thing is happening here. Millennials did not grow up in an era where communism was a significant threat to the American way of life. When the Cold War and its hot proxies were raging around the world, they were hardly a gleam in their parents’ eyes. They grew up in a world where the major threat to the American way of life came from Islamic jihadism and, to their increasingly-twisted way of thinking, corporations like Bank of America and Wal-Mart.

The spoils of unchallenged capitalistic supremacy has given them the easiest life of any generation in human history…and perhaps that’s exactly the problem. They have been inundated with privilege and it has turned to boredom. Boredom with consumerism, social media, and non-stop entertainment. They need a cause to rail against so they can bring some meager form of meaning back into their lives, and so they are doing what so many generations before them have done – turning against the status quo.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a little bit of youthful rebellion – that’s how humans make progress. But there IS something inherently wrong with a system of government that forces people to trade freedom for security. Socialism and communism are the thieves of liberty, and America’s triumph over these failed, murderous ideologies has been one of this country’s grandest achievements. Unfortunately, the lie at the heart of these ideologies – the one that says “Oh, we can definitely do it better next time” – remains alive.

Alive and spreading like a virus.