In Reply to: (link) Op-Ed piece from WaPo on why younger... posted by SagoBob on April 07, 2024 at 19:55:20
for what it is, whereas previous generations were ideologically conditioned (by fear of communism) to internalize a cultural imperative to buy into the ideology of capitalism, which gradually lost its force when the Soviet Union collapsed.
The illusion of capitalism was also benefited from the soft light of economic optimism and continually growing wealth. As long as wealth was being distributed reasonably, it was easier to carry on with the fantasy. Then came the Reagan years and the gap between the classes ended up growing wider and wider with middle class stagnation, followed by endles cycles of boom and bust, which kept getting harsher and harsher. As growth slowed down and the bigger pieces of the pie kept concentrating in fewer hands, and the fear of communism subsided, a harsher light was cast on the veneer of capitalism, and the fairy tale met reality. So younger generations can actually see what a Potemkin Village the whole thing was all along.
From where I'm standing, the question of why young people don't have faith in capitalism is an absurd one. It's the kind of question that people who have been benefitting from the system would ask and exposes a level of naivite and disconnect, akin in some ways, to that line about how if people don't have bread to eat perhaps they can eat some brioche (translated to English as "cake").