Demographics is Destiny
Or, why you should expect a showdown with socialism
I really hate to dwell on “the coming unpleasantness,” but there are just a lot of indicators that lead me to believe conditions in the U.S. are going to worsen substantially before they get better.
Last month, Gallup published an update showing that 58% of Americans nationally feel “extremely” or “very proud” to be an American. That’s down from 87% in 2001. That gap has widened substantially since 2012, when about 92% of Republicans and 85% of Democrats felt the same way. In the June 2025 survey, Republicans maintained that level of pride at 92%, while Democrats fell to a new low of just 36%. Interestingly, only 60% of Democrats said they were proud during the Biden administration.
One thing I note is that Republicans have hovered at an average of 90% since the survey began in 2001, while Democrat numbers have declined by over 50%.
But by far the most concerning thing about this poll is how Generation Z views pride in being an American. Roughly a third (32%) of Gen Z Democrats reported little to no pride in being an America. Just 24% of Gen Z Democrats expressed a high level of pride, compared to 65% of Gen Z Republicans. You can see the intra-generational gaps widen from 15 points separating Silent/Greatest Generation Republicans and Democrats to a 41 point gap for Gen Z. [source]
I ask this earnestly: what happens to a country when a majority of its citizens no longer express pride in being one? These numbers are stark, and while there are likely numerous explanations, I think the primary driver is fairly obvious.
According to a 2022 Pew Research poll, 40% of Americans aged 18-29 say they hold favorable views of socialism. A March 2025 Cato Institute/YouGov poll found that 62% of adults aged 18-29 hold favorable views of socialism. Members of Generation Z are today between the ages of 13 and 28 – a substantial number of whom favor socialist policies in a capitalist system that is no longer working for them. There are likely other factors, including declining trust in institutions and the government, political infighting and dysfunction, reflection on the reported declining perception of Americans abroad, etc. Regardless, this level of dissatisfaction is a problem in search of a solution, which may be political. Anyone who watches political news (or reads this report) should realize that democratic socialists are likely the future of the party.
“Demographics is destiny” is shunned by the mainstream as a racist, Alt-Right talking point, but it’s true. What is a nation, if not its people? What is the future of a nation, if not its young people? It stands to reason that if you want to see the future of a country, start by looking at its young people.
This split among American youth, especially, is not just a reflection of differing politics, but of differing cultures – not differences in degree, but differences in kind. And these increasing numbers of widening differences are socially discohesive. One of the many great quotes that mathematician and historian Peter Turchin has given us is about social cohesion. “[C]ultural uniformity appears to be an important precondition of social cohesion,” he writes in Historical Dynamics. In other words, when cultural uniformity disintegrates, so does social cohesion. And when social cohesion disintegrates, you get systemic instability because you’re no longer dealing with differences of degree among people, but differences in kind – a socialist system versus a capitalist system, one religion versus another, and, yes, darker skin versus lighter skin. These widening differences among inhabitants sharing a country tends to produce conflict. It’s not just the history of humanity, nor the history of foreign conflicts, but it’s also the history of conflict in the United States, from the American Revolution to the Black Lives Matter riots and Far Left insurrection of 2020. It will apply to the next round of conflict, too.
The reality is that there’s not just a blue-red state divide or an urban-rural divide, but also a divide on how to solve deep economic and fiscal problems and how an economy should be run. This is leading to an “American identity crisis,” that will redefine what it means to be American not just in racial or ethnic terms (e.g., “the browning of America”), not just in religious terms (e.g., Christianity fading as the dominant religion and great social force), and not just political or ideological (conservative versus liberal), but generally civilizational.
This conflict has obviously already started, but if you look at demographics and the growing desire to replace our capitalist system with a socialist one, how can you not expect it to worsen? - M.S.