Gen Z Can Fall out of Love with Socialism 

Ask anyone over forty in the conservative movement about Gen Z’s political prospects and you’ll probably be met with one of three reactions. The first is despair: how could members of a generation who have enjoyed immeasurably more economic and social opportunities than their parents be quite so angry at the system that produced them? The second is indifference: sure, campus radicalism and socialist organizing may be the order of the day, but sixties free love can turn into eighties Thatcherism/Reaganism with the help of a full-time job, a mortgage, and perhaps a few kids. The third, the rarest and in my view most important to cultivate, is curiosity: not simply dismissing the new socialists as more of the historical same, but a genuine curiosity as to why our generation is quite so discontented.  

This curiosity is exactly the solace that the politically engaged members of Gen Z find in the left-wing parties, movements, and individuals making strides across the West, be it Zohran Mamdani and the so-called Democratic Socialists in the US., Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France, or Zack Polanski’s Greens in the UK. The new left is popular among young people because it is speaking directly to their concerns. From housing to employment to welfare, the antidote of more state involvement is sold to Gen Z as patients who routinely see the economic system fail them, especially as they seek to begin building wealth in their adult lives. All of the markers of success, those key indicators that might make a person more conservative as he ages, are slipping further out of Gen Z’s reach, almost uniformly, across the West. Home ownership rates, youth unemployment, opportunities to raise a family, all signal to Gen Z that “the system” (read, capitalism) is worth burning down.  

The challenge and the urgency to the conservative movement are now very clear. Elected officials peddling the snake oil of socialism are proving able to win in local and national elections. Perhaps Gen Z will find its way out of the malaise, perhaps the effects of economic prosperity will be enough of a shock to their worldview, even if they gain it ten or twenty years later than their parents did. It seems to me the safer option is to try to understand Gen Z’s concerns and offer the real solutions that the market and strong institutions can bring.  

The first challenge for conservatives is understanding how Gen Z perceives the problems it faces. Too often when the right defends capitalism, it reads to young people as defending the status quo. If capitalism is understood to mean “what we have right now,” then surely it is natural for Gen Z to have such an aversion.  

In the U.S. and the UK, where home ownership culture is much stronger than in continental Europe, the average age of first-time buyers has been steadily rising. In Britain, recent data suggest the average age for a first-time buyer now stands at thirty-four, up from twenty-nine in the mid-1990s. Starker still is the precipitous fall in first-time buyers under twenty-five, now only 6 percent of total purchases; this figure stood at 25 percent in the 1990s. In the U.S., some estimates place the average first-time buyer age around forty, up from thirty-three as recently as 2021. Hundreds of thousands of eighteen-year-olds across the West were told that the “right” thing to do was get a college education and secure their future economic prospects. In truth, almost none of my friends from university who did just that could, at present, even secure a mortgage on the family home they were raised in. If an Englishman’s home is his castle, Gen Z seems to be set for economic serfdom until at least their mid-thirties. 

The changing job market is also affecting Gen Z’s ability to get on in life. In recent years, and for the first time in decades, recent college graduates in the U.S. have had a higher rate of unemployment than the average worker; in 2024 the British job market saw 1.2 million applications for fewer than 17,000 graduate vacancies and there are realistic predictions that there will soon be more than 800,000 unemployed young people across the UK. The leader of the Conservatives in the UK, Kemi Badenoch, drew eloquent attention to this in her recent speech to the Conservative Party conference: “I finished my engineering degree in 2003. And I remember what it was like graduating from university at that time. My friends and I didn’t have to worry about getting a job, we were debating which jobs to take. … That is not true for young people today.” 

Badenoch deserves mention because she is one of the few conservatives in the West who grasps the urgency of speaking to young people. The solutions offered by the Mamdanis and Polanskis of the world are backward and stale, and they offer false hope. The band-aid solutions of socialist politicians may well speak to Gen Z’s concerns, but they will not solve them. In fact, in the long run, more government intervention in the economy will exacerbate our woes. It is frustrating that when young people decry capitalism, they are so often in fact decrying state regulatory failure.  

Look at Mayor Mamdani’s policy offerings, for instance. His instinct is to throw money (or new regulation) at every problem facing New Yorkers. The solution to astronomical rents is not increasing the housing supply, but freezing rents, a policy condemned by the Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck as “the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.” The Mamdani solution to the cost of living is not reducing the tax burden or facilitating the creation of new jobs, but gimmicks like state-run grocery stores or a thirty-dollar minimum wage. Zack Polanski’s Green Party offers many of the same solutions to young voters in the UK, from rent control to state-run utilities, albeit without a slick communications strategy to match.  

