It’s our fault millennials support socialism

A professor at the University of Oklahoma recently published an op-ed in which he explained that the allure of Bernie Sanders for many young Americans was a “symptom of our failure to educate them” as Americans. How has our country arrived at a point where an avowed socialist is firmly in the running for the Democratic nomination for the president of the United States?

Professor David Deming writes, “Socialism is a dead end. For hundreds of years, it has failed everywhere it’s been adopted. The enthusiasm of our youth for the candidacy of Bernie Sanders is a symptom of our failure to educate them, not only in history, government, and economics, but also basic morality.”

Many young people, as Professor Deming correctly pointed out, are unaware of the results of socialism in the real world. Their eagerness to embrace a philosophy they know nothing about causes them to ignore common sense and reality.

Much of the allure of socialism can be traced to a single word—fairness.

A recent example of this obsession with fairness at the cost of practicality can be found at West Virginia University, where new state-of-the-art gender-neutral bathrooms are being touted and praised by student-led diversity groups. There is a separate argument to be made about gender-neutral bathrooms in schools, but in this case, the focus is slightly different. The campus does not even have sufficient handicapped restrooms for the students, even though Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) groups have been trying in vain for years to convince the university to acquire them.

This is just one example of how the insistence on the notion of “fairness” can blind people and cause them to ignore issues that are really important. In this case, transgender students can have their own restrooms when they could have simply put aside their pride and used an existing one. Meanwhile, handicapped students, those struggling with debilitating physical afflictions, are being overlooked. We need to get our priorities straight as a country, and it needs to happen with millennials quickly.