Vice President JD Vance explains on Joe Rogan’s podcast why socialism became popular:

VICE PRESIDENT J.D. VANCE: Okay, let me play devil’s advocate with the DSA. Because I think that their ideas are crazy. And I think that you’re right. They will lead to a very totalitarian place. I’m not defending a single thing that they say, particularly their hatred of ice cream. What I am saying is – and maybe this is just sort of the way my mind works. I tend to be a little bit more empathetic. Why are young people attracted to socialism in 21st century America? One of the best interviews that Charlie Kirk ever gave – it was right before he died. It was an episode that he did with Tucker Carlson where he talked about the fact that if you don’t give young people a stake, if you don’t give them ownership, if you don’t give them a sense of the American dream and a possibility in the future, they’re going to become socialists. Like if you have a zero-sum environment for a 25-year-old in this country, they’re going to start to say the only way for me to get anything is to take away from somebody else. So we have to get away from the zero-sum thinking. I think that’s the root cause of this. But I also think that, look, we’ve ran an experiment in the United States of America. I think that we have undone that experiment, taken it in a different direction in the Trump administration where ship all the factories overseas and let low-wage foreigners make our stuff. That was a bad deal for American workers. Again, it takes a long time to reverse that trend, but I think it’s one of the best parts of Trump administration policy is you do see that trend starting to reverse. This idea that nobody should own anything. We should all become renters, whereas what we’re trying to do is lower interest rates. You actually have seen housing costs stabilize in the country over the last year and a half, frankly, because of immigration. We had way too many people going after way too many homes. You close the border. This is one of the reasons why rents and housing costs have stabilized a little bit. So I think that unless you go down that pathway of allowing young Americans to own something, socialism is the inevitable outcome. Do I think that’s good? No. But I really do worry, and I see this, frankly, more in my own party than I do on the other side. There is this revulsion to socialism that’s totally justified without enough thinking about how did we get here in the first place. And, man, if we don’t fix that, and I would say if we don’t get back to a more Christian sort of understanding of economics, socialism is the alternative. That is where this goes. If people don’t own anything. Well, people think the game is rigged. Exactly. And in some ways, Joe, the game is rigged. Yes. I mean, if you look at – I mean, again, I think so much of housing because, you know, this happened – I think it was during the presidential campaign. Maybe it was right before. But I was talking to some family members over Thanksgiving and, you know, just sort of a younger friend of my wife’s. They were like five or six years behind us. They were just about to get married. And this young woman, successful engineer, makes a higher salary than most Americans. She just sort of like tossed out there that, you know, when her parents’ generation was coming up, it was like possible to own a house and to raise a family and not be worried that much about things. And my thought was, OK, you’re an engineer. You make way more money than 75 percent of people your age, maybe 90 percent of people your age. And you think that it is like this ridiculous, unachievable objective to have literally what your parents had, which is a decent job, a nice house, and a safe place. Like at that – literally that same dinner, like another guy, another friend of my wife’s was talking about this. And he – you know, South Indian family, grew up – you know, his parents immigrated. He was born and raised in San Diego. And he was like, you know, when I was growing up in Oceanside – this is like a suburb of San Diego where a lot of Marines live in Oceanside. It’s close to Camp Pendleton. So when I was growing up, all of my – like the kids that I played with, that I rode bikes with, that I was playing street hockey with and football with, all of those kids were the sons of enlisted Marines in Oceanside, California. And then we went and looked at like Oceanside, California rents. Once again, this is a couple years ago, rents and housing prices. Like every house was north of a million dollars on the street this guy grew up in. Enlisted Marines – frankly, most Marine officers could not afford to buy a million-dollar house. So like does the socialism thing scare me? Yes. Is it the wrong solution? Yes. But one thing I try to persuade my fellow Republicans of is socialism is the alternative if we don’t have a pathway to give people a sense that the system is not rigged and that the American dream is attainable. That’s like our job. That’s what we have to do. I’m not saying Rome was built in a day. It’s not going to be easy to undo some of these economic trends. But man, we ran the experiment. We ran the experiment of offshoring all of our industrial jobs, of becoming a services and finance economy, and allowing Wall Street to come in and buy every asset of modern life and turn it into an investable line-goes-up asset. And what has that done? It’s created a generation of kids who kind of are attracted to socialism. We have to fix that problem.

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