Today, 21% of Gen Z say they are likelier to see World War III break out than to ever afford a house.
That is not a mood. That is a whole generation being told the deal is off.
American capitalism held together for decades on the assumption that if you work hard, you can afford a home, and each generation will keep growing, every generation will be better than the previous generation. Your kids ended up better off than you were. But now all of it is broken.
Buying a home has been pushed back a full generation. The median age for first-time home buyers now is around 40 years old. Back then it was 28, a 12-year difference.
And plenty never make it that far. First-time buyers just fell to a record low, 21% of the market. Close to 1.8 million young households that should have formed last year simply did not. They moved back in with their parents, doubled up with roommates, and called it a phase. It is a generation stuck in this phase of life that was promised.
Because of all this, in the last five years, the share of young Americans who call themselves a capitalist fell from 29% to 19%.
I do not think they read Marx’s Communist Manifesto. They learn everything from their material reality, which is depreciated. They learn it from their landlords’ rent notices every month, and from their wages falling behind. They learn that whatever effort they put in turns into nothing, and they are called lazy. That is why more people have more appetite for socialism right now, or at least the curiosity to pivot to it.
So this did not start with an idea. It started with a promise dying in front of a whole generation, slowly, in real time.
The official story does not record this. History does. Late Rome was not everyone in rags. It was ordinary people nailed in place, to the land, to their father’s trade, every door upward welded shut, effort drained of meaning.
A society does not break when it is poorest. It breaks when most people stop believing in tomorrow.
This promise did not break on its own. Somebody killed it.
American workers once held a valve. The New Deal, the unions, Social Security. None of it was handed down out of kindness. Ordinary people clawed it out over decades of strikes, organizing, and blood. It did one job. It forced capital to hand back a slice of the take.
For 40 years that valve has been unscrewed one bolt at a time. Plants moved offshore. Unions were broken. The corporate playbook flipped from make more and hire more to buy back the stock, cut the headcount, and dress up the numbers for the shareholders. Today only 37% of Americans hold a favorable view of big business, and 62% hold the opposite.
Look at what it produced. The stock index hits record after record. Corporate profit hits record after record. And the paycheck underneath barely moves while the rent climbs past it. Two lines on the same chart, one clawing up, one sinking, and you are told to read it as one healthy economy.
Globalization changed one thing. Capital can move. You cannot. The company drops a line about your taxes running too high and your wages too rich, and it is gone by morning. You cannot move your city. You cannot move your home.
So this is not a bug. It is a feature. The valve did not fail. It was removed, deliberately, because every dollar that reaches you is a dollar clipped off their end. They do not tolerate that for long.
The left and the right are taking the same bullet. The worker who votes Trump and the kid who votes Mamdani curse different names, but the sentence underneath is identical, word for word. This system does not run for me. Every ounce of noise the two parties make is piled on top of that one line to keep you from hearing it.
A system that can no longer buy you off has two doors.
One is to fix it. Tax the rich for real. Pry housing and health care out of capital’s mouth. Share. That door costs the owners money.
The other is to manage you, distract you, and aim your anger somewhere else. That door is free.
They take the free one.
They cannot give you a house. They cannot give you a wage that outruns the rent. They cannot give you a future you can see. So they hand you an enemy instead. Hate the neighbor who is just as broke as you. Hate the immigrant they swear took your job. Hate the one whose skin or god or gender does not line up with yours.
A culture war is cheap. Enforcement staged as theater is cheap. Turning the people at the bottom against each other is the cheapest product this machine still knows how to build.
Watch where the enforcement points. Not up, at the people who unscrewed the valve. Down, at the people already flattened by it. That is not law and order. That is a message. Stay scared, stay split, stay quiet.
The machine has stopped pretending. Enforcement turns into a weapon. The party brawl turns into a smokescreen. And the bill, every time, lands on the people with the least left to give.
A system that can no longer buy you will move to control you.
So stop arguing about whether socialism is on its way back. That question was pressed into your hands on purpose, and they are delighted to watch you fight over it.
A decades-long promise is dead. The people who took it apart knew exactly what they were doing. And now they are working, harder and cruder by the month, to keep you from asking the one question that matters. Who did this.
Stop watching the faces on the stage. Watch the machine. The one thing it fears is you taking the anger on the left and the anger on the right and welding them into one question.
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You describe a malignant equilibrium which is becoming less stable. Eat the rich.
As the American ruling class struggles to maintain stability in the face of mounting discontent, it turns to high-tech dictatorship. It refuses to expend capital on improving wages, working conditions, housing, health care, the living standards of the people. Even though they have taken direct control of mainstream news and entertainment and social media—Washington Post, CBS, CNN, Paramount, TikTok—popular resentment in both liberal and conservative America grows. In spite of tens of millions spent by the economic ruling class on their careerist, bureaucratic, and demagogic puppets, candidates of both parties falter in elections. The political ruling class, with Big Tech support, is turning to police state methods that violate Constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure, freedom of speech and assembly, and right to privacy. ICE established the method of violent arrests and inhumane incarceration. Both liberal institutions like Columbia University and conservative like the State of Texas suppressed the speech and peaceful assembly of pro-Palestinian and pro-immigrant protesters. The integration of Big Tech into the war industry and Pentagon and use of Palantir and Flock to gather data on citizens establishes a network for mass surveillance, propagandizing, and Minority Report-type pre-crime arrests. Law suits defending the Constitution are at best support actions. Only a mass movement of the whole working class, urban and rural, white and minority, using demonstrations, occupations, and strikes can prevent dictatorship.