Why Young Americans Are Rejecting Capitalism, and the Money Behind the Obesity Crisis

Scott Galloway (0:01)

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Scott Galloway (1:10)

Welcome to Office Hours with Prof G, where we answer your questions about business, big tech, entrepreneurship, and whatever else is on your mind. Have a question? Send us a voice recording at officehourswithprofgmedia.com or post your question on the Scott Galloway sub-Reddit, and we just might feature it in an upcoming episode.

Question number one comes from Dan Fure on Reddit. Hey Scott, I've seen some Democrats online express concerns over the DSA, Hassan Piker, and recent wins including El-Sayed, but then state they will vote straight blue because the Trump administration is the greater threat. Republicans didn't push back on extremists, and now the Republicans are the party of Trump. Do you fear something like this could happen with the Democrats?

Okay, first some data. The Democratic Socialist of America says its membership has grown from 6400 in 2016 to 120,000 today. That's an increase of nearly 19-fold. DSA-backed candidates have also won several prominent primaries this year, including victories over established Democratic incumbents. But its reach remains at this point limited. Nationally, only a third or 32% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say they like political leaders who identify as Democratic Socialists. A majority, 56%, say they neither like nor dislike them. Support is concentrated, as you would think, in the party's left. 52% of liberal Democrats like Democratic Socialist leaders compared to just 15% of moderates and conservatives. According to Brookings, most DSA-backed candidates have competed in places that already lean heavily Democratic. Of 282 candidates examined, only 10 won primaries in states or districts that were not already overwhelmingly Democratic. So let's talk about El-Sayed, his primary win. Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan's Democratic primary with 745,000 votes, or 48.4% of the electorate, compared with Hailey Stevens, 731,000 votes, or 47.6%.

That was a margin of about 14,000 votes, less than one percentage point. And I would also argue that Stevens wasn't a great candidate. In other words, it was an important victory, but not evidence of an overwhelming ideological mandate from a swing state. There's a limit to the comparison with Trump. Trump's grip on the GOP grew over time. In 2018, his average primary endorsement came about seven weeks before election day. This cycle had came roughly seven months beforehand. Nearly three-quarters of the endorsements of the cycle went to incumbents, suggesting Trumpism is now part of the Republican establishment. And some, the DSA may be growing, but its victories remain concentrated in heavily Democratic areas. Everyone's calling Mamdani a kingmaker. And to a certain extent, he is, but only locally.

And the elections he weighed in on were about not electing a DSA candidate over a Republican, it was about electing the more extreme DSA candidate. I think that there is some real concern that people like Cassandre Piker or soon to be Representative Chevalier will be used to convince moderates that quite frankly Democrats have lost their fucking mind and to vote Democratic just as we highlight some of the more extreme views on the Republican side to try and convince moderates that the Republicans are just flat out crazy.

What's happened here? One, people want to change. This generate, if you're under the age of 40, what you have witnessed is in addition to COVID, you've witnessed this transfer of wealth and opportunity from your generation to older generations, incredible income and equality. What feels like a coarseness and a meanness that runs through our politics and in general acceptance that it's okay not to care about the lower middle class and the prospects of the young. Some of that is inflated by the media and social media, which divides us. There's a decent argument that we're actually not that divided, but we have social media dividing us. But in some, very few young people, less than a quarter of young people think that America is on the right track. So it's not on the right track. And that track is capitalism. You embrace another economic model and the most obvious other economical model is socialism. There are some northern European countries that could claim to be capitalists who embrace socialism. And that's the problem with the word socialism. Socialism means controlling the means of production. You could argue that the Trump administration is the most socialist presidency we've had in a long time, taking shares in US Steel and Intel. I think they get the word wrong. I think what they mean or what they aspire to in the DSA is just a stronger social safety net. I think some of the crazies on the right who they bring on Fox to just see how ridiculous they are, not represent even the extreme part of the party. The difference in the mistake is calling Northern European countries socialists, as most of them are actually in many ways more capitalist than us. They let free markets reign, they let companies start more easily than many of their European counterparts, and they also let them go out of business. We've become fond of bailing out companies, which again is just another transfer of wealth from the entrance to the incumbents, propping up the old people who own companies such that new entrance or younger people don't have the opportunity to go in and buy a failed restaurant for pennies on the dollar. So young people think this isn't working, this is capitalism, so they go to socialism. Also, to be fair, many of the DSA candidates are generational talent. El Said is very compelling, Mamdani is a unique talent politically. And unfortunately for centrists such as myself, at least at kind of a local level, I think you'd argue our bench is great for president. We do have a lot of moderates, Shapiro, Bashir, Pritzker, Newsom are all moderates. Captain Mark Kelly, Senator Kelly from Arizona is a moderate. But it does feel as if the voices in our dialogue right now that centrists and moderates don't appear to have the same mojo as an AOC, a Bernie Sanders or a Mamdani. In some, movements are led and driven by spokespeople, and our spokespeople in the center just aren't as compelling right now. Thanks for the question. Question number two comes from Mesa, who emailed us. They say, Dear Scott, while the rising costs of healthcare are frequently discussed, I rarely hear about the impact of our food supply and the major food companies responsible for the sharp rise in obesity. Is the food industry considered untouchable, similar to the defense industry? I would love to hear your thoughts on this.