I read an article this week about Zohran Mamdani that, on the surface, seemed like a story about one election and one family. Jewish parents warning their children. Children celebrating a political victory their parents found frightening. Dinner tables turning into ideological battlegrounds.
But the piece wasn’t really about Mamdani. It was about something much deeper: a country that no longer shares a common story about how power works, what fairness means, or what has failed us.
That generational divide is real, and it’s not just political. Older generations like me, especially American Jews who grew up in the long shadow of the Cold War, were steeped in a very specific narrative. Socialism was dangerous. America, for all its flaws, was the greatest country in the world. Capitalism and freedom were inseparable. Meanwhile, people raised in the Soviet Union or Maoist China were fed the mirror image of that same propaganda: that their system was inevitable, superior, and morally righteous.
The difference is that younger generations, like my sons, didn’t inherit a closed information loop. They grew up online. They talk to peers across borders. And more importantly, they’ve lived through an America where the wealth gap is staggering, home ownership feels unattainable, healthcare is precarious, and effort no longer reliably maps to outcome. So when they hear, “this is the greatest system in the world,” it doesn’t land as reassurance. It lands as gaslighting.
That doesn’t mean they’re wrong to be angry. But it does mean we need to be careful about what conclusions that anger leads us to.
Let me say this plainly: antisemitism is real, and it must be named honestly. We can and should debate Israeli policy although we should never forget that they are our ally. Criticizing a government is not the same thing as attacking a people. But antisemitism is not a policy disagreement. It is prejudice. Sometimes overt. Sometimes coded. Sometimes disguised as “anti-Zionism” that slips into collective blame, conspiracy, or dehumanization.
As the son of a Holocaust survivor, I listen for this carefully. I watch for it and I address it with vigilance.
Mamdani’s rhetoric and alliances around Israel have made many Jewish New Yorkers deeply uneasy, especially in a city with the largest Jewish population in the world. That unease shouldn’t be dismissed. At the same time, weaponizing accusations of antisemitism to shut down any criticism of Israel corrodes trust and obscures real hate. Antisemitism exists on both political extremes, and refusing to acknowledge that doesn’t protect Jews, it isolates them.
Both truths matter. If we can’t hold that line with integrity, we lose moral clarity entirely.
Where I part ways most sharply with many younger activists is on socialism. Not because I think the current American system is working, it clearly isn’t for the younger generation, but because history is unambiguous about what true socialism produces. Socialism doesn’t “sometimes” fail. It has always failed. Not as an abstract theory, but in practice: chronic scarcity, reduced innovation, concentrated power, and diminished human freedom.
Central planning cannot replace price signals. Ideology cannot override incentives. And when markets are suppressed, power doesn’t disappear, it consolidates and corrupts. Always.
This is where the conversation often collapses into confusion. Socialism is routinely conflated with social democracy, and that distinction matters. The Nordic countries, Spain, and Portugal are not socialist economies. They are capitalist systems with strong private property rights, competitive markets, and high rates of entrepreneurship, supplemented by social safety nets. In fact, Nordic nations consistently rank among the most pro-market, business-friendly economies in the world, with strong protections for capital, trade openness, and fiscal discipline.
Social democracy works because capitalism creates the wealth first. Democratic governance then redistributes some of that wealth through healthcare, education, and social insurance. Socialism, by contrast, destroys the mechanism that creates wealth in the first place. Once the state owns or centrally controls the means of production, shortages, repression, and stagnation follow with remarkable consistency.
This is also why it’s critical to separate America’s constitutional framework from capitalism itself. The Constitution gave us rule of law, property rights, checks and balances, and constraints on power. Capitalism flourished within that framework, but capitalism is not the Constitution, and defending one does not require blind loyalty to the other as it currently exists, despite the fact that I unwaveringly support both.
America’s prosperity was not an accident. For nearly 250 years, that framework produced unprecedented growth and lifted millions out of poverty. What’s breaking today isn’t a lack of welfare programs or food assistance. We have those. What’s breaking is fairness and legitimacy.
Young Americans aren’t frustrated because the country didn’t go far enough left. They’re frustrated because justice department enforcement failed. Antitrust law became decorative. Monopolistic and oligopolistic behavior, once aggressively curtailed, is now tolerated or quietly protected. Entire industries are dominated by a handful of players who extract value instead of creating it.
Nothing illustrates this more clearly than housing. Homes have been turned into financial instruments. Private equity firms compete against families. Communities are hollowed out by absentee ownership. Renters and workers aren’t bidding against neighbors, they’re bidding against balance sheets. That isn’t free-market capitalism. It’s regulatory capture paired with a regressive tax system that rewards capital over labor and speculation over productivity.
Homeownership is a pillar of the American dream. It must remain accessible.
As we move into an AI-driven economy, this imbalance becomes genuinely frightening. Productivity gains will be enormous, but without counterweights, the rewards will concentrate even faster. This is where parts of us get it badly wrong. Strong unions are not anti-capitalist. They are one of the most effective defenses against a system that could otherwise become completely stacked against workers.
Unions helped build the American middle class. They balance power. They create dignity in work. In an AI era, they may be one of the last tools workers have to negotiate fair outcomes in the face of unprecedented technological leverage.
If we want young people to stop flirting with failed ideologies, we need to make the American system feel legitimate again. That doesn’t mean pretending the past was perfect, and it doesn’t mean embracing socialism out of despair. It means reform.
Enforce antitrust laws aggressively. Break monopolies and cartel behavior, like the split of Ma Bell/AT&T in the mid 1970’s. Stop the transition from homeowners to renters, not with bans but with incentives for working people. Fix a tax system that rewards extraction over contribution. Protect workers’ bargaining power. Restore a world where effort once again correlates with outcome.
Ideology doesn’t house people.
It doesn’t treat addiction.
It doesn’t build opportunity.
Competition and competence do.
Accountability does.
Fairness does.
And if we fail to restore those, we shouldn’t be surprised when desperation makes bad ideas start to look courageous.
