Life, Liberty, Property #116: Young Adults Losing Faith in America, Free Markets, Poll Finds
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IN THIS ISSUE:
- Young Adults Losing Faith in America, Free Markets, Poll Finds
- The High Cost of Rent Control
- Solving the Birthright Citizenship Puzzle
- Modern Conservatism’s Origin Story
Young Adults Losing Faith in America, Free Markets, Poll Finds
A majority of young voters want a socialist to win the 2028 presidential election, and more than three-quarters want government to nationalize major U.S. industries, a new poll from The Heartland Institute and the Rasmussen group has found.
In the survey, “53% of likely voters aged 18-39 said they would ‘like to see a democratic socialist candidate win the 2028 presidential election,’ and 76% said they ‘somewhat’ or ‘strongly’ agree that ‘Major Industries like health care, energy, and big tech should be nationalized to give more control and equity to the people,” write Justin Haskins and Christopher Talgo in a Heartland press release about the results.
The vast majority of this large demographic group say they would approve of drastic further expansion of the U.S. government:
Additionally, 76% of respondents said they “strongly agree” or “somewhat agree” that “Major Industries like health care, energy, and big tech should be nationalized to give more control and equity to the people,” suggesting that increasingly more young American voters favor radical socialist policies.
Two-thirds of likely voters in this age group said they think the United States is “morally mixed” or “fundamentally evil”:
Half of the respondents to the survey also said that America is a “morally mixed country,” while 28% said the United States is “fundamentally good” and 17% said “fundamentally evil.”
The clamor for a potential socialist president crosses party lines, the poll found:
… [S]upport for radical socialist policies and candidates appears high among likely voters under the age of 40. According to the results of the survey, more than half of young American voters say they want a socialist candidate to win the 2028 presidential election, including a shocking 35% of respondents who said they voted for Donald Trump in 2024.
The most popular potential socialist presidential contender among this group was the least openly socialist of the choices offered, the survey found:
Although more than half of respondents (53%) said they would like to see a socialist candidate win the 2028 presidential election, support among respondents for the most socialistic Democratic Party candidates remained lower than more establishment candidates. When asked who respondents would most likely vote for in a Democratic Party primary, Kamala Harris (36%) received the most support, followed by Bernie Sanders (16%), Gavin Newsom (9%), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (9%), and Zohran Mamdani (4%).
To those who said they would like to see a democratic socialist candidate win the 2028 presidential election, we also asked, “Among the following options, which best describes the biggest reason you would like to see a democratic socialist candidate win the 2028 presidential election?” The respondents were then provided with eight options. Of the options provided, the one that was selected most often was “Housing costs are too high” (31%), followed by “The economy unfairly benefits older, wealthier Americans” (17%) and “The economy unfairly benefits large corporations” (15%). This appears to suggest that support for a socialist president is tied to a belief that America’s economy skews toward wealthier individuals and large corporations.
Young Americans’ belief in the United States and market economies are deteriorating in the wake of long-term economic decline, says Haskins, a senior fellow in the institute’s Glenn C. Haskins Emerging Issues Center:
“This survey clearly shows that due largely to economic challenges, young Americans are increasingly turning to socialist candidates and radical collectivist policies,” said Justin Haskins, senior fellow at The Heartland Institute and the primary author of the poll. “The fact that three-quarters of voters aged 18-39 support nationalizing major industries is an incredibly disturbing trend that must be taken seriously. Clearly, socialism is once again on the rise in the United States.”
Here are the results of the survey:
Survey of 1,201 18-39 US Likely Voters
Conducted August 26-27, 2025, by Rasmussen Reports and StoppingSocialism.com
- Trump Approval
24% Strongly approve
24% Somewhat approve
13% Somewhat disapprove
37% Strongly disapprove
2% Not sure
- In the 2024 presidential election, who did you vote for, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump or some other candidate? Or did you not vote in the 2024 presidential election?
