Not All Quiet Before the Storm: A Political Study of the West

By Peter J. Sandys

Not All Quiet Before the Storm: A Political Study of the West offers a comprehensive political and philosophical critique concerning the increasing popularity of socialism among liberal intellectuals, leftist generations of the young, and even Christian democrats. The author presents a series of extensive analyses on ideological, cultural, and generational wars, moral and identity issues, and the challenges facing the Western world in the twenty-first century.
The reader is to receive a severe but frank stricture upon liberal democracy, a condemnation of the globalizing elite and the Western world’s current political climate and culture.
The tone of the work is “politically incorrect,” describing the decline and socialist transformation of the West. The Left has changed the entire political and cultural landscape of the Western world. The breakdown of civil society was caused by individual rights not being paired with personal responsibility, and the growing culture of entitlements has convinced the people that failure is not their fault but results from the political-economic system’s transgressions. Westerners have abandoned the ethical basis for society, believing that all problems are solvable by “good government.”
The book offers recommendations on solving the readily apparent impasse. It outlines an alternative system termed the “New West”.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Feb 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9781398493865

Peter J. Sandys

Peter J. Sandys was born and brought up in Hungary, where he was briefly imprisoned for attempting to escape from the country in 1963. After rehabilitation, graduating from technical high school, and finishing military service, he earned a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Technical University of Budapest. Following his successful defection to the West, he settled in the United States and earned a master’s degree in business administration from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and a doctoral degree in international business from the University of California. He held various engineering and project management positions, mostly in the aerospace industry, and published The Waning of the West: An Inconvenient Truism. Retired, he has one daughter and lives in Germany.

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About the Author

Peter J. Sandys was born and brought up in Hungary, where he was briefly imprisoned for attempting to escape from the country in 1963. After rehabilitation, graduating from technical high school, and finishing military service, he earned a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Technical University of Budapest. Following his successful defection to the West, he settled in the United States and earned a master’s degree in business administration from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and a doctoral degree in international business from the University of California.

He held various engineering and project management positions, mostly in the aerospace industry, and published The Waning of the West: An Inconvenient Truism. Retired, he has one daughter and lives in Germany.

Dedication

To Emily, Eva, and all Americans still worthy of the name.

Copyright Information ©

Peter J. Sandys 2023

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Acknowledgement

There is a new tendency among authors to thank people for inspiration, non-existent assistance, or some casual reference to the writer’s work. Therefore, in case this is helpful, I wish to acknowledge the debt I owe to the thinkers and dissenters of the past. It was they who have taught me wise things about life and shaped my character over the years: Edmund Burke, John Adams, David Hume, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Arthur Schopenhauer, Alexis de Tocqueville, Friedrich Nietzsche, Giuseppe Mazzini, Pyotr Stolypin, Oswald Spengler, Antonio Gramsci, António de Oliveira Salazar, Eric Voegelin, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Joseph Schumpeter, George Santayana, Wilhelm Röpke, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. None of them is alive today, but my connection with them is more straightforward than with any present-day would-be successors.

I am also immensely grateful for the thoughtful support of my daughter, Emily Sandys. It has been a great pleasure to speak weekly with a person a continent away from me who is genuinely interested in ideas, renders a constructive critique of any material, suggestion, or practice that is presented to her, and is always eager to consider new concepts, new ways of thinking, and new approaches. My initial objective was to write such college textbooks that might spark her interest in politics, philosophy, history, and international relations. She was the leading cause for my endeavour of writing books, and her life, demeanour, and character prove that a proud father’s efforts are worthwhile.

I want to thank my lifelong companion, Eva Lätzsch, for years of remaining calm and tolerant of my incessant disappearances into my home office. She sustained me in ways I never knew I needed and has been so forgiving and wonderful through all of this that I think she might be a product of my imagination. Such a loving partner makes both the journey and destination rewarding.

Chapter 1

The Current Political Climate of the

Western World

Thirty years ago, I was quite interested in the writings of famous professors such as Francis Fukuyama, Jeffrey Sachs, David Lipton or Lawrence Summers. They all argued that the Left was pretty much doomed because it was totalitarian, brutal, corrupt and bankrupt. On the other hand, the Western world was liberal, economically viable, stable, patient and victorious in achieving the democratisation of the planet. So, bit-by-bit, the world inevitably becomes better, freer, wealthier and happier. These were the principal arguments of The End of History and the Last Man (Fukuyama, 1992).

The above reasonings were based on the fact that, suddenly, the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union fell apart and were supposed to take communism into the grave with them. After all, the West was left standing. Liberal, democratic, wealthy, and powerful, it had outlasted those other centrally directed powers such as Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, and Bolshevik Russia. Still, there had been plenty of people in the twentieth century who thought that, between organised and centrally controlled authoritarianism and liberalism, the decadent West was doomed.

Nevertheless, the West outlived them all. That is what made me wonder—there must be something in the West’s way of doing things that led to its survival and something in the Nazi or communist systems that leads to death. Nature is pluralistic: there are many, many solutions for every imaginable situation. Nature can change to meet new challenges, which Arnold Toynbee called the ‘challenge and response’ (Toynbee, 1934–61). Society responds to a problem: if the response is good, it survives to meet the next challenge; if the reaction is bad, it fades away.

Nature rejects ideologically rigid systems because they can only function inside the existential assumptions of that ideology. However, no doctrine is any more than a small subset of boundless reality.

So, what does or, sadly, I have to ask, did the West have to survive? They are pluralism, or flexibility, of thought, power, and action. I am not asking who or what is better, more ideal, or more moral; only why is one still around and the others are not?

Let us take free speech or pluralism of thought. Everybody is different; everybody has different ideas, insights, and points of view. Let us assume that, for some issue, mine is the winning idea today. However, tomorrow somebody else may have a better solution for the problem that appears tomorrow. If I suppressed or otherwise prohibited other concepts, which may perhaps be irrelevant today but relevant later, we would be in trouble tomorrow and less likely to survive until the next day. Since we do not know today what tomorrow’s problems will be, it is best to let everybody think their thoughts because no one knows whose ideas will be winners tomorrow. The same can be stated about the other two pluralisms (power and action). So, by always practicing pluralism of thought, power and action, a society improves its chances of survival. That is all I was looking for: survival, continuation, endurance.

