Why the "Socialist Wave" Among Young Americans Will Fade — Not Grow

The Short Version

A lot of headlines say young Americans are turning socialist. The membership numbers, the polls, and the election of a socialist mayor in New York all seem to back that up.

But look closer and the story changes. The young people turning socialist are mostly college graduates whose careers got squeezed, not working-class young people. In fact, young Americans without degrees are the least interested in socialism of anyone their age, even though they have less money. Why? Because their paychecks have been growing, and growing fast.

Here is our argument in one paragraph: The AI boom hurts young office workers but helps young tradespeople, and there are a lot more young people without college degrees than with them. If paychecks for ordinary workers keep rising the way they did from 2020 to 2024, the socialist movement stays boxed into one shrinking group — educated young professionals in expensive cities — and never becomes a national force.

And our bottom-line expectation, explained at the end: agentic AI is real, we expect American productivity to grow more than 4% per year through the second half of the 2020s, and that kind of growth is exactly what pushes ordinary paychecks up and keeps the social peace.

1. The Surprise Nobody Talks About: Ordinary Paychecks Have Been Winning

For forty years, from about 1980 to 2020, the gap between high earners and low earners in America got wider almost every year. Then, starting in 2020, something remarkable happened: it went into reverse.

Three respected economists — David Autor of MIT, Arindrajit Dube of UMass, and Annie McGrew — studied it and called it "The Unexpected Compression." Their findings, in plain terms: the lowest-paid workers in America got real raises, meaning raises bigger than inflation, of about 8% in three and a half years, while the highest-paid workers basically stayed flat. About one-third of the entire forty-year rise in wage inequality was erased in three and a half years. And the biggest winners were exactly who you'd hope — young workers without college degrees, who kept switching to better-paying jobs because employers were desperate to hire.

The gains have mostly stuck. Through late 2025, the lowest-paid quarter of workers were still up about 9.7% after inflation since 2020, versus 4.5% for the highest-paid. Meanwhile, the famous college wage premium — how much more a degree-holder earns than a high-school graduate — has stopped growing and started slipping, because high-school-graduate pay is rising faster. At the same time, the price of the degree itself went up about 40%. College costs more and pays relatively less than it used to.

Remember that. It explains almost everything that follows.

2. The AI Boom Has Two Faces

Everyone knows AI is threatening office jobs. Fewer people notice what it's doing for people who work with their hands.

The bad face, if you're a young office worker: entry-level job postings are down about 35% since early 2023. Among recent college graduates, more than four in ten are working jobs that don't require their degree. The first jobs AI replaces are the starter jobs — research, drafting, basic analysis — the bottom rung of the office career ladder.

The good face, if you're a young tradesperson: AI runs on data centers, and data centers are built by hand, out of concrete, copper, and wiring. Construction workers on data-center projects earn about 32% more than on ordinary projects. Electricians on data-center jobs in Texas and Virginia are reportedly earning $140,000 to $280,000 a year, and America is short about 300,000 electricians. In 2025, for the first time since the government started keeping track in the 1990s, workers with trade-school degrees had lower unemployment than workers with bachelor's degrees for six months of the year.

Young people have noticed. Trade-school enrollment has doubled since 2010, from 4.2 million to 8.4 million, while four-year college enrollment has shrunk. The press calls them the Toolbelt Generation. The average trade-school graduate leaves with about $10,000 of debt; the average four-year graduate leaves with about $36,000.

Something very similar happened a hundred years ago. In the 1920s, electricity created the assembly line, and the assembly line created good jobs for people without much schooling — Henry Ford's famous $5-a-day wage. The paychecks of unskilled factory workers rose faster than skilled workers' pay in that decade, and it bought America a decade of social peace.

The data center is this generation's assembly line.

3. Who Actually Supports Socialism? (Hint: Not the Working Class)

If socialism were a movement of struggling workers, support should be highest among young people with the least money and the least education. It's the opposite.

Start with the polls. Harvard's big youth survey found support for socialism among young Americans at 21% overall, but it breaks down sharply: 29% of young college graduates, 22% of current college students, and only 18% of young people with no degree. Now the twist. In the same poll, the no-degree group was almost twice as likely to say they're struggling financially, at 53% versus 32% of graduates. The people with the hardest lives want socialism the least. So this isn't about poverty. It's about educated people whose careers didn't deliver what the diploma promised.

Then the elections. Zohran Mamdani, the socialist elected mayor of New York in 2025, won college graduates by a landslide, 57% to 38%, but lost voters without a college degree and lost the poorest voters, those under $30,000 a year, outright. His strongest support came from people earning $50,000 to $200,000 — the young professional class. The socialist mayor of New York was elected by office workers, not by the working poor.

The 2024 election told the same story. Young voters with a high-school education or less voted for Trump by 12 points, while young college graduates voted for Harris by 13. Young working-class Americans aren't drifting left. Many are drifting right.