45% Harris
41% Trump
7% Other
6% Didn’t vote
1% Not sure
- If the Democratic Party’s presidential primaries were held today, and the candidates were Kamala Harris, Alexandria-Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, Gavin Newsom, and Zohran Mamdani who would you vote for?
36% Harris
9% Ocasio-Cortez
16% Sanders
9% Newsom
4% Mamdani
6% Some other candidate
11% Wouldn’t vote
8% Not sure
- Do you believe the United States is a fundamentally good, evil, or morally mixed country?
28% Fundamentally good
17% Fundamentally evil
50% Mixed
5% Not sure
- Do you agree or disagree with this statement: Major Industries like health care, energy, and big tech should be nationalized to give more control and equity to the people?
39% Strongly agree
37% Somewhat agree
12% Somewhat disagree
5% Strongly disagree
7% Not sure
- The next presidential election is in 2028. Would you like to see a democratic socialist candidate win the 2028 presidential election?
53% Yes
27% No
20% Not sure
Answered by the 53% who would like to see a democratic socialist candidate win the 2028 presidential election:
- Among the following options, which best describes the biggest reason you would like to see a democratic socialist candidate win the 2028 presidential election?
31% Housing costs are too high
12% Taxes are too low for corporations
11% Taxes are too low for wealthy individuals
8% Want single-payer health care system
17% The economy unfairly benefits older, wealthier Americans
15% The economy unfairly benefits large corporations
5% Some other reason
2% Not sure
The poll questions and crosstabs are available in full here. The survey included 1,201 likely voters aged 18-39 and was completed on August 27, 2025. The reported sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95 percent confidence level.
As I have noted in previous issues of this newsletter (see #114, for example), government interference in the nation’s economy over the past century, and especially since the full severing of the U.S. dollar from gold in 1971, has distorted Americans’ production and trading of goods and services for decades. The disturbance of the relationship between work and rewards has become more pronounced for each generation.
The current generation is reacting not against the results of free markets but against the inevitable destruction inflicted by crony capitalism, corporatism, and government manipulation of the dollar. The United States does not have anything like true free markets today, and the nation has not had a true market economy for decades.
That is what these young people are reacting against, and their claimed support for socialism reflects the only alternative they have been taught in their schools and in the nation’s culture.
The Heartland Institute has been diligent about informing the public about the unfree character of the U.S. economy. These poll results show that it is critical for all proponents of liberty and market freedom to declare that the current U.S. economy is anything but free and that socialism is the problem, not the answer.
Source: The Heartland Institute
Video of the Week
The Heartland Institute and Rasmussen recently collaborated on a poll asking voters under the age of 40 what kind of government they support. Shockingly, more than half said they would back socialist candidates for president — and even more favored nationalizing major industries. This reflects the same troubling trend seen across Europe in recent decades, where increasingly left-wing governments took hold, even with supposedly “conservative” politicians supporting leftist policies.
The High Cost of Rent Control
With young adult Americans struggling to afford to buy houses and start families, facing greater economic burdens than Generation X, Baby Boomers, and prior generations, socialist and ultra-regulatory policies such as rent control are becoming increasingly popular. Young people would be wise to rethink their support of these notions.
“Is There a Dumber Housing Policy Than Rent Control?” asks Manhattan Institute Research Director Judge Glock at The Free Press. “No,” writes Glock, with admirable directness.
Glock is right, and he brings the evidence:
Economists working on rent control are forced to adopt an attitude of weary resignation. The studies on it are so universally negative, the lamentable results so consistent, that reiterating them can feel both necessary and tiresome.
Instead of making housing more affordable, rent control greatly reduces the amount of available housing for new renters, increases the cost of local uncontrolled rents and of properties for purchase, and causes severe deterioration of the properties offered for rent:
[O]ne of the most consistent findings of the literature is that buildings under rent control stop getting maintained and fall into decay. Many researchers trot out the late Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck’s famous line that “rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.”