Therefore, to my mind, social or national survivability is best assured by pluralism and flexibility of thought, power, and action. The essence of pluralism is the freedom of being oneself. Like individuals, all nations should be themselves: Russians should be Russian, Hungarians Hungarian, etcetera. Who can say who will have the next good idea? Who is so wise that he can direct his neighbour’s life? Had that been the message the West kept preaching, I think we would all be better off today.

What has happened instead? We had the absurd proclaiming of ‘values’: we have them and they do not. All over the West, pompous pretenders got up in parliaments to brag about ‘our values’. How have we gotten them? No one knows. Have they been handed out to some people but not to others? Eastern Europeans, too lazy, shiftless, or worse, having missed the ceremony? Had these ‘values’ mysteriously grown in some national soil over a long time? Have they inherited the relics of some ancient customs or the products of centuries of learning? What is a ‘value’ in any case? A practical guide to action or virtue that you either have or do not? Are they something innate or something learned? Could they be taught? Whatever they are, the West had them, and the others did not; the West was virtuous while they were not.

Apropos, there was another tiresome thing about this ‘value thing’—especially when it was about ‘European values’. Robespierre, Napoleon, Marx, Engels, Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, Gramsci, Hamsun, Quisling, Sartre, and all the rest were Europeans. All of them based his ideas and political views on values deeply rooted in European thought and experience. If it had not been for the ‘Allies’, including the Soviets, of course, those ‘European values’ the Eurocrats and their flunkeys are boasting about today would have involved a lot more leather, jackboots, and stiff-armed salutes.

European ‘values’ and democratic ‘virtue’ entitled the West to rule the world. The West was licensed to do just about anything because it had ‘what plants crave’—triumphalist arrogance and complacent ignorance combined with the West’s monopoly of brutal exportable power. Unexamined conceit, frighteningly widespread, became the justification, and cover, for less noble actions.

Some reactions to challenges are not so successful, and we must ask what has become of our boasted ‘values’ today?

We are still free to speak our minds, are we not? Not, of course, if it is ‘hate speech’ or ‘fake news’; who could defend that? Also, certainly not to offend anyone’s safe space. Moreover, you would probably better not say anything pro-Russian.

Political freedom? Not entirely gone, I suppose, in those little corners not already bought up by lobbyists. And it would certainly be wrong to question anything said or done by human rights activists, gender defenders, or climate controllers.

The free enterprise, of course, still flourishes. In whatever tiny spaces that the gigantic and well-connected corporations have not yet got.

Altogether, we cannot be entirely pleased with the state of pluralism in the West, can we? If I am correct that pluralism is the key to survival, how much longer do we have?

Incidentally, who did win the Cold War in the end, again?

Three decades ago, the Berlin Wall came down, and the West ‘won the Cold War’—or so proudly but arrogantly it claimed. Today, however, it is hard to see what it won. The arrogance that victory brought has given the erstwhile winners wars without end: Kosovo, Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, ISIS, Yemen. Each conflict leads to the next: overthrow Gaddafi, run guns into Syria, train up ‘moderate oppositionists’ who soon join ISIS, which recruits more fighters from among the relatives of those blown up in drone attacks. Years or decades of ‘nation-building’ in Iraq collapse in an instant. No problem, we are assured that more bombing and more training will solve the issue. Even if this strategy does not work, we will say it does.

‘Human rights’ have become just additional pieces in the box of war toys: Gaddafi was not ‘bombing his own people’, but the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) was weaponised to overthrow him (UN General Assembly, 2005). Poroshenko was ‘bombing his own people’, but R2P was kept in the box. Liberal democracy and the other cherished ‘Western values’ have been made into threadbare camp followers stumbling behind the Juggernaut of War.

A quick ‘regime change’ in Ukraine to weaken Russia becomes a nightmare of war, neo-Nazis, destruction, and chaos, with worse to come.

Furthermore, after three decades of ‘partnership’, Moscow fully understands now that it is on the West’s hit list, and Beijing knows that if Moscow can be brought down, it will be next. The West’s latest regime change has pushed these two powers into an alliance, which is tremendously dangerous: even ‘forgetting’ that they are nuclear powers, Russia and China could collapse the Western economies if the going gets tough.

Some of the ‘Western allies’ roped to the Juggernaut of War hesitate. Hungary chafes against the whip; Turkey may be quitting, the Czech president questions the party line, the Poles are irritated. The Juggernaut grinds on, and the presstitutes obey the summons: The president of the Czech Republic is a ‘mouthpiece of Putin’; Orbán, Putin, and Erdoğan are a ‘band of brothers’, Maduro of Venezuela, Salvini of Italy and Bolsonaro of Brazil are about to join them. More enemies still, and still more enemies.

‘Cold Peace’ and the ‘Liberal World’ have brought riches, pride, anger, and war. Yes, the Soviet Union and the Soviet Empire have been gone for decades. Nevertheless, American internationalists, Democrats, and Republicans alike persist in speaking of the ‘Free World’, quite as if the Earth continues to be divided between the liberal-democratic-capitalist and the communist camps. We have heard a great deal more of these Free World talks since President Trump’s entering office. They have been directed to say that the new President is not only letting the Free World down but also turning his back on it. Moreover, he is careless, whether it survives, languish, or perishes without American military assistance, financial aid, and diplomatic support. However, no one on either the right or left asks whether the Free World still exists today in the sense that the term has any meaning.

The Free World has always been a romantic-ideological idea from the start—and an aggressive one at that. Its political nemesis was the ‘communist bloc’, an ‘unfree’ world in an ideological, philosophical, and totalitarian way on the other side of the Iron Curtain. For the Free World champions, the Unfree World did not ordinarily include, for ideological and political purposes, countries whose political and social traditions were traditional and pre-democratic. Therefore, the Free World was willing to make alliances and do business with empires, monarchies, even with old and nonideological dictatorships on behalf of its strategy against the Unfree World. For the Free World, the Unfree World meant the Marxist-Communist one solely, a mortal enemy so dangerous that the world itself was too small to make settled coexistence possible.

Indeed, American liberals were more or less overtly hostile to imperialism and authoritarianism in every form. After World War II, they quickly turned on their former European allies—mainly the British—by encouraging and even forcing them to dissolve their colonial empires. Nevertheless, Washington continued to operate on the assumption that whatever was not communist was on the side of the West, which meant the American side. I agreed with them. Today, as the internationalists of both major American political parties fight to keep the Cold War alive, one may reasonably question whether anything adequately definable as ‘Free World’ persists at all in the twenty-first century. Also, as a second question, whether the United States is morally qualified to lead or even to speak for that Free World if it does.

