I recently came across a statistic that sent chills down my spine, having been born in a communist country. According to a recent Cato Institute Survey, four in ten (38%) 18-to-29-year-olds (and almost a third of 30-to-44-year-olds) are favorable towards communism. Communism’s appeal among Gen Z is twice as high as among 45-54 year olds, and three times as high as among those aged 55-64.
Momentarily I was transported back to the economic ruin, stripped supermarket shelves of grey, repressive 1980s communist Bulgaria, and the power outages and hyperinflation that followed in the 1990s in the post-communist Soviet bloc countries.
To me, communism means being forever stuck in mediocrity, silence, and a fawning existence marked by hollow propaganda heralding non-existent equality and demanding self-sacrifice “in the name of all”. It means a ruptured relationship with the engines of a happy life, like truth, trust, empowerment and success. It means being continuously lied to by those in power, being prohibited from expressing yourself freely and repressing any big dreams of standing out from the crowd that you might otherwise have had.
What is it then that so many young American adults like about communism, I wondered, fairly certain that it was not any of the facets I associate communist regimes with.
To get some answers I interviewed Fenley Scurlock (18), co-author of Down to Business and now a freshman at Brown University majoring in philosophy, and Atlanta-based Harper Bruner (17), a senior at Stanford Online High School focusing on history.
Despite communism’s collapse in 20th century Soviet bloc countries, the last decade has witnessed a surprising surge in interest in communism and socialism among the US public and journalists globally. Analysis by my consultancy AKAS reveals that Google searches for communism have reached an all-time high in the US, up 82% since 2006. Ahrefs analysis of 684 million English-language news pages published globally between 2016 and 2026 revealed that news mentions of socialism are now on a par with mentions of capitalism, while mentions of communism, although at a lower level, are at recent high.
In our conversation, Bruner observed that young adults are picking up on the heightened communism- and socialism-related rhetoric being “thrown around” by politicians and news commentators. Indeed, President Trump drastically escalated his warnings about communism this summer, mentioning the term 81 times in the two weeks surrounding 4th July. Calling his opponents “communists” seems to be one of Trump’s midterm election campaign tactics.
Bruner explained that young people are confused and turn to Google search and AI for clarification on the cacophony of terms – communism, socialism, utilitarianism, authoritarianism – that hold no historical resonance for them, being three generations removed from the past they signify.
Contrary to the political rhetoric’s intended effect, according to my interviewees most young people are not frightened by the threat of communism or socialism. They associate these terms with a different, often more promising, economic reality rather than with a political regime, let alone an authoritarian one (another term poorly understood among the young). As Bruner remarked, “We grew up without memories of the Soviet era. We view these terms more abstractly and associate words like communism with resources rather than with authoritarianism.”
Scurlock argued that the Republican red-baiting rhetoric has backfired, triggering instead a favorable attitude towards the ill-understood concepts of communism and socialism among young people. “Republicans are used to labelling measures like universal healthcare and universal basic income […] as ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’, which they use as scare words. But when you see something that looks good for people being labelled socialism, or communism, you think, ‘Well, those things seem good, maybe that means that socialism is good’.”
At the heart of communism and socialism’s disproportionate appeal among young people lies their increasingly curtailed economic prospects, which both Scurlock and Bruner talked about at length. With 53% of US 18-to-29s favorable towards socialism but only 45% favorable towards capitalism, Gen Z evidently feel let down by capitalism. And they are indeed wrestling with unprecedented economic precarity, as the rising age of first-time home buyers indicates (29 in 1981 vs. 40 in 2025).
“I think the problem is the lived economic frustrations associated with high costs of living, soaring house prices, student debt, low student wage. So, when you live under these difficult market conditions, the ideas and promises of universal equity or wealth redistribution naturally catch your attention,” rationalized Bruner. Having volunteered to support Hispanic immigrants she was keen to speak about the extreme economic inequality she had witnessed. “Some people don’t have access to a proper education, to a house or to technology… others don’t even have access to basic things like pens, pencils, diapers, period products and paper.”
Scurlock drew a detailed picture of failing capitalism, which so many from his generation fervently averse to. “In the last 40 years …we’ve seen large corporations become a sort of authoritarian entity in themselves. We see billionaires buying media companies and influencing their trajectory, the wealthy actively donating money to fund certain political candidates that they then can make demands of. We see monopolies, multinational corporations that are too big to fail. In other words, we see something that in one sense is not actually capitalism, something like a crony capitalism.” He further laid out the extraordinary economic unfairness his generation perceives: “You see companies outsourcing labor to China, to underpaid and often underage workers. You see a high level of corruption in government due to corporate interference. Young people look at our current system specifically in America and see that this system isn’t working.”
My conversations and research left me much less shocked at that statistic that had sent chills down my spine a few weeks prior. I see that many young people are searching for alternative systems to the one so many see as broken. Politicians must listen to them and provide an alternative that does not relegate Gen Z to the sidelines of prosperity and personal fulfilment but puts them at the centre instead. In Scurlock’s words, “We want more regulation, more individual ground-level say in the economy and less of one CEO at the top throwing $100 million to secure the election of a candidate who cuts their taxes.”
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