Politicians forever exaggerate our misfortunes to gain power. But few have ever peddled this level of doomerism. Virtually the entire case of the American socialist is based on a myth. 

Historical context isn’t always relevant to the average contemporary voter. The fact that the country had 25% unemployment rate in the 1930s or 11% in the early 1980s doesn’t matter if you can’t find a job today. People live in the context of their own experiences. It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job, but it’s a depression when you do, the saying goes.

But convincing young people they’ve been handed a broken world only fostered an unprecedented sense of hopelessness. You are not victims of “oligarchs,” unfettered capitalism, or any other imaginary monsters. 

One of the most popular myths these days — you hear from both sides all the time — is that the American middle class is being gutted. It’s simply not true. In 1980, 36% of American families were middle-class. Only 31% of Americans are still in the middle class because the upper-middle class has grown from 10% of households to over 30%. The middle class is shrinking because the upper middle class is expanding.

Real median income has not only grown across all classes over the past 40 years, but it has zoomed past the rest of the Western world. The average American family in Mississippi now has a higher per capita GDP than the average French, British, and German family. That’s a pretty remarkable economic inheritance. Just ask the soccer fans visiting for the World Cup.

Another big grievance of younger people is that housing has become far too expensive. It’s a genuine concern. But ownership rates are no lower today than they were in the ’60s, ’70s, or ’90s, and most of the 1980s. The homeownership rate in 1980 was 65.5%. In 2025, it was 65.4%. Rates temporarily spiked through the 2000s when government policy incentivized millions to “buy” houses they couldn’t afford with no money down.

Housing shortages are driven by the laws of physics. It’s no one’s fault that too many people want to live in and around major urban areas. We’re running out of space in those areas, but opposition to expanding the infrastructure needed to support civilization is often from young people who have bought into apocalyptic climate change messaging.

You wonder if the average Gen Zer understands that the environment is infinitely cleaner today than it was 30, 40, 50 years ago? There has been widespread reforesting and wetland restoration. There is far less litter. Air quality is drastically cleaner. As is water. When boomers started driving, gas was leaded, and most cars didn’t even have catalytic converters. Gen X grew up worried about things called “nuclear winter” and “acid rain.”

Capitalism-driven efficiencies have made most things more efficient and less dirty. They have also many things more affordable. An average household spends far less on clothing and food than their grandparents did. And yet, they also have substantially more choices, including international and nutritious fare.

It’s true that health-care costs have risen. Some of it can be attributed to bad policy. Most of it reflects prosperity, as younger Americans will generally enjoy longer life expectancy and better care than any generation before them. Big Pharma, one of the industries reviled by Ocasio-Cortez and her allies, keeps coming up with ways to keep people with once-deadly diseases alive. None of it is cheap. Yet.

Then again, we are generally safer. Vehicular deaths per 100,000 have been cut in half since 1980. Fire-related deaths and workplace fatalities have plummeted. In the first year of Ocasio-Cortez’s life, there were over 2,200 murders in her litter-strewn hometown of New York. By the time Ocasio-Cortez turned 20 in 2009, homicides fell to a historic low of 461. Last year, there were 305 murders, one of the lowest annual homicide totals in the city’s recorded history.

Despite what you may have heard, the world is also seeing far less war, terrorism, conflict, and genocide (the real kind, not the trendy, fictitious Gaza “genocide” that Marxists are obsessed over). Extreme poverty and famine across the globe have plummeted over the past 35 years.

When Ocasio-Cortez first won her congressional seat, Time magazine writer Charlotte Alter wrote a glowing profile of the socialist newcomer, explaining that her “adulthood was defined by financial crisis, debt and climate change. No wonder she and her peers are moving left.” 

No one will argue over rising government debt, though socialists couldn’t care less about it. But since Ocasio-Cortez turned 18 in 2007, there have been only two negative growth years in the United States, one of them due to a worldwide pandemic. From 1970 to 2007, there was, on average, a negative or recessionary year every three to four years.

Americans worked through recessions in 1928, 1937, 1945, 1949, 1953, 1958, 1960, 1969, 1973, 1980-1981, 1990, and 2001, without turning to socialism. The only thing special about Ocasio-Cortez’s adulthood is that the recessions have become shorter and less severe. Ocasio-Cortez is living in the golden age.

Maybe one of the reasons millennials and Gen Z have moved left is because they have been exposed to relentless revisionist histories about capitalism and progress. Maybe it’s because they weren’t around for the Soviet Union or the notable mass starvations, wars, and genocides of collectivism.

RADICAL SOCIALIST DEMOCRATS PRETEND TO BE BLUE COLLAR ALLIES

Boomers have failed on plenty of fronts, but being on the hook for a ridiculously expensive student loan on a useless degree isn’t one of the great tragedies to have befallen mankind. It’s just the consequence of choices. And most progressives want other people to pay for their choices.

There are plenty of serious problems — there always are — but historically speaking, by virtually every quantifiable measure available, Americans are living in a uniquely wealthy and safe world. Ocasio-Cortez should be thanking baby boomers for the world they left her.