While British Teen Vogue readers or Greta Thunberg acolytes don’t speak for all of under-40s, a “skin deep” yet persistent generational sympathy for anti-capitalist ideas is glaringly obvious. Survey after survey shows a hostility to capitalism and sympathy for socialism among both millennials (those born in the 1980s through 1996) and Zoomers (those born from the Blair era onwards). When given word association options, capitalism is linked most often by both to “the rich, corporations, exploitation and unfairness”. Socialism, in contrast, gets most associated with the terms “workers, people, equality, fairness, opportunity, and community,” not “failure” or “Venezuela”.
This imbalance in sentiment has long been acknowledged. In a 2018 CapX poll, British adults were asked whether they agreed with the statement “Communism could have worked if it had been better executed”. Just a quarter of the population agreed. That figure, though, was much, much higher — at almost two in five people — for those in their mid-30s or younger. The cliché of “Generation Left” might be overblown, but “Generation Leftish” is a fairly accurate moniker.
The new IEA survey of 2,000 16 to 34-year-olds shows that the young are prone to blaming capitalism for many societal ills. A massive 75pc of them agree with the assertion that climate change is a specifically capitalist problem, which will be news to anyone who knows about the Soviet Union’s environmental record. But then 71pc also think that capitalism fuels racism too, while 78pc blame capitalism for our housing crisis.
These sentiments feed through into their economic policy instincts. Over 70pc agree with each of the assertions that private sector involvement would put the NHS at risk; that energy, water and railways should be renationalised; and that solving the “housing crisis” requires rent controls and public housing. No wonder exit polling in 2019 found that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour had a 43-point lead among 18 to 24-year-olds and a 24-point lead among voters aged 25–34.
The complacent conservative view has always been that these findings are just evidence of youthful indiscretions. Eventually, even 1960s hippies and Maoists saw the light about socialism. When today’s teens start working and paying taxes, so the argument goes, they’ll soon come round to a hard-headed view of the world, just like generations before them.
Niemietz’s work suggests this is wishful thinking. Not only do surveys suggest little mitigation of socialist sentiments between those now in their late teens and early-40s, but millennials were actually more socialist than Zoomers in answering many of the IEA’s questions. There’s no more evidence to assume “they’ll grow out of it,” he says, than that the young will “grow into it”. If current trends continue, in fact, “Generation Leftish” might well become “Population Leftish”.
Thankfully, all is not lost. When presented with stand-alone pro-capitalist statements, majorities of young people are persuaded enough to agree with them too, albeit less strongly and less often than the pro-socialist ones.
This suggests that although persistent by age, a lot of the younger cohorts’ Left-wing opinions are weakly held — perhaps reflecting an attachment to the general zeitgeist created by the more aggressive Left-wing activists and influencers.
That suggests hearts and minds are still up for grabs, whether through good policy delivering economic prosperity or the age-old art of persuasion. Sadly, it is not always clear that the Conservatives are interested in young voters: the recent national insurance rise to fund social care and the rowing back on planning reform are just the latest examples of an agenda operating against the young’s intergenerational interests.
We might laugh at TikTok bedroom dwellers agitating for state-run industries, or mock US socialist politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for wearing her ridiculous “Tax the Rich” dress at this year’s Met Gala, but absent any sort of animating centre-right agenda for the young, these social media-driven opinions filter into survey answers, at the very least reflecting what people think they should believe.
The heartening news then is that a Marxist revolution in Britain is not imminent. But Niemietz shows that the leftward turn in the younger generations is real, persistent, and worthy of taking seriously. Ultimately, this matters, because policymaking is downstream of the culture of ideas. Even if socialistic opinions are softly held, and not well understood, a gradual leftward change in sentiment in the population will shift the role of the state further left too.
Today there’s a real constraint against the very worst ideas and impulses of those too young to have lived when socialism wreaked havoc: today’s elderly, who happen to be far more likely to vote. That constraint, though, will not exist forever. And it’s dangerously complacent for conservatives to assume that Millennials and Zoomers will just mature out of their current world views.