In 1989, Vietnam’s former foreign minister, Nguyen Co Thach, noted the effects of rent control on his capital city: “The Americans couldn’t destroy Hanoi, but we have destroyed our city by very low rents. We realized it was stupid.” One 1981 book had a series of photos of devastated urban wastelands with the captions “Bomb Damage or Rent Control?” Most readers couldn’t tell which was which. Even today, it’s hard to tell the images of the Bronx, particularly hard-hit from New York’s 1970s tightening of rent control laws, from those of postwar Germany and Japan.
Here are a couple of those photos:
Source: The Fraser Institute
Rent controls are a sure way to remove rental properties from the market, Glock notes:
During World War II, the American homeownership rate rose a shocking 10 percentage points, accounting for about half of the increase in homeownership in the entire twentieth century. According to one research paper, a major explanation of that shift is that rent control during the war forced landlords to transfer their units to buyers. Similarly, when San Francisco expanded rent control to some small houses and multifamily units in 1994, researchers found a 25-point reduction in renters living in them. Time and again, the reduction in the number of apartments made rents in the nonregulated units go up.
Rent control favors older residents over newcomers, especially the young, and reduces competition for tenants, both of which give wealthier people advantages over the rest of the population:
In 2022, St. Paul, Minnesota, enacted a widespread rent-control ordinance. Just two years later, housing production had dropped by over 80 percent, and the city council was forced to roll back some of the previous controls.
Even beyond the effects on new construction, new apartment listings rarely come on the market under rent control, because old tenants benefit from staying put, often leaving only when they go to their final reward. In New York City, about a fourth of all rent-controlled tenants have been living there for more than two decades, more than triple the rate of market units.
Rent control does the same thing that high interest rates, inflation, and ever-tighter restrictions on construction of new housing are doing to the housing market overall: removing options for consumers and making residences cost more. These government intrusions in housing are making it especially difficult for young adult Americans to buy houses. Young workers are getting squeezed from both ends: artificial, government-imposed scarcity of both personally owned housing and rental units.
Little wonder that Americans between the ages of 20 and 40 are desperately considering socialism, which would further increase government control over their personal decisions, even though government control of U.S. housing is the cause of the problem in the first place.
The result will be more misery, Glock writes:
To the tens of millions of renters who want to lease an apartment, as well as to the millions of small landlords, rent control is an almost unmitigated disaster. Yet it persists. Housing reforms take time and involve allowing new buildings to go up, brick by brick, row by row. Instead, people keep demanding relief now. They get rent control, and then they get the entire train of unfortunate consequences, over and over again.
Rent control and other housing-market interference demoralize the public, make people increasingly dependent on government, and undermine the American Dream. Proponents of these horrible ideas claim high ideals, but the results look much more like evidence of a war against the American people.
Americans can build things. All that we need is for governments at all levels to get out of the way
Source: The Free Press
NEW Heartland Policy Study
‘The CSDDD is the greatest threat to America’s sovereignty since the fall of the Soviet Union.’
Solving the Birthright Citizenship Puzzle
One of the most controversial legal questions of our time is the matter of birthright citizenship, determining exactly whom the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to grant citizen status.
With the U.S. Supreme Court expected to rule on the matter in the next term, legal scholar Robert G. Natelson of the Independence Institute performs a deep, scholarly analysis of the question for Law & Liberty. Natelson summarizes the central dispute:
The Citizenship Clause reads, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Thus, to qualify as a birthright citizen, a person must have been both (1) born or naturalized in the United States and (2) born “subject to the jurisdiction of” the United States. Disputes about the scope of the clause center on the meaning of “subject to the jurisdiction of.”
The problem stems from the fact that the amendment was a rush job after the Civil War and shows it, being hopelessly muddled, Natelson notes:
The value of the Fourteenth Amendment has made writers reluctant to criticize the measure’s text or its drafters. Candor compels, however, the conclusion that the Fourteenth Amendment is very poorly written.
