A Fox Poll Says Socialism Is Rising. Let's Talk About Why That's a Real Problem.

The Numbers Don't Lie

A new Fox News poll shows socialism gaining ground among American voters, particularly among voters under 35. Depending on how the question is framed, somewhere between 35 and 45 percent of Americans now express positive views of socialism — numbers that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

I've spent my career studying political education and ideological formation. These numbers don't surprise me. They worry me. And they should worry every conservative who has been assuming that the appeal of free markets is self-evident.

Nothing is self-evident. Everything has to be taught. The failure to teach it is how you get a generation that views democratic socialism as an attractive alternative to a system they've been told is rigged against them.

What People Think Socialism Means

Here's the thing that polling on socialism almost never captures: most Americans who express positive views of socialism are not thinking about Venezuela. They're not thinking about the Soviet Union's grain quotas or Cuba's political prisoners or the bread lines in 1970s Poland. They're thinking about Denmark. They're thinking about free college and Medicare for All and Amazon not being allowed to pay its warehouse workers $15 an hour while Jeff Bezos owns a yacht the size of a destroyer.

That's not socialism in any rigorous historical sense. It's social democracy — a market economy with a strong welfare state and aggressive redistribution. Genuine socialism means state ownership of the means of production, the abolition of private property in capital goods, and centralized economic planning. Show Americans that definition and ask if they want it, and the numbers look very different.

But that sleight of hand matters strategically. When a 24-year-old says she supports socialism, she means she wants healthcare to work like it does in Germany or Canada. When Bernie Sanders says he's a democratic socialist, he means something that his Nordic counterparts would find quite radical. The ambiguity is doing a lot of work — and conservatives have been losing the semantic battle for 20 years by failing to define terms.

I'm from Lagos originally. I watched what state control of the Nigerian oil sector actually produced. Corruption. Inefficiency. A resource curse that enriched elites and impoverished a nation that should have been wealthy. Socialism in practice — not the Scandinavian fantasy version, but the real version that has been tried across Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe — produces that outcome with remarkable consistency. The poll numbers reflect a failure to communicate that history, not a genuine ideological shift toward central planning.

Why the Appeal Is Real and Must Be Taken Seriously

Dismissing the polling as ignorance or propaganda is both factually wrong and strategically catastrophic. The conditions producing socialist appeal are real conditions in real American lives.

The United States has seen real wage stagnation for median workers over roughly four decades, even as productivity has continued to rise. The gap between executive compensation and worker compensation has widened dramatically — the ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay at S&P 500 companies was approximately 20:1 in 1965 and is now above 300:1. Housing costs in major metropolitan areas have risen far faster than income. Healthcare costs are genuinely irrational by international comparison. Student debt is a real burden on a generation that was told college was the path to prosperity.

These aren't manufactured grievances. They're documented economic realities. And when people experience those realities and the dominant party of free markets responds with talking points about supply-side economics, they look for alternatives. Socialism is available, heavily marketed on social media, and offered by charismatic politicians who at least acknowledge that something is wrong.

The conservative answer has to be better than "the market is working, you just don't understand." Because the market is not working for a significant portion of the population, and pretending otherwise doesn't persuade anyone who's living the reality.

The Intellectual Obligation

The conservative intellectual tradition — from Hayek to Friedman to Sowell — has the better arguments. The empirical record of market economies versus command economies is not even close. Countries that liberalized their economies after 1990 — Poland, South Korea, Taiwan, Chile — grew dramatically. Countries that doubled down on state control — Venezuela, Cuba, Zimbabwe — declined or collapsed.

Thomas Sowell wrote in Basic Economics that the first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics. That sentence is as true now as when he wrote it.

But making these arguments requires actually making them. Showing up in classrooms, on podcasts, in communities where young people are forming their views. Not assuming that the case for freedom is self-evidently obvious to someone who graduated from a public school system that doesn't teach the history of collectivism's failures.

The Fox poll is a warning. Not about the inevitability of socialism. About the cost of conservative intellectual abandonment of the next generation. The arguments exist. Use them.