Deseret News opinion editor Jay Evensen is right not to panic. Writing in a column for Deseret News, Evensen surveyed the recent string of democratic socialist primary victories nationwide and concluded that democracy has a way of sanding the sharp edges off radical ideologies. The far left’s record of governance is dismal, he noted, and grand plans tend to crack under the heat of reality.
This is all true, but there is a deeper story that must be told as to why these radical ideologies have begun to win and why these politicians have been able to organize so effectively. It begins with the question of why so many young Americans are drawn to them.
The answer can be found in a book published a quarter century ago by a late mentor of mine — Seymour Martin Lipset. Writing with Gary Marks, Lipset wrote “It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States” and asked why America, alone among industrial democracies, never developed a serious socialist movement.
The answers Lipset and Marks offered were partly structural — our two-party system and winner-take-all elections punished third parties — but they were also, crucially, experiential. So many Americans lived capitalism’s promise and positive realities.
America’s workforce saw real mobility for themselves and their children and an individualist, antistatist creed ran deep. Moreover, Americans were formidable joiners — as observed by Alexis de Tocqueville decades earlier — and they were deeply embedded in churches, lodges, unions, clubs and neighborhood associations that gave them belonging, status and voice without any need for a revolutionary party to supply it.
Lipset and Marks argued that socialism did not fail in the United States because Americans read the right rebuttals to Marx. Rather, it failed because the conditions present nationwide never let it take hold. This points to the uncomfortable truth of 2026: Almost every immunity Lipset and Marks identified in their book has now degraded — particularly for young adults.
A misunderstanding of market economics
Start with young Americans’ lived experience of markets and capitalism. In cities where socialism has gained political traction — Chicago, Seattle, New York and San Francisco — many younger Americans are living through soaring housing costs, shrinking opportunities and dysfunctional markets. Their frustrations are real.
This mistake is not in recognizing the problems but in misidentifying their causes. Too often, however, they are seeing the consequences of regulation, restrictive zoning and poor governance as if they were failures of capitalism itself.
That confusion is hardly surprising. Most young Americans have never been taught how markets create prosperity. Significant numbers graduate from college without taking a single economics course, something I have long argued should change. There is also commonly a campus culture that presents markets primarily as engines of exploitation rather than as the greatest anti-poverty mechanism in human history — one that within living memory has lifted billions of people out of extreme poverty.
So when Gallup finds favorable views of capitalism slipping, and when a Deseret News/Hinckley Institute poll shows a majority of Utah Democrats viewing socialism favorably, we should be careful about what those numbers mean. They do not necessarily reflect a careful comparison of competing economic systems and their trade-offs. They reflect what happens when a generation is asked to make judgments on a socioeconomic system it was never taught to understand.
A lack of strong social structures
Moving beyond economic systems, Lipset and Marks would point to the recent real decline of associational life as a major cause of socialism’s ascent. Theorists from Alexis de Tocqueville and Edmund Burke to Robert Nisbet and Richard John Neuhaus have long marveled at Americans’ art of association. Lipset understood that these institutions kept radicalism marginal by meeting fundamental human needs for fellowship, purpose and recognition.
Those institutions have been hollowed out, and young adults are the loneliest Americans on record. They may be digitally connected and habitually online, but few join congregations, civic clubs, scouting or recreational leagues. They are not merely under-informed; so many younger Americans are isolated, under-formed, unattached and without a social core.
If we look honestly at what the Democratic Socialists of America can offer a lonely 24-year-old, it is not primarily a policy program. It is membership and meetings, canvassing and organizing with friends on a Saturday morning, along with a shared vocabulary, a common enemy and the feeling of mattering to something larger than oneself.
This dynamic was evident in the post-Oct. 7 protests around our nations campuses. The same social mechanics are at work in the DSA today, where belonging can be as powerful a draw as the ideology and ideas of the DSA itself.
What can be done?
If we consider this framing, it radically changes how we think about this so-called socialist surge. If the problem were socialism as an ideology itself, the answer would be rebuttal with more op-eds, more education and public-focused work, and more warnings about Venezuela and countless failed states. But reason and evidence alone do not persuade or work on people whose initial attraction was rooted less in ideas than belonging.
If the problem is formation — and that certainly appears to be the case — the real answer is to rebuild what once formed young Americans into confident, connected participants in a free society.
That means teaching economics so that graduates understand scarcity, trade-offs, incentives and the astonishing record of market economies, along with their real failures. It also means rebuilding our social associations: the congregations, camps, scouting troops, service organizations and local institutions where young people find the belonging they now seek in ideological movements like the DSA. Neither project is glamorous. Both are slow and thankless. But they address the underlying conditions fueling the DSA’s growth rather than simply reacting to individual candidates and particular cities and places.
Finally, I should note that Lipset’s title contained a quiet warning that his admirers sometimes miss. Socialism didn’t happen here in the past tense because a particular America existed: prosperous, mobile, religious, fraternal and thick with institutions that formed citizens and demonstrated capitalism’s promise in daily life. That America was not an accident, and its immunities are not permanent as we see now — our nation’s immunities to socialism were built and then regularly reaffirmed.
Evensen is right that we need not fear the socialists. What we should fear and then fix is the loneliness and disconnection as well as the ignorance that make socialism feel like an answer for so many young people. Restore formation, purpose, community, and belonging and this socialist impulse will fade the way of every American socialist movement before it did.