Why do Millennials Lean Left?

Guest Post by Eric Peters

It’s said – and it’s probably true – that Leftism has made even greater inroads with Gen Z than it has with the Millennials who preceded them. If it’s true, it’s probably because they both got screwed by the system they were born into, which is “capitalist” in the same way that America is a “free” country (which almost no one says anymore because it no longer applies, anymore).

So they turn to socialism as the antidote to the “capitalism” they believe they’ve been screwed over by.

A better real-world example of the Stalin’s Chicken story would be hard to come up with. If you don’t know the story, it goes like this: Stalin was entertaining foreign guests, one of whom asked him how he maintains the love of the people, given the fact that most of the people in the Soviet Union lived hard (and poor) lives. Stalin demonstrated how. A chicken was brought to Stalin, who grabbed the bird and roughly plucked it until the bird stood naked and shivering at his feet. He then reached into his pocket and spread a few scratch grains on the floor at his feet, which the bird began to peck at.

And that’s how.

Similarly, Leftists promise to “help” the Millennials and Gen Z with such things as student loan forgiveness and “free” health care, etc. After having plucked these birds first, so that they are grateful for what they get – because they believe that they’ll never have anything, otherwise.

And they’re not wrong about this. Just about the cause of this.

Here I’ll get personal and use my Gen X self to explain what’s happened to the Millennials and now Gen Z.

When I graduated high school back in the ’80s, practically every high school kid owned their own car – because they could afford to own one. Cheap old cars abounded. If you had a few hundred bucks, you could have a car. It now takes a few thousand bucks to own a car, not counting the cost of insurance. And these cars aren’t cars that can be gimped along by a kid with not much money, few tools and hardly any real knowledge of their workings. When it stops working, the repair to get it working again is likely to be a dealer/shop repair that a kid can’t afford. A car you can’t afford to buy or keep running tends to sour you on cars; it also tends to make you feel gypped – and resentful. Easy enough to join the ranks of Leftists excoriating car ownership and driving as a threat to the “climate.”

When I got my first salaried job as an editorial writer at The Washington Times, I was offered health insurance. I was not required to pay for it, via having a large chunk of my salary deducted for it. I chose not to pay for it, which made sense to me then and still does, today. A healthy, single guy in his 20s needs health insurance like a guy that age needs hair dye. What someone that age does need, on the other hand, is money. And if you aren’t forced to spend it – as by the government – then you will have more of it to spend on other things.

Like a first house, for instance.

Because I did not have a car payment when I was in my 20s (because I was able to buy an old VW Beetle for a few hundred bucks) and because a large chunk of my salary as an editorial writer for The Washington Times wasn’t taken from me to pay for health insurance I needed like a frog needs a suntan, I was able to save up enough money for a down payment on my first house.

Something I did need. Something I was able to pay for myself – because I hadn’t been plucked like Stalin’s chicken, as subsequent generations have been via Obamacare, which forces them to pay for health insurance and via Obama’s “cash for clunkers” program, which took the bulk of affordable old cars off the market by paying off the people who owned them to turn them in to be destroyed.

There are additional, compounding factors. They include the policies of the federal government under The Chimp that wildly inflated the real estate market via speculation in the real estate market (people bought homes to “flip” rather than to live in; people were suckered into buying more home than they could afford, etc.) which eventually ebbed but never retreated to where it was. Add in zoning – another government hobble to affordability – which outlaws affordable housing by requiring all homes within a certain area to meet certain standards that guarantees all of them will be expensive homes.

Not many Millennials (let alone Gen Zs) can afford the $400,000 it now takes to buy an average single family home in this country.

Just as not many of them can afford to spend the nearly $50,000 it now takes to buy the average-priced new vehicle. Many of them are still living with their parents. They feel screwed – and they’re not wrong about that.

Just about who – and what – screwed them over.

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