Campus conservatives often spout the phrase “socialism sucks.” But it’s almost never explained. If you are lucky, you will hear these pundits mention economic efficiency or freedom, but they hardly examine the root causes of why younger people increasingly support socialism. Organizations that peddle such trite slogans as “socialism sucks” usually slap those words on a t-shirt and sell it for $30 to bright-eyed conservatives looking to challenge the predominantly liberal discourse on their college campuses. It’s not much better outside of the campus bubble. While those on the religious right point to a God-shaped hole in the hearts of younger generations, mainstream Republicans obsess over Cuba and Venezuela rather than look at the countries actually idealized by American socialists (such as Norway and France) or analyze why the young are enamored with socialism.

Simply put, younger people are trending socialist because America is and likely will be worse for them than it has been for their parents. Suicide, drug overdoses, and housing prices are all rising while life expectancy, mental health, and real wages are declining. These issues disproportionately affect the generations that must over-leverage themselves in order to have the same material quality of life as the previous generation. Never mind that people in this new generation will have fewer friends, suffer heightened racial tensions, and feel the looming threat of climate change hovering over them. Frankly, socialism may provide a better solution than the nebulous, often unrewarding principles of market equilibrium and classical growth that the free- market conservatives espouse. Instead of merely hoping that housing prices will return to equilibrium without zoning laws, the socialist wants to create green, mixed-use neighborhoods with ample public transportation.

If you saw someone overdosed, homeless, and alone beside a perfectly clean corporate office, who would you empathize with? It is impossible to walk around a modern city without witnessing obscene human degradation. As the socialist sees it, this scene is an implicit threat to the working class: if you do not have your entry-level job that requires three years of experience manipulating pointless spreadsheets and meticulously constructing PowerPoints, that could be you. The socialists reject economic efficiency in their pursuit of equality. They do not care that their envisioned system doesn’t reach market equilibrium, because they see the market equilibrium as unequal and therefore unjust. The younger generations strive to enact the economic policies that they see in almost every European country, and why should they not? With innovation on the decline and social strife rising, our political system must adapt to an economic paradigm of low growth. We can either attempt to reboot our economy or accept our stagnant future and support those who are left behind.

After acknowledging that the youth are indeed likely to be worse off than their parents, we can see why they may be drawn to socialism rather than capitalism. They also harbor substantial resentment toward the older generations that valued short-term growth and enjoyment, leaving us with an untenable economic ponzi scheme and an environment on the brink of collapse. These emotions are channeled into ideas like heavily taxing the rich and agendas like the Green New Deal. Regardless of whether you think those ideas will better society or not, their motivation stems from real problems that the opposing side too often ignores in favor of abstract principles. When the system is not working for you, you want it to change -- and corporate capitalism is not working for the younger generations, now that the economic pie is not growing. Although a utopian solution is impossible, any step that alleviates the increasingly harsh aspects of modern life will seem like a step in the right direction.

To move beyond the “socialism sucks” paradigm, conservatives need to adopt a message of principled action rather than pure principles. Instead of adhering to the dogma of Ronald Reagan, worshiping free-market principles and posing a now-amorphous communism as our enemy, we need to embrace actionable ideas. We must resist the urge to bask in America’s former glory and seeming security, and focus instead on the future. If we want American manufacturing to come back, we must create a tariff system, provide subsidies, and encourage research and development rather than focus on lowering taxes for firms that are already using sophisticated tax-avoidance strategies. If we want our cities to be clean and free of crime, we need to enforce the law, but also address the underlying problems that cause social decay. The power of the state, which is not diminishing anytime soon, should be used to move toward and maintain a society that is more moral, more beautiful, and better acknowledges human dignity, rather than a structure that seems to have failed when Gross Domestic Product increases by only 2 instead of 3 percent.