Further complicating interpretation, the Senate debates do not make it clear what the various participants were thinking: “Sometimes, even the same Senator is found supporting several sides,” Natelson writes. Natelson provides multiple examples showing that even supporters of the amendment disagreed greatly with one another about what they intended by it. It seems clear that they passed the amendment without coming to full agreement on what it really meant.
The Supreme Court will not have that luxury, Natelson observes. However, though the details of the congressional debate are inconclusive, “the drafting history does disclose principles accepted by most, if not all, of the participants,” Natelson writes, and these ideas indicate what the drafters of the amendment had in mind when they passed it:
First: Both the presumption against redundancy and the Senate debates tell us that “subject to the jurisdiction” imposes a requirement additional to being born within the country. A 2011 Time Magazine cover story opined, “The 14th Amendment … holds that if you’re physically born in the US or a US territory, you’re a citizen. Full stop.” We can be confident this assessment is wrong.
If the senators meant to say that merely being born in the United States makes one a citizen, there was no need for the clause “subject to the jurisdiction,” Natelson notes. The presence of that phrase indicates there is some further requirement. Natelson then examines the record to identify that additional requirement: allegiance. Natelson writes,
Second: Several senators, including the principal sponsor, acknowledged that “subject to the jurisdiction” excluded the children of all or some foreigners.
Third: Several senators said, without contradiction, that the amendment restored the law as it had existed prior to the Dred Scott decision.
Fourth: Several suggested, without specific contradiction, that “subject to the jurisdiction” was tied to the Anglo-American concept of allegiance. For example, Edgar Cowan (R.-Pa.) said, “It is perfectly clear that the mere fact that a man is born in the country has not heretofore entitled him to the right to exercise political power.” He affirmed the prerogative of states to evict people “who acknowledge no allegiance, either to the State or the General Government.” Similarly, Senator Trumbell declared that tribal Indians “are not subject to our jurisdiction in the sense of owing allegiance solely to the United States.”
Soon after the amendment was ratified, the Supreme Court’s decision in Elk v. Wilkins (1882) “adopted the allegiance rationale,” Natelson writes, quoting the Court’s majority as follows:
The main object of the opening sentence of the fourteenth amendment was to … put it beyond doubt that all persons … owing no allegiance to any alien power, should be citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside. … The evident meaning of these last words is … not merely subject in some respect or degree to the jurisdiction of the United States, but completely subject to their political jurisdiction, and owing them direct and immediate allegiance.
Further Court decisions clarified that some children born of foreign parents on U.S. soil were definitely not U.S. citizens. Natelson provides a very useful quote from United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898):
The fundamental principle of the common law with regard to English nationality was birth within the allegiance. … The principle embraced all persons born within the king’s allegiance, and subject to his protection. Such allegiance and protection were mutual … and were not restricted to natural-born subjects and naturalized subjects, or to those who had taken an oath of allegiance; but were predicable of aliens in amity, so long as they were within the kingdom. Children, born in England, of such aliens, were therefore natural-born subjects. But the children, born within the realm, of foreign ambassadors, or the children of alien enemies, born during and within their hostile occupation of part of the king’s dominions, were not natural-born subjects, because not born within the allegiance, the obedience, or the power, or, as would be said at this day, within the jurisdiction, of the king.
The congressional debate and subsequent Supreme Court decisions affirm the common-law principle of allegiance as the key to understanding the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction,” Natelson concludes. With the drafters of the amendment having failed to affirm a definitive final meaning to their handiwork, it is unreasonable to expect the Supreme Court to provide an airtight case for a full understanding today. Nonetheless, Natelson’s careful look at all the evidence identifies a plausible and justifiable case for the essential meaning of the clause:
Because of the poor drafting of the Fourteenth Amendment, the conflicting statements among those who proposed it, and the lack of useful ratification history, there can be no perfect interpretation of the Citizenship Clause. But there is a best one: A child is born “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States when his or her parents are in allegiance to the United States. That means they are either US citizens or non-diplomat foreigners from friendly countries—temporarily or permanently, but legally—in the United States.