In endeavoring to write this piece fairly, I wanted to give my leftist friends and supporters of the Greens and Labour more generally their fair hearing. There is often an impression that young people flock to the new left because of identitarian or other social issues like climate change and immigration. There is some truth to that, but the left-leaning young people I spoke to have serious economic concerns, too. I was surprised to see talk of high taxes, surely the bread and butter of the right. The idea that virtually nobody talks to young people in politics and the idea of major parties being captured by the interests of older generations were a recurring theme. 

A stalwart Labour-voting friend told me that those in her circle were “irritated at higher taxes.” She told me this was anecdotal from young people she knows “being sad when they look at their paychecks.”  

When I asked a young Green campaigning in my town about the apparent rise in his leader’s popularity, he told me: “People are excited about Zack [Polanski] because he actually wants to change something. He’s the only politician to make me feel like things don’t have to be this way or that my life might actually improve.” 

A center-left friend put it most simply, and perhaps most damningly: “I don’t know if I have ever seen an economic policy that made me think, wow, that feels like it’ll actually help people our age!” 

Far from a no-go zone for the right, this strikes me as a huge opportunity. If Gen Z hears anything at all from politicians, it is usually from suspect left-wing parties selling the same old solutions.  

You don’t have to take it from me or my lefty interviewees. A poll conducted by Glasgow University’s John Smith Centre in June of this year found the Greens to be the most popular party among eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old Brits, with a commanding 7 percent lead over Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s Labour Party. The poll also measured what young Brits are most concerned about, and the results are stark. Forty-five percent of respondents said that financial worries were their biggest concern, more than double the percentage of young people who listed climate change or other global/political issues. It might be comforting for the conservative movement to imagine that young people are lost because of the culture war, but we are decidedly losing the argument on economics as well.  

If we take these concerns seriously, and speak to them, there is much to be hopeful about. Free-market solutions abound for the issues of housing supply and the creation of wealth. Britain would be wise to look to Austin, Texas’s housing miracle to offer hope for young potential buyers. In 2022, Austin’s rent price increase was among the highest in the country, up a staggering 40 percent. Rather than reaching for rent controls or other demand-subsidizing state measures, Austin’s government unleashed the power of the market to correct prices. Through a combination of planning deregulation and fast-tracking applications, the city was able to reverse the extortionate cost of housing in as little as two years. House prices and rents actually fell. How often do you read headlines like that? 

For too long, right-wing parties have run on anti-development platforms, as well as failing to target policies toward Gen Z to redress imbalances of taxation and unemployment. The response has too often been that conservative parties rely on the support of older voters, especially since they are more likely to vote than Gen Z. This is reaching the point of unsustainability in economies across the West. Britain’s ballooning welfare system cannot be sustained by anemic economic growth. Even Andy Burnham’s Labour has been forced to address the fiscal irresponsibility of Britain’s pension system (though he has kicked the decision down the road to 2030). A similar reckoning is surely overdue with the U.S. Social Security system, with both the Social Security and Medicare A trust funds heading for insolvency by 2033. It is bad enough that politicians of all stripes are repeatedly failing to level with voters about the state of public finances, but worse still is that the young workers who currently pay for extortionate welfare bills will almost certainly not enjoy the same benefits when they reach retirement. Young people are suffering economically to prop up an unsustainable system. 

When Margaret Thatcher won her breakout electoral victory in 1979, more eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds voted for her Conservatives than for the Labour Party. When Ronald Reagan stormed to the White House the following year, as many eighteen- to thirty-year-olds voted for him as did for Jimmy Carter. The idea of a popular free-market offering for young people might seem farfetched now, but only because the right has ceded ground on these issues for so long. The policies of Mamdani or Polanski will not address the core concerns of young people; in many instances, it will make them worse while dragging the economy down for everyone else. It falls to the conservative movement, therefore, not to abandon Gen Z or consider them a lost cause, but instead, to put future economic prosperity at the heart of their platforms. Leaders like Kemi Badenoch in Britain and Pierre Poilievre in Canada are lighting the way.  

Almost 100 years ago, the UK Conservatives published a clever election poster of a ship beckoned to shore by a lighthouse. It reads: “Let the lighthouse of Conservatism save ‘S.S. Great Britain’ from the rocks of Socialism.” Economic prosperity across the West will depend on the conservative movements and free marketeers being that light for Generation Z. 

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.