The matter depends mainly on whether one believes the United States is still a free country in the historical sense, and the self-proclaimed Free World, whose symbolic leader remains the US, is similarly free. According to reports issued regularly from fervently democratic sources like the US State Department, various governmental and non-governmental agencies, the answer is a tentative ‘yes’: free, but—it could be freer. Current popular movements across the Western world pejoratively identified by the left-liberal establishments as ‘populist’—in America that undefined activity called Trumpism; in England Brexitism; in France Le Penisme; in the Netherlands the Party for Freedom; in Italy, the Lega Nord and the Five-Star Movement; in Germany, the Alternative for Germany; and so on—indicate the opposite.

This popular-populist opposition to the Western establishment regards itself as a virtuous and democratic vestige of a once perhaps free world but is becoming more constrained and inadequate every day. That is happening under the rule of a left-liberal-socialist political establishment dedicated to an Orwellian ideology resolved to impose soft tyranny in the name of freedom. For ‘populists’, this New Free World is not just an evil parody of the Old Free World but an unreal system built on the lies and self-serving illusions of a fake elite. Some people, including this author, believe communism was defeated in Eastern Europe and some parts of Asia to re-establish itself in Western Europe and North America.

The present-day primary threat to freedom in the Western countries is advanced liberal culture, with the liberal government as shaped by that culture being oddly secondary. Overwhelming as government’s power over modern society has become, popular opinion has been shaping politics to an extent even more than governments have been doing, as recent studies of partisan political alignment in the United States seem to demonstrate. In this sense, the people have the government they deserve, or at least the popular majority does. However, while the American and British electorates divide nearly equally between liberals and antiliberals, liberal culture has become the official culture throughout the Western world, the culture of the elites and governments they staff and control. Just as plainly, this culture is anti-democratic and liberal: overbearing, controlling, intolerant, and with palpable totalitarian instincts.

All ideologically motivated governments and societies whose formation rests on a foundation of metaphysical falsity are evil. By definition, falsehood is untruth; and just as ‘the truth shall set you free’, so untruth will make you unfree—a slave. Advanced liberalism, having fashioned an alternative metaphysical reality for the world, is working to impose its intellectual creation on reality. The reality, or the truth, can be effectively (though temporarily) resisted solely by brute force and the curtailment of fundamental freedoms, a business well underway across the United States and the West. Left-liberal governments demand, with growing impatience and renewed determination, that their people deny the truth and renounce the natural human instincts, affirmations, sentiments, and loyalties on which personal and social identity, security, contentment, and human happiness depend. At the same time, these leftist governments also demand that the people affirm the liberals’ creed of materialism and moral relativity.

So, for the last third of a century, the liberal culture of the ‘Free World’, i.e., the Western world, has concentrated on making that world less free. Simultaneously, the US government has summoned its Western ‘friends and allies’ in the name of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, to extend and impose the new American version of both of them beyond the Western world. The US is to enforce them with all its military might and the enthusiastic support of the modern liberal culture at home. It is hard to say which of the two is worse.

The Western civic culture wants, in addition to free and democratically elected government everywhere, liberal-capitalist-global economies, permeable if not open borders, social equality, the denial of natural differences between the sexes, religious equality and secularism, sexual hedonism, easy access to contraception and abortion, and the recognition of gay rights, up to and including gay marriage.

Western popular culture brings synthetic vulgarity into mass production, moral relativity and immorality in the arts, and cheap American-style clothing. It also brings the obliteration of local traditions, styles, and products with it. Then, civic and popular culture merge in the relentless politicisation of Hollywood and other Western media. They conscientiously infuse their productions with progressive messages carefully shaped to promote social inclusiveness, feminism, and sodomy. With them, widespread resentment of supposedly greedy businessmen and corporations working to impoverish the weak, corrupt governments, thwart ‘democracy’, and destroy ‘the environment’. Lacking the communist monster to slay, the ‘Free World’ has replaced it with the avowed enemy of ‘our core values and principles’. The new beast is capable of assuming a thousand different forms but readily identifiable by the absence from its forehead of the Great Seal of Political Approval with which the Western elite brands its own. It is the ‘Populist’.

Sergey Kislyak, the notorious one-time Russian ambassador to the United States, once reminded his American audience that we do not impose our exceptionalism on you (MacFarquhar & Baker, 2017). His remark went mostly unnoticed by the media (or anyone else), of course. The ambassador was undoubtedly conscious of the irony that the US, having hoped for decades to rescue the Soviet peoples from Bolshevik tyranny, had been attempting to subject the Russians to the tyranny of modern Western liberalism. And that is, in its newest form, a direct offshoot of Marxist-Leninism. It may also have struck Mr Kislyak that not only does the ‘Free World’ no longer exist, but, if it did, Washington would have no business leading it. James P. Rubin, the Democratic operative, once anointed Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, the new ‘Leader of the Free World’ and the old liberal order (Rubin, 2017). Both she and the country she has betrayed are welcome to that honour.

The Marshall Plan, the European Recovery Program to which the name of then-Secretary of State George C. Marshall was affixed, was an example of ‘conservative reform as a weapon of war’ and thus wholly consistent with the conservative foreign policy of the Truman administration. The Truman containment strategy incorporated a calculated rejection of Wilsonian universalism in favour of sovereign particularism, whereby nations subject to Soviet pressure would have both the means and the will to resist it themselves. George F. Kennan, director of the State Department’s policy planning staff, thought that what was required was not to remake the world in the image of the United States, but rather to preserve its diversity against attempts to convert it in the image of others. Kennan understood containment as a matter of retrenching rather than enlarging America’s global ambitions while strengthening her allies and hewing to the balance of power that prevailed throughout the international system. Kennan’s favoured policy was congruent with Russell Kirk’s belief that the diversity of economic and political institutions throughout the world should be accepted by Washington. Soviet hegemony ought not to be succeeded by American hegemony, Kirk wrote. While working on ‘the defence of order and justice and freedom’, American conservatives should press for a ‘conservative foreign policy’ aiming for prudence, rather than intervention or isolation (Kirk, 1953). Brilliant ideas and plans, if somewhat idealistic, that could not possibly have been carried out realistically.

