The victory of Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City shocked many observers as the election results rolled in last week. Yet it could mark the beginning of a socialist wave sweeping the country, buoyed by America’s youth — particularly college-educated voters, 62 percent of whom backed Mr. Mamdani.

The Queens assemblyman captured millennials and Gen Zers through his explosion of content on social media. Campaigns like Hot Girls for Zohran helped, too. But more critical was his underlying insistence that the government must radically redistribute capital in order to “unrig” the system. That rhetoric is resonating — and a key reason is that young people are mired in vicious cycles of debt. 

Since 2006, the national student loan debt has more than tripled, growing to $1.73 trillion from $520 billion, according to the U.S. Federal Reserve Board. Over those two decades, an estimated 36 million Americans have graduated with bachelor’s degree student loan debt. In 2023, student debt burdened 58 percent of millennials with bachelor’s degrees and 57 percent of Gen Z-ers with bachelor’s degrees.

“Too often, people take on tens of thousands of dollars of debt for an education that doesn’t actually end up justifying itself financially,” a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute focusing on student loans and higher education, Preston Cooper, tells the Sun. Mr. Cooper has found in his research that in about 43 percent of master’s degree programs, students are worse off financially after completing their programs than they would’ve been otherwise.

“They find it difficult to pay off their student loans, and they feel betrayed by the whole system — by the colleges, by the government that gave them these loans, and by society as a whole,” Mr. Cooper says.  “So I don’t think it’s difficult to draw a line from that situation to some of the socialist inclinations that we’ve been seeing among young people.”

According to a recent Cato/YouGov survey, 62 percent of American adults under 30 say they hold favorable views of socialism — up from 52 percent in 2019. Meanwhile, 34 percent of those surveyed under 30 say they feel favorable toward communism. 

It’s unclear if young people understand socialism as “seizing the means of production,” as Mr. Mamdani has proclaimed as its end goal — or as a mixed economic system that accepts private property but demands heavy government regulation and a robust welfare state. Regardless, what unites young people who identify as socialists is, as a Cato Institute senior editor, Michael Chapman, puts it, “a disdain for capitalism and a preference for collectivism over individualism.”

Cities such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago have become hotbeds for socialist-aligned policies. Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago is backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, while Mayor Karen Bass of L.A. has the support of DSA-aligned city council members.

While it’s difficult to parse out correlation versus causation, the tilt toward statism in cities tracks alongside the explosion in student debt for the many college graduates moving there. Many young adults are struggling to pay their bills every month and lack the means to buy a home — leaving them disillusioned with the promises of capitalism.

That argument was made by a business entrepreneur, David Friedberg, in a recent episode of the “All-In” podcast. “The debt and deficit will ultimately lead to socialism,” he said, “as it has every time in history when you’ve had a free voting, representative democracy that becomes encumbered with too much debt.” 

The Democratic Socialists of America — of which Mr. Mamdani is a member — advocates for the cancellation of all student debt as one of its central principles. It sees debt relief and free tuition as central to broader social transformation. “We can end this nightmare,” DSA proclaimed in a 2023 statement, “but only if we act collectively to fight back against this unjust system.”

The federal student loan program began expanding in the early 1990s, driven by the federal government’s assumption that higher education was always going to pay off for students — which turned out to not always be true. Today, the federal government issues student loans to virtually anyone enrolled in an accredited college. There’s little scrutiny of how much a student borrows, what the institution charges, or whether the chosen field of study leads to stable employment after graduation.

“Hundreds of thousands of kids have been sold expensive degrees for which there is little or no demand in the marketplace,” the chairman of a political science center at Johns Hopkins University, Benjamin Ginsberg, tells the Sun. “Now they dream of creating a different society — one in which their talents will be properly recognized. That is the siren song of socialism.”

One solution would be to make it easier for students to discharge their loans in bankruptcy. Currently, there is a much higher standard for student loans than for other types of consumer debts. Unlike mortgages or car loans, there’s no way to “repossess” an education if a borrower defaults. A possible reform to the system could involve requiring the borrower to pay back the loan for at least seven years before he or she can discharge the debt in bankruptcy, Mr. Cooper says, so that people don’t immediately enter bankruptcy to get rid of their loans. 

Some opponents of federal student loans advocate for disbanding the system altogether. Mr. Friedberg suggested on the “All-In” podcast that the free market should take over the government’s role in student lending. “The universities have absolutely no incentive to keep prices down and create a competitive or economic incentive for making sure their degrees work,” he argued. “The only group that possibly could would be true capital lenders.”

The idea is that if capital markets assumed a larger role, they would underwrite loans only to students earning good degrees at good colleges, who are most likely to be able to repay the loans in the future. An objection to this proposed system is that it could preclude some students from receiving loans and discourage the pursuit of college majors, such as in the humanities, that are less likely to lead to lucrative jobs.

Yet polling of first-year college students discloses that the desire for a good job is a major driver for college enrollment. They want a return on investment from their education.

For now, Mr. Mamdani and similar politicians are channeling anger over student debt into a call for redistributive reform, not authoritarian rule. But as history suggests, socialism is rarely an endpoint — it is often a means. 

“The rise of fascism and Marxism,” Friedrich Hayek warned in “The Road to Serfdom,” “was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.” Whether today’s movement evolves into something more radical may depend on whether America finds a way to lift the burden from the backs of its youngest generation.