The Dumbest Generation

 

Some time ago I noted that this generation favors socialism over capitalism without really knowing what socialism is but that is par for the course in that this generation seems sorely lacking in analytical skills. Most seem to picture socialism as just capitalism with a bigger safety net. One poll found that when young people were shown the actual agenda items of the Democratic Socialists of America, they rejected nearly all of them. A recent Wall Street Journal column went further and labeled these young thinkers the “dumbest generation.”

wsj.com/opinion/socialism-and-the-dumbest-generation-687024bf

If anything, that headline is generous. This generation has been fed a steady diet of socialist ideas from kindergarten through college, so it’s a small miracle any conservatives survive the process at all. Too many have simply never been asked to think for themselves. The Journal piece makes the point that these contradictions are sitting in plain sight and most of this generation are either blissfully unaware of them or simply don’t care.

Consider the numbers. Seventy-seven percent of registered voters under 25 believe pay should be based on the “merit and value” of one’s work — a distinctly anti-socialist idea. Sixty-eight percent want to own a home. The DSA says that home ownership is white supremacy. The DSA platform calls for seizing the means of production and nationalizing large corporations. Yet seventy percent of these same young people want to start their own business and 63% see America as the land of opportunity. So which is it — is this the dumbest generation, the most secretly entrepreneurial one, or just a generation of useful idiots repeating slogans they have never once questioned?

Holding a contradiction without noticing it isn’t a youth problem — it’s a human one. I have a friend of more than forty years, an avowed socialist, who hasn’t worked in years and lives comfortably off an inheritance — without ever connecting that comfort to the same capitalist system she condemns. I once asked her if she would donate that inheritance to a socialist government so it could be redistributed “more fairly,” in exchange for a modest “living wage”? She said “Are you crazy?” Would she hand over her house and rent it back from the state? “Hell no!” she said. Crazy? Not me. 

But this is the socialist leaders’ playbook: private ownership for me – collective control for everybody else. As I’ve said before, the world breaks down roughly into three groups: the 3% who make things happen, the 7% who notice what’s happening, and the 90% who have no idea what’s happening at all. Socialist movements recruit mainly from that last group. But intellectual laziness and unexamined ignorance aren’t new phenomena — we’re just more aware of them now, thanks to how loudly and publicly they’re expressed. 

Who said?

“The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they alone knew everything, and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them.”

— Socrates

A bright exception to this generational dumbness comes from my niece’s school, Harvey Mudd College, where she serves as president. Mudd is a small STEM-focused undergraduate college, recently ranked third in the country behind only MIT and Stanford. It’s full of sharp, driven young minds working hard and pushing toward genuine excellence. This does not mean that they might reject socialism, yet. I’m reminded that Thomas Sowell entered his PhD program at the University of Chicago as a committed socialist. One of his professors said that he would not be a socialist for long. He was simply too bright.

The Mudd students strike me as cut from that same cloth. In the campus magazine, my niece, President Harriet Nembhard, described a course she recently co-taught:

Devices of Democracy

 

Some 2,500 years ago, Athenian democracy used the kleroterion, a sortition device that randomly selected citizens for public office and jury duty. In 2024, the artist Taryn Simon reimagined this ancient tool as a modern sculpture meant to spark conversation about democracy today. The course I co-taught with Michael G. and C. Jane Wilson Professor Ken Fandell, “The Game of Democracy: Art, Engineering, Chance, Choice, and Civic Life,” turned that conversation into an interdisciplinary learning experience. Together, we explored how aesthetics and structural design shape democratic life, and students shared their work in a campus exhibition that included Simon’s kleroterion sculpture, on loan from the Almine Rech Gallery in Paris.

hmc.edu/game-of-democracy

Now that’s a college-level course! With an education like that, Mudd’s graduates will land among the 3% or the 7% but not the 90%. They’ll be the thinkers, the innovators, and quite possibly the leaders. Some may even be socialists now but given enough thought, like Sowell, they will be too smart to remain socialists.

But given Harriet’s course, I am wondering whether we shouldn’t bring back the sortition? Given the presidential candidates we’ve had over the last twenty years, picking leaders by lottery could hardly do worse.