Regrettably, the United States today is less the symbol of the Free World than of the globalist one, developed by spreading a false perception of freedom internationally—after imposing it at home. Having acknowledged Vladimir Putin as a significant obstacle to realising their ambitions, the alliance of neoconservative and neoliberal hyper-imperialists is determined to revive in the twenty-first century the Cold War they thought they had won once and for all thirty years ago. They are close to succeeding in their ambition, even as foreign governments are beginning to accept that President Trump has no interest in nation-building. He has no interest in championing and protecting ‘human rights’, propping up the United Nations, and assisting other ‘vital’ internationalist projects being promoted by the former leaders of the ‘Free World’. Small wonder the Deep State (and plenty of others) loathe and fear him and are feverishly working to sabotage his administration and lay the man himself low.

The list of topics that are publicly no more or barely negotiable is getting longer. It includes the protection of unborn life, doubts about anthropogenic climate change, gender ideology, Islam, increasing cultural conflicts in the West, immigration, and more. Anyone who deviates from the official language rules immediately realises that his freedom of expression is minimal indeed. At worst, he is threatened that his opinion will be considered racist or ‘fascist’ and, therefore, a crime. At best, it is confirmed that although he is free to express his views, beliefs, or insights, he has no natural right to disseminate them publicly.

Therefore, dissenters who shy away from the direct conflict can experience the freedom of expression within the boundaries identified in these verses: I think as I please, And this gives me pleasure, My conscience decrees, This right I must treasure. In the German original, "Ich denk’ was ich will, Und was mich beglücket, Doch alles in der Still, Und wie es sich schicket"—from ‘Die Gedanken sind frei’, or ‘Thoughts are free’, a German song about the freedom of thought. The original poet and composer are unknown, though Hoffmann von Fallersleben rendered the most popular version in 1842. The refuge of privacy cannot be overestimated, especially as the opinion makers massively question it. However, political effectiveness triggers a violent response only when it reaches the public and enters the political discourse.

In this sense, freedom of expression means merely the right to be present in public space. Today, if dissenters use that opportunity to get engaged, they are accused of anti-democratic ‘seize-the-moment strategies’, exhibiting threat of violence and antisocial hate speech. The obvious is declared as ‘scandalous’.

At least, the Internet offers an alternative way to exchange information, analyses, and discussions. In terms of levels of reflection, analytical acuteness, and linguistic wit, platforms and blogs outperform the average standards of the daily press, political magazines, and talk shows.

However, for now, the Internet is just an extended samizdat, which was understood to disseminate system-critical literature over unauthorised channels in the communist Eastern Bloc. The big moves still take place elsewhere. Only those who have access to the mainstream media, the radio, and television channels, who are engaged in lecture halls, meeting rooms, and on stage, can run political propaganda campaigning. Thus, politicians and the media managed to publicise the infamous story of the ‘xenophobic chase in Chemnitz, Germany’ in a way that made the starting point of the citizen protests there—the murder of a German citizen by a euphemistically-called asylum seeker—as good as forgotten (Der Spiegel Staff, 2018).

It is a mistake to think that such manipulations are but the exceptions, the dizzy spells, of an otherwise sound system. No, the problem is systemic. Here, the whole operational and functional principles are displayed, always justified from a left-liberal perspective. According to that, and given that access to the general public—through television networks, newspapers, magazines, lectures, et al.—is a scarce resource, institutions that are the gatekeepers to the public have a fiduciary responsibility to award access based on the merit of ideas and thinkers (Van Norden, 2018). That is the politically correct description of the present-day left-liberal censorship.

The ‘refusal of institutional channels’ is not a censorship today but a reasonable corrective. The left-liberal ‘institutional channels’ contradict the English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), who demanded the absolute freedom of opinion and publication because even a false belief could trigger a productive debate in which the truthful view legitimises itself again (Mill, 1859). In Mill’s lifetime, so the politically correct modern explanation, that might have been appropriate because false beliefs were widespread about, for example, slavery and the role of women, and the majority rejected any discussion of such issues. However, relying on freedom of speech and expression, the ‘tyranny of the majority’ could be bypassed, and the debate could still be conducted.

On the other hand, in today’s circumstances, that view is ‘naïve’, according to today’s ‘institutional channels’. For, while the limitless freedom of expression in the nineteenth century served to overcome the ‘tyranny of the majority’, it would favour them today and destroy the rational discourse.

Now, how does one distinguish ‘obvious falsehoods’ from the rational argument, ‘the rebellious ignoramuses and intellectual impostors’ from those ‘whose competence is beyond question’ and who therefore must insist on ‘just access’? The left-liberal answer is not philosophical but purely political. The ‘falsehoods’ are always the ‘extreme right-wing views’, whichever topics they happen to concern.

The one-time Marxists and present-day left-liberals have always pleaded for the revoking of tolerance of ‘the conservative and political Right’ before those can take any action. That means, of course, intolerance towards thinking, opinion, and the word. These are also ‘anti-democratic ideas’, and they necessarily derive from the actual state of a society in which the basis for all-round tolerance has been destroyed. Among other things, the monopolistic media’s rule as an instrument of economic and political power has created a false consciousness. The conditions under which tolerance can once again become a liberating and humanising force have yet to be established.

The left-liberal truth criteria, which justify the right of access to a mass audience, advocate that public exposure be granted ‘based on achievement and social benefit’. The first criterion is qualitative, the second a pragmatic one. However, some useful deceptions and falsehoods can be of use to one but harm another. Moreover, a consensus of experts, specialists, or professionals can still be based on a common fundamental error.

In the Soviet Union and all other socialist countries under the Bolshevist spell, every student in civics instruction was confronted with the Lenin quote: The doctrine of Marx is omnipotent because it is true (Lenin V. I., 1977). From this point of view, anyone who contradicted Marx’s doctrine spread untruth. So, it was entirely correct that he was forbidden to speak and sentenced to powerlessness. It was not about the truth; it was about preserving the Marxist-Leninist state and party’s power.

Today, it is also about maintaining power. American universities harmed the ‘fair and balanced discussion culture’ when they invited political scientist Charles Murray to discuss his ‘pseudoscientific theses’. Together with the psychology professor Richard Herrnstein, Murray had written the book The Bell Curve in 1994, in which they note some differences in the average intelligence of different races and attribute them to genetic predispositions (Murray & Herrnstein, 1994).

