Young Americans increasingly see the federal government as caretaker — and are losing faith in democracy itself.
The good news is that a majority of American respondents recently told Gallup pollsters that it’s your responsibility, not the government’s, to ensure that all your basic needs are seen to. The bad news is that it was the barest majority — just 50 percent. Meanwhile, 49 percent of Americans said that it’s the government’s job to be “responsible for making sure individuals’ basic needs are met.”
More depressingly still, the conception of the federal government as caretaker is most popular among younger Americans. A staggering 63 percent of young adults under the age of 29 agree that government should care about you and your well-being, as though it could much less should. Their outlook aligns with Democrats broadly, nearly seven in ten of whom believe that government should safeguard your “needs” as well as your rights.
Some are tempted to wrangle these numbers to make them less menacing than they are. Perhaps these respondents merely conceive of “needs” as a basic social safety net, not the Mamdani-style vision of America as a socialist commune. Maybe. But the data compiled by the Kettering Foundation in its partnership with Gallup cast that optimistic outlook into doubt.
Those same younger voters who, poll after poll shows, are more favorable to socialism than the rest of the country and apparently believe that the feds should be providing for their lifestyles are also souring on democracy. A majority, 52 percent, of this cohort told Kettering pollsters that democracy was performing “poorly,” and not just at the moment. A bare majority, 53 percent, say that democracy represents “the best form of government.” Forty-seven percent are, by contrast, neutral toward or skeptical of that proposition.
Perhaps these are expressions of dissatisfaction with the status quo born of the youngest voters’ sense of economic precarity. But while that explains these poll results, it doesn’t excuse them. The relative health of American democracy is not measured by how much the services you use are funded by the expropriated wealth of the country’s most productive citizens. The idea seems to elude a staggeringly large number of your fellow Americans.