‘Crushing Cost of Living’ Driving Youth to Socialism, New York Times Claims

The executive editor of the New York Times, Joe Kahn, just did an interview in which he boasts about his 2,200-person newsroom and talks about the need for skeptical editors, including those on the political right, who ask "what are we missing here?"

The Times newsroom’s latest investigative effort to discover what’s attracting young people to socialism sure could have benefited from that kind of scrutiny. It appears, unfortunately, absent.

Under the print headline "Groundswell for Democratic Socialists Rooted in Crushing Cost of Living," and the online headline "How Economic Anxiety Is Driving the Democratic Socialists’ Surge," the New York Times interviews the socialists themselves, who, predictably, deliver a Marxist analysis of the situation.

"In interviews, many D.S.A. members, leaders and strategists argue that the driving force in the primary results and in the group’s expanding influence is a sense, especially among young people, that the economy isn’t working for many people. This economic frustration — and the spotlight given to it by Mayor Zohran Mamdani — is prompting many to join the D.S.A., with the national organization announcing that it had surpassed 120,000 members on Saturday," the Times reports. "At the national level, progressive strategists say they are trying to make the case that economic grievance is what’s driving recent D.S.A. election wins."

The article also speaks about "layoffs in white-collar industries, the threat of job displacement from artificial intelligence, rising costs of living."

The headline is flawed, because there is no "groundswell" for Democratic Socialists. There were a few low-turnout Democratic primaries in heavily left-wing New York City districts where socialists won as well as one in Colorado. There were other primaries where socialist candidates lost. In a country of nearly 350 million people, 120,000 is not that many.

Had a Times editor pushed the reporter to interview people outside the socialist-progressive bubble, the economic explanations might have met with some skepticism. After all, the economy is fairly strong. The stock market has been testing record highs, and government-measured inflation has come down along with the prices in dollars of gold and Bitcoin. The unemployment rate in June was 4.2 percent. And even if people are feeling economic strain or anxiety, a resort to socialism isn’t necessarily the most logical reaction. People reacted to the stagflation of the 1970s by turning not to socialism but to President Reagan’s emphatically capitalist pro-growth tax-cutting. Plenty of people reacted to the Bidenflation of the early 2020s by electing Republicans, not socialists. And plenty of people react to economic challenges by moving out of New York City to lower-cost places, or by figuring out a way to earn more money by creating more value, rather than by trying to vote in socialists to destroy the free enterprise system and to confiscate and reallocate the hard-earned wealth of people who have succeeded in that system.

The Times reporter, Emma Goldberg, didn’t reply by deadline to my email asking "did you think about expanding the pool of people interviewed to the story to non-socialist, non-progressive sources?"

Had she done so, she might have encountered some political analysts who attribute the turn to socialism to youth too young to have remembered the disaster that was the Soviet Union’s communist economy. Or to a U.S. education system that is failing at teaching reading and math, let alone history or economics.

She might have even brought in a perspective from President Trump, who has been talking about the issue. Trump addressed it in a press conference on Wednesday after hammering the theme over Independence Day weekend. "Communism’s easy to sell," Trump said. "You’ve got free rent, for the rest of your life. What they don’t say is that you'll be living in squalor in 12 months."

"It’s never worked and it's not going to work," Trump said of communism. He noted that one reason he had support from Hispanics is many of them had come from communist countries and seen its horrors. "What is working is the United States. Think of it. We have more jobs than we’ve ever had. People are making more money than they’ve ever made. I’m talking about workers now. They’re making higher salaries than they've ever made before. It's just the best system and it's got flaws, but everything's going to have a little flaw, but it's been amazing."

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