Scientific or merely ‘pseudoscientific’ can be discussed, but Murray’s opponents want to decree instead of entering into a civil dispute. In March 2017, the scientist was invited to Middlebury College in Vermont. On YouTube, one can see the real tyrants in action: an angry mob of students who shouts down the speaker. Murray and a professor accompanying him were assaulted, which even the left-liberals deplored—because it allows the ‘opponent’ to ‘play the role of the martyr’.

Access to the public can now be controlled even more effectively and splendidly than around John Stuart Mill’s time. Simple souls like the German Left-Green politician Katrin Göring-Eckardt are permanent guests of the media; the clever Right-Alternative-for-Germany man Gottfried Curio is never invited. Incidentally, in the present period, the ‘democratic’ argument is invalidated by the fact that the democratic process itself has become obsolete.

The ‘atrophy of narrative’ is intensified by modernisation and globalisation; that is, they weaken the narrative, the force of society’s underlying tissue.

Time management is one of the most valuable skills in the modern age. People’s lives are too short of building new narratives; they have to modify the old ones during the one short life and fast-paced lifestyle available, and then pass them on to the next generations.

Donald Trump and Brexit’s success can largely be explained by the culmination of ‘atrophy of narratives’. Old narratives as the nation, patriotism, religion, small communities, family, among many others, have been weakened while the new stories in their place, such as global world, gender issues, liberal democracy, or late-twentieth-century freedom, are for the majority of people incomprehensible and mostly uninteresting topics.

Human life is unsuitable for incorporating the global dimension of narratives into a basic life-narrative. Old, even age-old tales, such as home, family, community, or nation, have proven themselves to be working stories, so their continuing return, reappearance, especially in the face of unstable global processes, is inevitable.

The first ‘globally’ returning ‘old’ narrative is the concept of the nation. England, leaving the global ‘United States of Europe’, and the Trump-voters, who are grouped around the ‘make America great again’ slogan, have united in accord with the underlying narrative of the nation (irrespective of other political ideologies).

People have enough of the incomprehensible narratives that ignore the scales and measures, the weights and stratification of importance in their lives, and they do not know what to do with the stories offered by globalisation and the mainstream elite that shaped it.

Former politicians were expected to deal with ‘meta-narratives’, that is, not to care about people’s direct experiences, but to deal with the impact, with the effects of these experiences.

For example, in the old system of migration, a politician’s primary task was not to deal mainly with people’s acute problems, say the situation at a given railway station, but to provide a credible answer to the root cause of the global problem. This process worked while the fundamental narratives that filled people’s lives were plausible, and people trusted them to function. While they knew that their nation’s borders would protect their lives, the functioning frameworks would solve the problems of their everyday existence. That is, their country would not be suddenly swarmed by hundreds of thousands of exotic foreigners marching through overnight.

Thus, the new politician, such as Donald Trump, must prove that he can offer a solution primarily not to the ‘indirect problem’ but the directly experienced, or ‘hands-on’, everyday problems caused by the loss of narrative and the mistakes of globalisation. Even more, the modern politician will also have to prove that he can deal with the ‘indirect problems’, too, by noticing and solving the underlying problems.

The narratives that can be interpreted on a human scale instead of on a global level will be the number one driving force behind political decisions for many decades to come and bring the return of previously successful concepts such as nation, religion, and family. I do not claim that the process of globalisation can be reversed—only, hopefully, at least arrested—or the multicultural nature of Western cities will drastically change. However, most likely, the underlying global narratives, such as the late-twentieth-century concept of freedom, liberal democracy, political correctness, gender issues, climate fanaticism, etc., will gradually become marginalised.

The individual who has adapted to a community existence and narrative cannot be mere dust in the wind. Nevertheless, that precisely is what he has become by conforming to the spirit of ’68—that relativising and subversive outlook.

The human being is conservative, and he is reluctant to replace the old generations of authenticated narratives (God, home, family, nation) with new and unknown ones, which are difficult for him to comprehend and accept. All attempts to change the stories have necessarily been radical (French Revolution, Russian Revolution, ’68). Since these changes of narratives have been extreme, usually, a small elite team (avant-garde) commanded the transition, generally by force. Therefore, already the birth of the new narratives was elitist and violent, although they always tried to pull a charming mask in front of the laughing hyena face. Such covers are also the gender theory, the dogma of political correctness, or globalism.

Today, we are witnessing a similarly radical paradigm shift. The essence of this is the desire to return to the old narratives, a new classicism, a reanimated conservatism. Of course, in the eyes of the ‘avant-garde’, this is the rebellion of the rusty, immature, uneducated, inferior, reactionary, and deplorable mob. The ‘populists’.

The geographic and demographic divisions between the two political parties and the two Americas have reached a new dimension in the House of Representatives.

In the 116th US Congress, Republicans and Democrats now administer districts that display virtual mirror images of each other across a broad range of critical issues, from racial composition and education to income and age.

House Democrats control the vast majority of districts with more minorities and more college graduates than the national average. At the same time, Republicans are mostly confined to areas with more white voters and fewer college graduates than the national average. Likewise, Democrats are now in charge of the vast majority of House districts that are ‘younger’, more affluent, or have more migrants than the national average.

The widening divide between the two sides promises to narrow further the prospect of them reaching any common ground; the tectonic plates have been shifting for a few years now—the divergence is apparent across every key measure. Just over three-fifths of the Democrats in the new House represent election districts where the share of minorities exceeds the national average of 38%. On the other hand, almost exactly 85% of House Republicans represent whiter districts than the alleged national average of 62% (Brownstein, 2019). This profound and consistent separation culminates in a sorting-out process that has steadily reshaped the House since the 1990s.

The November 2018 election swept away dozens of Republicans from suburban seats with either large numbers of minority or liberal white voters or both who had been increasingly voting Democratic in presidential campaigns. The Republican losses were concentrated in the more affluent and better-educated districts; the Democrats won 43 seats that the Republicans had controlled in the previous Congress. Of the 43 seats, 31 are in districts that exceed the national average in college graduates. Personal incomes exceeded the national median in 35 of the 43 districts that the Democrats won over.

After these sweeping victories, Democrats now dominate well-educated and upper-middle-class congressional districts, many of them deeply involved with the high-tech economy and connected to global markets.

The election left the Republican Party (or ‘Grand Old Party’) in an even more delicate position in ethnically diverse America. The GOP now holds only about 1 in 6 seats with more minority share and just 1 in 8 seats with more migrants than the national average (Brownstein, 2019).

