A New Millenial Socialist Revolution
By: Nick Pallotto
Tags: Dictatorship, Bernie Sanders, Cuba, Socialism, Aoc

Photo by Mandel Ngan of Teen Vogue/AFP via Getty Images

Before any Republicans reading this accuse me of being a full-on “ communist,” let me clear something up. Socialism is not communism, it's an entirely different system. socialism means goods and services are distributed, produced, and regulated by a community or country in their entirety.

I am fully aware that I live in a country where everyone is entitled to their own political opinion. Mine is left… well really far left. With that said, I don’t put people like AOC or Bernie Sanders or even Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara on a pedestal. I agree with their philosophies and ideas but they are certainly not larger than life.

Every day I get the feeling that capitalism is failing and it started to fail long before the pandemic. I don’t think capitalism needs to go, I just think we can incorporate some things from socialism and tie in it into the capitalistic system here in the U.S.

What I think millennials need to understand before they start waiving around hammer and sickle flags and yelling “ Viva la revolution,” at the top of their lungs is that socialism does NOT have a good history and that's part of why it gets such a bad reputation.

People that have lived through the Cold War tend to mix up the two systems, only because what they have witnessed is authoritarian dictatorships under the cover of socialism.

Denmark is a country with very high literacy rates and one of the best education and healthcare systems in the world. What system are they? SOCIALIST. If parents and grandparents are freaking out that their America is under siege because a bunch of revolutionary Millenials is looking to transform the country to their liking, they shouldn’t worry.

I honestly think that if people like AOC or Bernie Sanders educate the “ Cold War boomers,” on a true system of socialism, they won’t view it as a dictatorship.

The one thing that I think needs to be addressed is that Millenials like myself view Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara as an individual with very rebellious attitudes, not the fact that he was in a way a mass murderer. Millennials don’t want to be told what to do by their older counterparts and I think that's where socialism and rebellion tie into our complex and intriguing personalities.

Socialism has even taken effect on articles of clothing. The face of Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara is worn on t-shirts mostly by younger people such as high schoolers and university students because of his rebellious attitude that a lot of Millenials seem to share.

Photo by Rene Burri/ Magnum Photos. Ernesto Che Guevara smokes a cigar during an interview in his office in 1965.

Socialism however becomes problematic when citizens try to use the government’s support to enrich themselves and use their newfound wealth for the benefit of themselves and not for others.

I think that going forward, if socialism is the better option, we need to use Denmark as a model. If we can do that there's really no way socialism can fail. When Americans think of socialism, they think of Venezuela, USSR, and many other post-Soviet block countries.

When we as human beings or Americans can eliminate this thought that socialism involves death and dictatorship we will be in a really good spot as a nation. We don’t even have to be the socialist republic of the United States. I think as law-abiding U.S. citizens, we can pick and chose from socialistic principles to make a happy, healthy, well-functioning America for all.