That resolves the most controversial aspect of the current legal debate over the citizenship of children of immigrants, though Natelson does not say so directly. Under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, children born in the United States to parents who are here illegally are not citizens by birthright.
Source: Law & Liberty
Modern Conservatism’s Origin Story
Frank S. Meyer was one of the most important libertarian-conservative intellectuals of the twentieth century. My review of American Spectator Senior Editor Daniel Flynn’s excellent biography of Meyer is now online at The Federalist. Please read it there. Here is an excerpt, to whet your appetite:
Political commentator and American Spectator editor Daniel Flynn’s excellent biography of the late Frank S. Meyer arrives at an opportune time for conservatives. The movement is embroiled in internal disputes and has splintered into multiple factions holding many mutually exclusive positions. Today’s right must find agreement on fundamental principles, and those are exactly what Meyer, a longtime senior editor of National Review and founder or cofounder of multiple still-important conservative institutions, provided in the 1950s and ’60s.
As Flynn argues in The Man Who Invented Conservatism, Meyer really did lay the foundations for modern American conservatism, and his vision for the movement is still the best course for the American right. Meyer’s design for a politically, culturally, and intellectually viable American conservatism was called fusionism, which he developed and publicized widely through National Review magazine and individual conversations, especially by telephone, with others throughout the conservative movement, from the greats to the foot soldiers, plus his skill and delight in public meetings and debates.
Fusionism is commonly thought of as defining a political coalition comprising free-market economics, internationalism (initially anti-Communism), and traditional values. Although Meyer was the central figure in assembling that coalition, his idea of fusionism was first and foremost philosophical, arising from an analysis of the ideas of the American founding, which he undertook for a Communist organization in the 1940s. “Yes, a fervent Communist became the man who invented conservatism,” Flynn writes.
Flynn explores Meyer’s early life and Communist years at length to establish the unique mix of aptitudes and experiences that led Meyer to redefine conservatism. The biography breaks much new ground: Flynn found fifteen boxes of Meyer’s papers, including tens of thousands of letters, in a warehouse in Altoona, Pennsylvania, which had never been examined before.
Meyer, Flynn writes, grew up in a wealthy, bourgeois, liberal Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey. He emerged into adulthood as an atheist and a Communist. Egotistical, intellectually arrogant, and pugnacious, Meyer washed out of Princeton University in the late 1920s because of inattention to his studies and an apparent boost from institutional antisemitism. Meyer eventually got admitted to Oxford University, where he became a full-fledged Marxist and worked intensively for the Communist Party of Great Britain, “an instrument of the Soviet Union,” Flynn writes.
Meyer’s organizational, persuasive, and coalition-building skills were top-notch. “When Meyer entered Oxford, no Communist presence existed among students,” writes Flynn. “Now the oldest university in the world overflowed with Communists to a degree that caused notice in Parliament.” Meyer was equally successful in his other positions in the movement.
Meyer dutifully opposed the Nazis, embraced them, and rejected them as Moscow directed. In fact, Meyer took the Soviet Union’s fight against the Axis powers all too seriously: he joined the U.S. Army during World War II over his Communist superiors’ strenuous objections and interference. Inspired by his experiences with ordinary Americans in the Army, Meyer began to search for validation of Communism in the nation’s founding, “as the fusing of the ideas of the American leaders with the ideas of Marx, Engels, and Lenin,” he wrote to the head of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) in 1943. …
Read the rest here.
Source: The Federalist
Podcast of the Week
| From Dakota to Dixie |
| Host: Tim Benson Guest: Jonathan W. White Length: 55 minutes |
| Heartland’s Tim Benson and author Jonathan W. White chat about who George Buswell was, his interesting service record in the Civil War, and the uniqueness of his diary of the period. |
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S. T. Karnick is a senior fellow and director of publications for The Heartland Institute.