Republicans still control two-thirds of those House seats where white voters exceed their share of the national population. The Republican edge in those seats is a reminder of the significant challenges still confronting Democrats in places less affected by economic and demographic change.

The Democratic districts that exceed the national median income split in half between those that are more and those that are less diverse than the national average. However, three-fourths of the Democratic districts that lag below the median income contain more minorities than average, reflecting the Democratic dominance in mostly non-white lower-income inner cities.

With fewer members representing non-urban, working-class, industrial districts, the Democratic Party will likely advance cultural issues, including gun control, gay rights, diversity, and immigration.

The Republican House caucus has been pushed back into Trump country: mostly white districts with few immigrants below the national average in education and income. Nearly three-fifths of House Republicans now hold seats in districts below the median income and whiter than the national average.

The Democrats could help reopen the door for the Republicans in white-collar suburbs if they move too far left either on spending or in their response to the agendas of the various minority groups in their coalition.

The GOP currently is defining itself very firmly towards the cultural priorities of older and blue-collar white men. However, the counterbalance to that is going to be millennials, females, and diversity coming back with a vengeance.

The cycle of change has produced a House divided, demographically, geographically, and ideologically as profoundly and cruelly between the political parties as any in modern times. There are not just two parties but two Americas that are poised to collide over time.

Chapter 2

Why Is Socialism Popular Again?

Young Americans blame capitalism for the housing crisis, healthcare costs, and declining wages. Once demonised, the word ‘socialism’ is back as a new political movement takes root. America’s youth has started realising that the political parties, Big Business, and their rulers are evil. They could not articulate their reservations about the political system, economic system, or even President Obama for a long time but had the frustrating sense they were not serving their interests so much as those of a monied elite.

The Western Fascination with Socialism

It was only when Bernie Sanders made his run under the banner of democratic socialism that it all started to fall into place. Today’s young had not realised before that there was an entire ideology, a whole political movement for them to have. Bernie Sanders was their introduction to the concept of democratic socialism. They never associated it with the Cold War; it was a new concept for them ultimately. That was the case for the millennials, which is why the movement has grown so much.

The youth suddenly became very curious about ‘socialism’. Some of them joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a rapidly growing socialist organisation that has drawn in former communists and roused millennials. The DSA is now the most significant socialist movement in the US as surging membership has rejuvenated the once dormant group. New chapters have sprung up, from Montana to Texas and New York.

Part of its membership veers towards the Scandinavian-style social democracy of universal healthcare and welfare nets while others embrace more traditional socialism of large-scale public ownership. The label has been adopted by other millennials who do not identify with any particular political group. They reached that stage through protest movements such as Occupy, and Black Lives Matter, fuelled by frustration at the Democratic Party’s failure to genuinely address the deepening disillusionment with capitalism, income inequality, and the perceived corporate seizure of the US government.

With that has ensued debate about pay, housing, universal basic income, and the role of the government in favour of more significant state intervention. According to recent polling, most American adults under the age of 30 reject capitalism, although that does not necessarily mean automatic support for socialism.

However, many are familiar with and like the British Labour Party’s succinct tagline: ‘For the many, not the few’. For the American youth, the summary of what socialism is, the democratic control of the society they live in, includes universal healthcare, universal education, public housing, public control of energy resources, and state ownership of banks. That is what they understood socialism to be when they heard Bernie Sanders introduce it.

Labour’s manifesto caught the attention of young leftist activists also in the US because it laid out a clear set of ideas with which they could identify.

Even those support specific socialist policies, such as single-payer healthcare, who do not label themselves as socialist. Everyone owes student loan debt, and everyone’s rents are excessive, and everyone is paying $300-a-month in premiums for health insurance. Socialism has become common sense for many young people in America.

The anxiety created by the likelihood of millions of people losing their coverage while millions more see their health insurance premiums surge has made the new breed of democratic socialists embrace universal healthcare. That is the gateway issue for the socialists to convince large numbers of Americans, including many Trump voters, that government control can work for them.

Americans who grew up and matured during the Cold War saw socialism being characterised as the close cousin of Soviet communism and the state-run healthcare system as an introduction to the gulags. They were those former Cold War warriors who helped detoxify socialism for younger Americans when the Tea Party and Fox News painted Obama as a socialist for his changes to the healthcare system. Precisely that President Obama, who recapitalised the banks without saving the homes of families in foreclosure.

Then came Bernie Sanders.

With the ‘Bernie phenomenon’, people suddenly can utter the word ‘socialist’ in public. Even before the Sanders-sensation, the Occupy Wall Street movement had already prompted scrutiny of capitalism. Occupy Wall Street happened together with a broader debate about what capitalism was. That meant someone also had to define what socialism means—that space had been left open. In its centre is a debate about the role of the state following decades when conservatives painted the government as oppressive and a burden. There is the fight over healthcare, the anger sparked by the greed of big banks rescued by the taxpayer, and a conviction that only the state has the strength to reverse deepening inequality. Those issues are breathing new life into the old idea that the government is there to control ‘capitalism’ (it is, of course, not capitalism per se but predatory, defrauding, and antisocial Big Business) rather than ‘capitalism’ controlling the government. If that takes hold among a broader group of millennials, it will represent a significant change in how many Americans think about the state’s role in their lives.

It would be a critical failure not to recognise that many white working-class people can be won over by those youths who look favourably on socialism, thinking about a kind of New Deal with government or democracy against the markets. To the present-day young generation, the New Deal represents government efforts to regulate ‘unbridled capitalism’, i.e., Big Business, and supplement income distribution with government programs.

Unlike the once buoyant Socialist Party of America, which long faded from popular remembrance, the New Deal remains in the American memory. More than a hundred years ago, socialists were frequently elected to public office in the US. The Socialist Party’s presidential candidate drew close to a million votes in the 1912 and 1920 elections.

The Democratic Party is indebted to corporate interests. Its usually leftist followers, particularly the millennials, realise there is something different going on, and they are in a fundamentally new period. There is a tremendous change taking place in America’s consciousness, and the younger generation is not going to be another docile age group waiting for their little piece of the American dream. They have long lost trust in the ruling elite and their entire Western system and know that that small piece of the American dream would not be granted to them. They are angry at corporate politics, angry at neo-liberalism, angry at…everything.

They have lost hope that the two main political parties would change and believe that the two-party system smothers any real debate about the issues essential to most people.

