New Poll Shows Socialism Surging. It’s Disturbing—and Entirely Predictable.

It took only two years.

In 2024, 18 percent of registered voters had a positive view of socialism. Today, according to a new CNBC poll, that number is 28 percent.

A ten-point increase in two years.

Among Americans aged 18 to 34, socialism now leads capitalism in favorability by 18 points.

Those numbers should be disturbing. They shouldn’t surprise anyone.

CNBC presented the poll largely as an electoral contest between political labels. A candidate calling himself a democratic socialist now performs slightly better with voters than one calling himself MAGA.

That makes for a provocative headline. It isn’t the real story.

The real story is that socialism—an ideology America spent much of the twentieth century opposing—has been rehabilitated in the minds of millions of Americans. Among the youngest adults, it’s no longer merely acceptable. It’s preferable.

That didn’t happen by accident.

The Left understood something conservatives spent decades ignoring: Winning an election gives you power for a few years. Controlling the institutions that shape how people understand the world gives you power for generations.

Education was always central to that strategy.

If that sounds exaggerated, listen to Randi Weingarten, president of the nearly 2-million-member American Federation of Teachers.

This isn’t an obscure campus activist. It’s the president of one of America’s largest teachers unions speaking less like the leader of an educational organization than the head of a political movement.

That distinction matters. The overwhelming majority of teachers aren’t radical activists but too many are and the institutions representing them increasingly behave as though shaping the country’s politics is part of their educational mission.

This doesn’t require every teacher to walk into class carrying The Communist Manifesto (although it is one of the most frequently assigned texts in American universities). It works more subtly than that.

Capitalism is taught through its failures: greed, exploitation, inequality and environmental damage. Socialism is taught through its promises: fairness, dignity, equality and compassion.

Capitalism is judged by every bad outcome that occurs beneath it. Socialism is judged by the intentions of the people proposing it.

When capitalism produces inequality, the system is blamed. When socialism produces poverty, repression or collapse, students are told that wasn’t real socialism.

That is quite an arrangement.

America is treated much the same way. Its history is organized around its sins. Students learn what America did wrong without learning what made America worth correcting. By the time they reach adulthood, many have absorbed a simple moral vocabulary:

Profit means exploitation.

Inequality means injustice.

Private ownership means privilege.

Government provision means compassion.

America means oppression.

Socialism means fairness.

Once those assumptions are established, socialism no longer sounds radical. It sounds like the morally responsible alternative.

That’s the part Americans should find especially infuriating. We’re financing the institutions doing it.

We pay the property taxes. We fund the universities. We guarantee the loans. We finance the grants. We subsidize the departments and programs that tell the next generation the country providing all of it is fundamentally corrupt.

Then a poll arrives showing socialism gained ten points, and everyone behaves as though a strange new political weather system blew in overnight.

It didn’t.

America doesn’t need schools that demand uncritical patriotism. It does need schools capable of explaining why liberty, private property, limited government and individual responsibility matter.

If we refuse to do that, someone else will explain those ideas for us.

The latest poll isn’t a mystery.

We taught a generation to associate capitalism with greed and socialism with compassion. We taught them America’s failures while treating its greatness as either irrelevant or fraudulent.

Now they prefer socialism, and we’re surprised.

We shouldn’t be.

We paid for the lesson.