So the youth socialist wave is really one specific group: young college graduates who did everything they were told, took on the debt, and then found the career ladder's bottom rung sawed off. Their frustration is real. But they are not the whole generation, and they're not even most of it.

4. Now Do the Math

Here's the simple arithmetic at the heart of this paper. Only about 41% of Americans aged 25 to 34 have a four-year college degree, which means roughly six in ten young Americans don't, and that share is growing as more choose trade school. Socialism polls at about 29% among the degreed young and 18% among everyone else. Blend those together and the natural ceiling for youth socialism is around a fifth to a quarter of the generation, concentrated in a handful of expensive coastal cities.

A movement that can't win the poorest voters in New York City — the most favorable ground it will ever have — can't win a national election on class lines. It can win Brooklyn, Seattle, and college towns. It can't win America.

And if paychecks for the non-college majority keep rising, that ceiling gets lower, not higher. The frustrated group shrinks; the satisfied group grows.

5. The Way Out for Young Office Workers: Get Paid for Results, Not Hours

There's one more piece, and it's about how people get paid.

The old office deal was: sell your time. Show up, bill the hours, climb the ladder. AI broke that deal, because AI's time costs pennies. A junior analyst selling hours now competes with software.

But AI didn't make young professionals worthless. It made them potentially far more valuable, if they change what they sell. Stop selling hours; start selling finished results — the report delivered, the deal closed, the product shipped. A young person who directs a team of AI tools can now produce what used to take a whole department, and can charge for the outcome instead of clocking the time.

A hundred years ago the assembly line moved workers from being paid by the piece to being paid by the hour. AI reverses it: from paid by the hour back to paid for the outcome. The young professionals who make that jump stop being frustrated employees and start being owners of their own output, and ownership, historically, is the single most reliable cure for radical politics in America. The ones who keep selling hours into a falling market will stay angry. That split — who makes the jump and who doesn't — will decide how big the angry group stays.

6. Being Honest: What Could Prove Us Wrong

Three things, in plain terms.

First, the raises stalled in 2025. After five great years, the lowest-paid workers' paychecks actually fell slightly behind inflation in 2025. Our whole argument depends on those raises coming back. If ordinary workers' pay stagnates for the rest of the decade while the stock market soars, the frustration spreads from the college kids to everyone, and that would be the truly dangerous combination. This is the number to watch, every quarter: are the raises of the bottom quarter of workers beating inflation? If yes, our thesis is winning. If no, four quarters in a row, it's losing.

Second, a good paycheck isn't a house. Wages are rising, but young people still own almost nothing. Americans under 40 hold just 6.6% of the country's wealth, versus 12% for the same age group in 1989. A 25-year-old electrician making $120,000 who still can't buy a house is doing well and still angry. Rising pay mutes socialism specifically. It doesn't mute anger at the establishment in general, and the working-class young mostly express that anger by voting right, not left.

Third, small movements can still matter. Even boxed in at a fifth of the generation, the socialist movement now has 120,000 members and about 250 elected officials. Revolutions aren't started by majorities; they're staffed by frustrated educated people, and that group exists. So the movement can still shape laws and write policy after the next downturn, even if it can never win the country. Contained is not the same as gone.

7. Our Expectation: Agentic AI Is Real, and 4%+ Productivity Changes Everything

Here is where we stand, stated as plainly as we can.

We believe agentic AI is real. Not a chatbot that answers questions, but software that does the work: completes the task, files the report, books the shipment, monitors the process, and hands back a finished result. That's the difference between a tool and a workforce. The technology crossing that line is what makes this boom, in our view, the real thing — comparable to electricity in the 1920s, not to the hype cycles in between.

We expect U.S. productivity growth to exceed 4% per year in the second half of the 2020s. For scale, America has averaged 1% to 2% for most of the past fifty years, and the last time it sustained anything near 4% was the electrification boom of the 1920s. Productivity growth is, simply, how much more the country produces for the same amount of work, and it is the only honest source of rising living standards. When it runs above 4%, there's enough new wealth being created each year that ordinary paychecks can rise quickly without causing inflation and without taking anything from anyone else.

If we're right, everything in this paper connects. The AI buildout keeps bidding up the pay of electricians, welders, builders, and drivers, the non-college majority of the young generation. The wage compression of 2020 through 2024, the raises at the bottom, resumes and runs through the rest of the decade, just as it did in the 1920s, when the paychecks of ordinary workers rose fastest of all. The young professionals who adapt, who learn to sell results instead of hours with AI doing the heavy lifting, join the winners' side of the boom. And the socialist movement stays what it is today: loud, real, concentrated in a few expensive zip codes, capped at a shrinking minority of one generation, and muted as a national threat.

The 1920s bought a decade of social peace with the $5 day. The 2020s can buy it with the $260,000 electrician and the 24-year-old who runs her own fleet of AI agents. Whether that happens comes down to one thing we'll be watching every quarter: do ordinary paychecks keep beating inflation? If agentic AI delivers the 4%-plus productivity we expect, they will, and the wave everyone fears will recede the same way it did a hundred years ago.