Sarah Hauer

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Ian Gunther’s career has not followed any sort of linear progression.

Gunther moved to Seattle after graduating from Nicolet High School in 2006 with the plan to go to school at North Seattle Community College while working retail. He wanted ultimately to be a video game designer.

Then the recession started to hit in 2007. He lost his job, couldn’t afford to stay in Seattle and moved back to Glendale to live with his parents.

He got a job at a piston ring manufacturer, Grover Corp., and graduated from Milwaukee Area Technical College with a degree in information technology. He spent the better part of a decade taking mostly contractor jobs around Milwaukee for companies like Kohl’s Corp., Assurant Health and Johnson Controls International.

Now, at 30, he’s back at MATC earning an electrical engineering degree. The plan is to transfer to Milwaukee School of Engineering for his last two years of classes. Gunther estimates he’ll graduate with $40,000 to $50,000 in debt.

Along the way, his views on economics evolved. Gunther is now a dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

All of which would mean nothing if Gunther was an outlier, a member of the political fringe. But he’s not.

Membership in DSA has increased more than 600% in the last three years to pass 45,000 members. The national organization says the new members are mostly young people under 35 — the group's average age has dropped substantially.

Further, a Gallup poll last month found that Democrats have a more positive view of socialism than capitalism. Specifically, the poll did not find that socialism had risen in popularity as much as that capitalism had fallen, dramatically. And although Republicans have not undergone such a change, the poll still reinforced that about one-fifth of Republicans consistently have a positive view of socialism.

The poll is just the latest of many. Another one, conducted by Fox News last month, showed more than a third of respondents saying it would be a good thing to migrate away from capitalism toward socialism.

Multiple factors seem to be at play.

First, for years conservatives labeled many progressive policies, and President Barack Obama’s economic ideology specifically, as Marxist or socialist. For young people who liked those policies or that president, the label began to lose its negative connotations. Socialist Bernie Sanders, the independent U.S. senator from Vermont, dominated the youth vote during the 2016 presidential primaries, picking up more votes from people 30 and under than Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton combined.

Second, while the word conjures up oppressive regimes for older people, young people often connect it today — accurately or not — to countries that have huge social safety nets, universal health care and free education. They travel to Nordic countries, for example, and come away envious.

Third — and economic and social authorities see this one as paramount — millennials grew up at a time of economic uncertainty. As children, they saw parents lose jobs and struggle to afford health care; as young adults, they may be saddled with debt and unable to see beyond their one-bedroom apartment and a modest job with minimal benefits.

When their parents entered the job market, corporate America was the provider of health care, pensions, continuing education — in short, stability. Now, the costs of health care, education, housing and retirement are weighing heavier on young people. In addition, the National Longitudinal Survey and other estimates suggest those entering the market today will hold 12 to 15 jobs in their lifetime.

And so, some of these workers turn away from capitalism. And that turn leads to socialism, or at least what they think of as socialism.

“If you’re a millennial, you came of age during this boom and bust,” said J. Michael Collins, faculty director of the Center for Financial Security at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ”You saw firsthand that it's harder to get a job, pay raises, buy a house. It’s just harder to be economically independent when you can’t change jobs or get the kind of income like previous generations could.”

In short, young people feel financially insecure. That feeling contributes to a lack of optimism in the ability of the American economy to improve without systemic changes.

By three measures, millennials are worse off than their parents economically. Wages are stagnant. Student debt has ballooned. And the cost of health care has skyrocketed. It all amounts to a sense of economic precarity.

"Capitalism was given full reign and it kind of failed in a way," said Mike McCarthy, an assistant professor at Marquette University who researches American capitalism and economic sociology.

The outlook for wages is about the same for 25- to 34-year-olds as it was in the 1970s, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. Median incomes for men have dropped while the incomes for women have risen, as well as the number of women working.

“You go through periods in history when people were doing worse off and there are moments in history where inequality (between rich and poor) is increasing,” McCarthy said. “But I think in the context we’re living in now, we’re torn between the two. There’s increased precarity for most people and it’s also happening in a context where these ideas about inequality are pushed into the public debate more.”

Tim Sheehy, president of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, sees the economic disparity, especially in cities like Milwaukee, as driving the pushback on capitalism.

"As a free market economy, we have to figure out how to respond to people who are on the sidelines," Sheehy said. "Capitalism certainly has its flaws. But when you compare it to all other alternatives, it’s clearly outperforming them."

Young voters, however, are not so sure.

Derek Beyer said he couldn’t have described the differences between the Republican candidate, George W. Bush, and the Democratic one, Al Gore, during the 2000 election, the first one in which he was old enough to vote.

Beyer enlisted in the U.S. Air Force after graduating from Nathan Hale High School in West Allis. His first day of service was one week before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. He completed two tours in Iraq and two in Afghanistan.

“The mission in Iraq kept changing,” Beyer said. “I lost a lot of faith in our decision-makers.”

Beyer left the military in 2005, returned to Wisconsin and earned a teaching degree at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

By 2008, he was all in for Obama. Four years later, Beyer had soured on him. “I saw a lot of do-nothing,” he said.

The presidential run of Sanders brought socialism into the American political conversation. In Wisconsin, Sanders defeated Clinton in the state's Democratic Party presidential primary.

The primary campaign inspired Beyer.

“I was in it eyes wide open,” he said.

That summer, he headed to Chicago for The People’s Summit, a conference for progressive political organizations, where there was a heavy socialist presence.

“I was going there to connect with other activist-minded people and see if we could help build something,” he said. “I sat at a break table with DSA-Chicago people. As they talked, (socialism) made a lot of sense to me.”

He wanted to live in a community where people earned a living minimum wage, everyone had access to Medicare and no one needed to worry about the safety of their water.

“Then the election. The 2016 election happened.”

Distraught over now-President Trump's win, he decided to fuel that energy into starting a Milwaukee chapter of the DSA. Seven people joined him for the first meeting in December 2016. The group is now approaching 250 dues-paying members.

Mary Steffenhagen joined because, as she sees it, incremental change is not working.

Steffenhagen wants structural change to the economic and political system that she sees as stacked against working people.

“We’ve been told for so long to ‘just be patient’ and ‘just let compromise work itself out,’ ” Steffenhagen, 24, said. “‘Politics is a slow grind.’ It became pretty obvious that we need radical change.”

Raised and home-schooled by her conservative, Christian family, Steffenhagen started learning more about alternative viewpoints when she entered college at Concordia University in Mequon. Steffenhagen said her political views really shifted from liberal to socialist when she realized it was implausible to achieve what she was told — get a degree, a salaried job with good benefits and own a home in a good neighborhood.

Steffenhagen described her family as middle class. Neither of her parents graduated from college.

"They didn’t realize capitalism was screwing them over — not the welfare state," she said. "They wanted to say they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps."

Steffenhagen said her parents have dismissed her ideas.

"People do get more conservative as they age," she said. "I hope that doesn’t happen to me."