“There actually is a third way that has existed in pretty much all Christian economic thinking going back 2,000 years ago, which is that yeah, extreme wealth inequality does create problems, but you still got to have private property.”
Socialism is on the rise in the US fueled by young people who find they have no stake in America or any kind of foothold on the American Dream. Home ownership, a good life at any income level, family, meaningful work, the opportunity for prosperity—these are the components of the American Dream, the promise of the American way of life, and for many who are coming up today the attainment of those things is just not even close to within reach.
In an interview with Joe Rogan last week, JD Vance cited Charlie Kirk in saying that the only antidote to the rise in socialist sympathies among young Americans is allowing them to "own something." Kirk said home ownership, owning a piece of America, is "the greatest crisis that is facing us."
About a year ago, just weeks before he was murdered, Kirk said "How do we get more young people under the age of 35 to have equity in the system? Not the Democrat version of equity where they want to have redistribution, but actually, are they paying a mortgage? Do they own stuff, or are they permanent renters? A permanent renting class in this country is the prerequisite, is the leading ingredient for radical politics that nobody wants to see. We need to reinvigorate the ownership economy." He said further that debt is radicalizing young Americans.
And he didn't mean free government money, which would just jack up the cost of homes in the first place. This is what has happened with every industry the government has propped up.
https://twitter.com/charliekirk11/status/1837680882301522284?s=20
A permanent renter class is what the DSA, the rising American socialists, are looking to create. They want city and state level government-owned housing and it's been proposed at the federal level, too. The idea is that it's just not fair for landlords to own property and decide what they want to do with it, that housing but that it should be owned by the government and distributed under some supposedly "fair" metric.
For people who are already renting and seeing their rents rise, or living in their parents homes without any feeling that they will ever be able to own a home of their own, this concept of government owned rental properties doesn't seem so bad—at least then, the socialist line goes, the rent wouldn't rise out of control.
This desire also speaks to something else, however, which is a decline in the hope for upward mobility. If young people believe that homes should be owned by government and distributed to the rest of us, then they have no belief that they could ever own a home. Boomers grew up in homes their parents owned. Gen Xers watched their parents work extra and save up to buy a home, and as adults, found that home ownership would have to wait until much later in life. Millennials had an even harder time and for Gen Z it's all out of reach.
"There is a Christian idea of political economy that's actually been lost in American politics," Vance told Rogan, "where it's it's like we think of it as libertarianism, the hardcore free market versus socialism or communism, and there actually is a third way that has existed in pretty much all Christian economic thinking going back 2,000 years ago, which is that yeah, extreme wealth inequality does create problems, but you still got to have private property. You still have to have the state that protects private property rights, and there's a way to balance these things that I think we've sort of lost in our in our country a little bit."
https://twitter.com/libbyemmons/status/2079212509316120864?s=20
It's that balance that Americans are looking for, not just extreme wealth or poverty, but a middle ground where hard work pays off and attainment is possible. Christian economic thinking would mean that considerations are made across the economic landscape and profit is not the primary alone at any cost is not the primary motive.
"Why are young people attracted to socialism in 21st century America?" Vance asked, after saying he didn't agree with the DSA and that their ideas lead to totalitarianism. Then he cited Kirk for the answer to that question: "he talked about the fact that if you don't give young people a stake, if you don't give them ownership, if you don't give them a sense of the American dream and of possibility in the future, they're going to become socialists.
"Like if if you have a zero sum environment for a 25 year old in this country, they're going to start to say the only way for me to get anything is to take away from somebody else. So we have to get away from like the zero sum thinking. I think that's like the root cause of this." As for what he's doing as VP, he said the Trump administration is trying to reverse bad trends like off-shoring American jobs, bringing manufacturing back home, lowering interest rates, stabilizing housing costs.
"I think that unless you go down that pathway of allowing young Americans to own something," Vance said, "socialism is the inevitable outcome. Do I think that's good? No, but I really do worry, and I see this frankly more in my own party than I do on the other side. There is this revulsion to socialism that's totally justified, without enough thinking about how did we get here in the first place. And if man, if we don't fix that, and I would say if we don't get back to a more Christian sort of understanding of economics, socialism is the alternative. Like that is where this goes. Well, people don't own anything exactly. And in some ways, Joe, the game is rigged."
And that's exactly what socialists like DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo, Zohran Mamdani, Darializa Chevalier, Claire Valdez, AOC, Bernie, Liz Warren and all the rest are tapping into when they talk about the insane cost of renting and call for an end to private property—because what does a kid who can't afford a home care about private property? The socialist line is about lowering expectations, they essentially say: you'll never afford to own a home, so make sure no one can own a home and exploit you with big rent.
Gordillo broke it down to Martha McCallum on Saturday: "Landlords in New York have been making a 12% return on their investment on average. They're complaining that 12 is not enough, and we don't think that anyone should have a constitutional right to double-digit returns on their investment... No one has a right, that's not in the constitution."
https://twitter.com/libbyemmons/status/2078493699365847501?s=20
If the bar for home ownership is so high, the logic goes, then instead of lowering that bar to make it easier to buy, raise the bar and make it impossible.
This is what fuels American socialism: a feeling of being left out of the promise of America, an inability to attain that promise even with hard work, a sense that downward mobility is the trend and that, as Vance says, the game is rigged. And if the game is rigged, why wouldn't a kid just overturn the board and scatter the pieces? They may not win, but at least then neither would anyone else. If you feel you have no shot at winning, it's easy to feel that not only is there no point in playing but the game should be destroyed. What Americans really want is a fair shot.
This article originally appeared in Libby Emmons' newsletter, click here to subscribe.
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