After Reality

By Abe Greenwald

In the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan has a compelling column on the current popularity of socialism, and she ticks off a number of reasons for socialism’s appeal among Gen Z. Noonan cites broad disenchantment with free markets, the threat that AI poses to employment prospects, and ignorance of Soviet Communism, among other factors. These are all plausible, but I think the problem of Gen Z radicalization (whether socialist or anti-Semitic) is more deeply rooted and more pervasive than any of these factors, even in combination, can account for. 

It’s not just that Gen Zs came too late to catch the USSR. They came too late to catch the real world altogether. What I’m referring to as the real world here is the manifest multidimensional reality in which humans once spent most of their lives, where they experienced the friction that comes from contact with other real people, challenging ideas, and historical events in real time. All that began to wink out sometime around 2007, when the iPhone was released. In the years since, we’ve migrated ever deeper into our screens and their facsimile of reality. And the pandemic hastened the change considerably. 

Many of us, of course, are old enough to have experienced life before and after. There are people alive who’ve witnessed World War II, the Shoah, the Soviet nightmare, the birth of the State of Israel, and 9/11. But younger millennials and Gen Zs simply showed up after the fact—after all the facts. By the time they arrived, they mostly had to make do with the real world’s digital epilogue—“learning” about what happened before they were born from social media, influencers, and AI. What they’re getting is not so much history but a malcontent’s primer on the world that’s rumored to exist outside of their phones. And we’re moving inexorably into an age in which they and younger generations will become the majority. 

The online world is a uniquely hospitable environment for both socialism and anti-Semitism to flourish in, and Gen Z (online an average of five hours a day) is being bombarded by both. Like the internet itself, socialism and anti-Semitism are primarily virtual. What do I mean by that? Certainly not that they don’t have monstrous real-world consequences. It’s that, at their cores, they both suppose notional worlds that mirror only the surface appearance of the real one. We often have to remind ourselves that “the internet isn’t the real world,” because the superficial similarities can be deceptive. This applies equally to the worlds of socialists and anti-Semites.  

Beneath its surface, the socialist’s world is populated with humans who are mostly unrecognizable: They’re not inclined to compete for goods, services, or status. They are made less in God’s image than in the image of eusocial insects, such as ants and bees, that work in highly cooperative colonies. Luckily for them, they are both infallible planners and natural rule-followers. 

At the heart of the anti-Semite’s world, all the action is engineered secretly and a bit mystically by a people who make up 0.2 percent of the global population, the Jews. Through a vast, labyrinthine, and shadowy network tying finance to governance to media and beyond, world Jewry manipulates the other 99.8 percent of the population into betraying themselves for the benefit of the Jews. 

If you showed up too late to see the real world in action, you don’t know how thoroughly ruinous these ideas are. And it’s much harder to remind yourself that what’s on your screen isn’t the genuine article. What is there to compare it to? 

Here’s the most frightening part: Once you’ve become thoroughly acclimated to virtual terrain, the counterfeit realms of socialism and anti-Semitism may not seem all that foreign or dangerous. Maybe they’re just additions to the neighborhood.

Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of COMMENTARY.