This young generation, including the millennials, knows they will not build a mass movement for any of the social-democratic reforms if they do not create an opening for the large numbers of low-income working people—including those who voted for Donald Trump.

Who are those people? White people who have been clobbered with entrenched intergenerational poverty and who are desperately looking for a solution. Sanders has already reached out to them by talking about healthcare, living wages, taxing Wall Street, and the billionaires who have wrought such havoc on their lives. A vast number of white working-class people in America can, at least theoretically, be won over by the radical and idealistic youth.

The socialist slogan is ‘Infantile intellectuals and desperate deplorables—unite! Your world revolution is coming!’

The Republican party and many ‘modern conservatives’ have come out swinging against socialism. Thankfully, that strategy successfully stopped the socialist march during the Cold War, but will it be effective with the millennials in the twenty-first century? They know only too well that comparing Bernie Sanders’s ‘soft’ democratic socialism with Soviet-style Bolshevism, with the Cambodian Khmer Rouge, or with the Maoist Shining Path movements is like correlating the American Revolution with Genghis Khan’s campaigns.

The modern ruling elite of the Western world either did not recognise or foolishly ignored the danger precipitated by their own mismanagement. The elite’s stupidity, blindness, philosophical ignorance, and moral turpitude ignited a genuine backlash across racial and religious lines, immigration status, gender, and more. Suddenly, the 99% recognise their shared interest in taking power back from the 1%.

Consciously or not, Democrats and Republicans, modern liberals and modern conservatives fear the theory and system of socialism, which is also their fear of multiracial democracy, their own creation that would end their and their wealthy friends’ stranglehold over politics. So, the elite 1% is confused and terrified.

The democratic socialism being voiced by politicians like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren is not closer to the Soviet Union’s old system than the American republic is to ancient Rome’s. The goal is straightforward: redirect society from the endless accumulation of corporate profits to the protection of human wellbeing.

Many millions of people remain uninsured while insurance and pharmaceutical executives rake in record profits, and the CEOs of Western financial institutions continue to get federal subsidies for their manipulating of economies, nations, and the people’s lives. One does not need to be a registered Democrat, either: 52% of Republicans support ‘Medicare for All’ (Levitz, What Medicare for All’s Sky-High Poll Numbers Really Prove, 2018). It is not difficult to recognise either that even an undocumented immigrant has more in common with an out-of-work coal miner than either of them does with the ruling elite.

The people merely want free healthcare and a liveable planet today—and the elites better listen.

The Trump Administration, the Republican Party, the ‘conservatives’, the Right, or whatever they are called nowadays, should take the wind out of the socialists’ sail and find a way to address the fears and wishes of both these ‘infantile intellectuals’ and ‘desperate deplorables’.

The great German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, despite his impeccable right-wing credentials, recognised the importance of setting up a social insurance program, the first of its kind in the world, to stave off calls for more radical socialist alternatives in 1889. A similar vision, strategy, and action would not only surprise but also neutralise the left-liberal, socialist-turned-radical opposition while assuring the unqualified support of the American people.

The Socialists of America

It is not for nothing that it used to be a dirty word, but Bernie Sanders helped remove the stigma. However, it is the spectacular failure of the ruling elite, not capitalism, that has changed people’s minds.

In 1906, the German sociologist Werner Sombart wrote an essay entitled ‘Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?’ In it, he sought to explain why the US, alone among industrialised democracies, had not developed a significant socialist movement (Sombart, 1976).

Today, however, I need to pose a different question: why are there socialists in the United States? Who are these people who now suddenly deem themselves socialists in the country that has long been resistant to socialism’s siren call? From where did they come? And what do they mean under socialism?

Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign has shown that many Democrats would vote for a candidate who proclaims himself a democratic socialist. Even more dramatic and consequential are all those Democrats who say they are socialists themselves. Before the Iowa caucuses, more than 40% of likely Democratic attendees said they were socialists (McCormick & John, 2016). On the eve of their primary, 31% of New Hampshire Democratic voters called themselves socialists—and among voters under the age of 35, just over half did (Pindell, 2016). A poll of likely voters in the South Carolina Democratic primary showed that 39% described themselves as socialists.

Favourable views of socialism are not limited to Sanders supporters. The 39% of South Carolina Democrats calling themselves socialist exceeded by 13 percentage points the number who, in effect, voted for Sanders. In a New York Times poll, 56% of Democrats—including 52% of Hillary Clinton supporters—said they held a favourable view of socialism (Healy, 2015). Nor was this leaning towards socialism triggered by Sanders’s candidacy: as far back as 2011, 49% of Americans (not just Democrats) under 30 years of age had a favourable view of socialism, while only 47% had a positive attitude towards capitalism (Pew Research Centre, U.S. Politics & Policy, 2011). The percentage of Americans under 30 who might have recognised Sanders’s photograph was probably in the low single digits in 2011. So, Bernie Sanders did not thrust the youth towards socialism—they had already been there.

The current socialist emergence was already foretold by the polls that showed most Americans looked sympathetically upon the message of Occupy Wall Street—that the 1% has flourished at the expense of the 99%. It was also indicated not only by the popularity of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century but also by the success of the ‘Fight for $15’ movement prompting cities and states to raise the minimum wage (Piketty, 2014).

What is the essence of the new American socialism? What do people mean by calling themselves socialist? Those Americans allegedly embracing socialism have not chosen from left-of-centre political identities. Bernie Sanders, running as a Democrat rather than as a third-party alternative with the connivance of the Democratic Party, has made it possible for progressives to call themselves socialist without lessening their effectiveness in American (or at least, Democratic) politics.

Today, there is little in Sanders’s own program that has not been supported by many liberals who are not Sanders supporters. Merely four Democratic House members have endorsed Sanders while more than 60 of them prefer single-payer health insurance, which, of course, is Sanders’s trademark proposal.

Why, then, this acceptance of a socialist identity by millions of Americans, who would have called themselves liberal before? For one, Sanders’s campaign has doubtless removed some of socialism’s stigma. Also, the collapse of the Soviet Union has allowed younger Americans to identify socialism with the social-democratic nations and welfare societies of Western and Northern Europe. All of those countries suffer from less economic inequality and its attendant woes than the United States.

