Peter Thiel Says Capitalism Is Failing the Young. Is He Right? By The Free Press.
Five years ago, Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist behind PayPal and Palantir, sent a prescient email to Facebook executives.
“When 70% of millennials say they are pro-socialist,” he wrote, “we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why.”
The email went viral after democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s victory last week in the New York City mayoral race.
Capitalism isn’t working for young people, Thiel said, citing burdensome student debt and regulations putting homeownership out of reach for many. “People assume everything still works, but objectively, it doesn’t. . . . If you proletarianize the young people, you shouldn’t be surprised if they eventually become communist.”
Some responses.
Blake Scholl is the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic.
If you insert enough socialist elements into a capitalist system, when the socialist elements inevitably cause problems, people will blame capitalism — and then turn socialist. That’s what happened in New York City, for example, where Mamdani voters were motivated by high rents and crippling student debt — even though rent control drives up housing prices, and government subsidies for higher education encourage universities to raise tuition.
Likewise, you insert enough capitalist elements into a socialist system, the system sort of begins to work, and people think socialism works. That’s what has happened in China. …
Today’s problems of affordability almost exclusively come from our most socialist institutions — such as our heavily regulated, subsidized, and centrally planned healthcare and education systems. By contrast, the freer, more capitalist industries, such as electronics and computing, have driven enormous improvements across the board in real-world standards of living. …
Zineb Riboua is the writer of Beyond the Ideological and a research fellow at Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East.
Thiel correctly identifies the economic frustrations driving young people leftward, but this material account captures only a fraction of what is really happening.
Decades of decolonial studies have reshaped the American intellectual landscape, and a deeper force now drives today’s politics: Third Worldism.
Yes, socialism turns on a dialectic of class conflict and material interests, but Third Worldism breaks from that model in a fundamental way: Inequality is explained not through socialism’s class analysis but through a moral ledger of oppressed and oppressor. The result is a politics defined by grievance and the need to rectify Western privilege.
Third Worldism moves beyond socialism by treating economic reform not merely as a remedy for inequality, but as a correction for history itself. Young Americans are now acting out a decolonial struggle seen previously in places like Latin America and South Africa. …
A materialist socialist analysis may explain economic frustration, but it cannot explain the elevation of a foreign struggle into a domestic moral imperative.
As a reader of René Girard, Thiel should recognize the mimetic dynamic at work here. Girard’s central insight is that politics often turns envy into the search for a shared target. Third Worldism makes this explicit. It elevates the global “victim” to the highest moral authority and designates the West as the collective scapegoat.
The envy involved is not the classic resentment of the socialist toward his bourgeois landlord; it is a broader civilizational envy that seeks to overthrow an entire way of life rather than a particular class.
Third Worldism is part of the IQ Wars: lower IQ groups use new ideology of “third worldism,” or woke, to level the playing field in economic competition.
Name it. “Third Worldism” is close, but not quite there.
