Emil Barr, co-founder of Flashpass and founder of Stepup Social, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to discuss his Wall Street Journal piece on the rise of socialist sympathies among young self-identified conservatives, a trend he says is both understandable and dangerous.
The conversation followed a segment on a separate Journal piece by reporter Mary Julia Kold examining why American men are increasingly absent from the workforce, with women now holding more payroll jobs than men for the first time in decades. Proft argued that shifts favoring women in male-dominated fields, along with a broader cultural emphasis on identity in hiring and admissions, have left many young men, particularly white men, feeling sidelined, and said that disaffection helps explain the political drift Barr’s piece examines.
Barr, 23, said he was struck by polling showing that 53 percent of self-identified conservatives under 40 support government-run grocery stores, a statistic he sees as evidence that many young people, including those on the right, are gravitating toward the idea that government should step in and solve their problems rather than relying on personal initiative and free markets. He said this instinct mirrors a victim mentality long associated with the left, except that instead of blaming corporations or billionaires, young conservatives are increasingly pointing to China, immigrants, or Israel as the source of their economic frustrations.
Barr argued that capitalism remains the most effective system ever devised for lifting people out of poverty, noting that more self-made millionaires emerged in the past decade than in the entire prior century. He said the country has lost the habit of celebrating entrepreneurial success stories, pointing to his own experience starting a business as a teenager and becoming wealthy without inherited money or family connections. He said Americans have shifted from admiring success to resenting and mocking it on social media.
Proft and Barr agreed the Republican Party’s leadership has failed to consistently make the intellectual case for free enterprise, allowing redistributionist thinking to gain ground even among younger voters within the conservative movement. Both pointed to figures like Vice President JD Vance as representative of a newer strain of populism more comfortable using government as an active tool rather than treating it as a restrained referee that sets rules and steps back. Proft said he worries the party has settled for celebrating occasional entrepreneurial success stories without doing the harder work of building broader public understanding of free-market principles.
Barr said the problem starts in schools, where he said students rarely encounter positive portrayals of the entrepreneurs and builders who shaped the country’s economy. He pointed to Bob Woodson’s Pro America curriculum as one example of an effort already underway in some schools, while acknowledging the difficulty of scaling such programs across a public education system serving roughly 50 million children. Proft drew a historical comparison to the vocational education partnership between Booker T. Washington and Sears founder Julius Rosenwald, suggesting a similarly organized, large-scale strategy may be needed today.
Barr closed by saying his goal in writing the op-ed was to help revive a proactive case for capitalism among his generation, warning that history shows socialist systems tend to enrich only the bureaucrats who run them while leaving everyone else worse off.