However, millions of Americans’ prime mover into the socialist column has been the near-complete dysfunctionality of modern American political, economic, and social systems. The once regulated (semi-socialised) and unionised capitalism of the mid-twentieth century produced a vibrant middle-class majority. The de-regulated, de-unionised, and financialised neoliberal-neoconservative capitalism of the past 35 years has brought about record levels of inequality, a diminishing middle class, and meagre economic opportunities along with record financial hardship for the young.

Although the United States may suddenly be home to millions of socialists, it still lacks a socialist movement. The Democratic Socialists of America seek to build one, and it is unlikely they will restrict it just to those individuals and organisations supporting Bernie Sanders. The progressive unions that have backed Hillary Clinton’s campaign, for instance, would likely support the emergence of a serious, ongoing social-democratic organisation or institutions within the Democratic Party.

All socialist utopias run aground ‘on the reefs of roast beef and apple pie’, Werner Sombart wrote in 1906. He argued that to those immigrants who came to America and formed its industrial working class, the living standards they found here so much exceeded those they had left behind that going socialist became unnecessary (Sombart, 1976).

The reality and expectation of rising economic conditions—and the sense that the US was a nation that rewarded work—was the key to socialism’s absence. The reality and expectation of declining political, social, and economic conditions, and the sense that today the US is a nation that rewards only the rich, is the key to socialism’s—or more precisely, the socialists’—surprising presence. That is why, today, there are socialists—by the millions—in America.

Young and Socialist

The so-called ‘democratic socialism’ is reaching new heights of popularity with millennials. Furthermore, with the election of people like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., America’s free-market foundations are increasingly under attack. ‘I prefer living in a socialist country’—do you agree with this statement? According to a recent Harris Poll, almost 50% of young Americans share that opinion. Moreover, an astounding 61% of 18-to-24-year-olds have a favourable reaction to socialism generally (Boyack, 2019).

The generational shift becomes apparent when one looks at senior citizens—those who still remember the destructiveness that socialism has wrought. Among this demographic, the favourable view of socialism plummets to a mere 27%.

What can explain this newfound interest in socialism among the rising generation?

The answer partly lies in the cultural popularity of the term, even if those spreading it around do not fully grasp perhaps its implications—yet.

That leads to one of the primary sources of the problem: the entire educational establishment and its unwillingness to teach relevant subjects a politically unbiased and socially responsible way. It is a problem that has been a long time coming—and the parents, their elected leaders, and the whole nation have been looking on for many decades. Is it any wonder that Ms Ocasio-Cortez has risen in popularity? That a fellow millennial comrade keeps fighting for free things is quite attractive to many young voters, still lacking the intellectual depth to know the inherent drawbacks of such a policy method.

When a person is still young, inexperienced, and naive, it is enticing to want to live at others’ expense and seek a relaxed and carefree life, to avoid the risk, unpredictability, and decision-making that independent living and the free economy involve. ‘Capitalist’ adults tell the rising generation to get a job, gain experience and become responsible providers. Simultaneously, so-called ‘democratic socialists’ want the electorate to be the equivalent of free-riders, entitlement receivers, eternal students living in their parents’ basement, like many in the European welfare states do, for decades to come.

The problem stems not only from a politically correct curriculum that conveys contempt for capitalism and everything ‘Western’ but from the gatekeepers themselves, administrators and teachers alike. A teacher with a leftist ideology is unlikely to extol the virtues of capitalism or point out the historically controversial results seen in countries that ever embraced socialism.

Consider the young adults entering college where they spend their formative years, embrace their new identity, and discover what they want and believe, apart from their parents’ view of the world. One survey of over 8,000 college professors from around the US revealed that 78.2% of the academic departments reviewed had either ‘zero Republicans’ or so few to make no statistical difference (Langbert, 2018). Such political homogeneity will not produce a climate in which any opposing viewpoint can be given its fair due.

Socialism’s increasing popularity directly results from the decreasing exposure to non-leftist, unbiased, and balanced political, social, and economic ideas among the rising generation. The non-partisan, objective open-mindedness has been chased out by a leftist, sometimes even Marxist educational establishment built upon a socialist foundation. But is there anything new or surprising about this subject?

Millennials are the only American age group in which a majority views socialism favourably. A Gallup poll has found that an astounding 69% of millennials say they would be willing to vote for a socialist presidential candidate—while only a third would do so among their parents’ generation (Ekins, 2016). Indeed, various polls reveal that about 70% to 80% of young Democrats cast their votes for Bernie Sanders, a ‘democratic socialist’.

Nevertheless, millennials tend to reject the actual definition of socialism—government control of the means of production, or government managing businesses. Merely 32% of millennials favour a government-managed economy while, similar to older generations, 64% prefer a free-market economy (Ekins, 2016). Moreover, as millennials age and begin to earn more, their socialist ideals seem to slip away somewhat.

So, what does socialism mean to millennials? Scandinavia—even though countries such as Denmark are not socialist states (as the Danish prime minister has taken great pains to emphasise). Denmark itself outranks the United States on several economic freedom measures such as less business regulation and lower corporate tax rates; nevertheless, young people like the country’s expanded social welfare programs more.

Millennials, maturing during the Great Recession of 2008, are ambivalent about the ability of free markets to drive economic mobility. Thus, many are comfortable with the government helping to provide for people’s needs. The overwhelming majority of millennials favour a government guarantee for health insurance and college education. Fifty-two percent of them also support a bigger government that provides more services—compared with 38% of the overall population.

Nevertheless, the expanded social welfare state that Sanders thinks the United States should adopt requires everyday people to pay considerably more taxes. Now, millennials will become averse to social welfare spending if they have to foot the bill. As they reach the threshold of earning about $50,000 a year, most millennials will oppose income redistribution, including raising taxes to augment financial assistance to the poor or pay higher health-insurance premiums to help cover the uninsured.

In short, millennials are willing to let others pay higher taxes for more services provided by a larger government when they still have low income but will opt for lower taxes for fewer services provided by a smaller government when they have to foot the bill.

Millennials are not the first generation to think like that. In the 1980s, baby boomers also supported bigger government, and so did Generation Xers in the 1990s. However, both baby boomers and Gen Xers grew more sceptical of government over time and about the same magnitude.i

Furthermore, many conservatives do not recognise that, in contrast with the 1960s and 1970s, college students and millennials today are not debating whether the US should adopt the Soviet-style command-and-control system that devastated economies and destroyed the lives of millions. Free enterprise already won the economic battle with socialism, and the free markets have lifted more people out of poverty than any other system.