Five years ago, Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist behind PayPal and Palantir, sent a prescient email to Facebook executives.
“When 70% of millennials say they are pro-socialist,” he wrote, “we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why.”
The email went viral after democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s victory last week in the New York City mayoral race. Thiel then sat down with The Free Press’s Sean Fischer to explain what he saw in 2020 that no one else did.
Capitalism isn’t working for young people, Thiel said, citing burdensome student debt and regulations putting homeownership out of reach for many. “People assume everything still works, but objectively, it doesn’t. . . . If you proletarianize the young people, you shouldn’t be surprised if they eventually become communist.”
The piece provoked impassioned conversation among our readers, who had their own thoughts about the source of today’s seeming socialist revolution. The debate speaks to one of the most urgent questions of our age. We’re thrilled to bring you a few of their responses today. —The Editors
Blake Scholl is the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic.
If you insert enough socialist elements into a capitalist system, when the socialist elements inevitably cause problems, people will blame capitalism—and then turn socialist. That’s what happened in New York City, for example, where Mamdani voters were motivated by high rents and crippling student debt—even though rent control drives up housing prices, and government subsidies for higher education encourage universities to raise tuition.
Likewise, you insert enough capitalist elements into a socialist system, the system sort of begins to work, and people think socialism works. That’s what has happened in China.
At the root of this terrible confusion is a failure of our education system—and our media—to give the next generation a proper history education.
