Many conservatives have been surprised to witness socialism making a comeback among today’s youth. From the fact that longtime socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders is a 2020 front-runner, to the polls showing growing millennial support for communism, statism is cool again.

These developments don’t exactly come as a shock to me. I’m a conservative, but my most recent relationship was with a Democratic Party campaigner who politically identifies as a communist. He is an American citizen whose parents are from Cuba, and he strongly supports the communist Cuban government. For the sake of this article, I will refer to him as Carl.