I fled communism. Are Gen Z drawn to it?

I recently came across a statistic that sent chills down my spine, having been born in a communist country.

According to a recent Cato Institute Survey , four in ten (38%) 18-to-29-year-olds (and almost a third of 30-to-44-year-olds) are favorable towards communism.

Communism’s appeal among Gen Z is twice as high as among 45-54 year olds, and three times as high as among those aged 55-64.

Momentarily I was transported back to the economic ruin, stripped supermarket shelves of grey, repressive 1980s communist Bulgaria, and the power outages and hyperinflation that followed in the 1990s in the post-communist Soviet bloc countries.

To me, communism means being forever stuck in mediocrity, silence, and a fawning existence marked by hollow propaganda heralding non-existent equality and demanding self-sacrifice “in the name of all”.

It means a ruptured relationship with the engines of a happy life, like truth, trust, empowerment and success.

It means being continuously lied to by those in power, being prohibited from expressing yourself freely and repressing any big dreams of standing out from the crowd that you might otherwise have had.

What is it then that so many young American adults like about communism, I wondered, fairly certain that it was not any of the facets I associate communist regimes with.

To get some answers I interviewed Fenley Scurlock (18), co-author of Down to Business and now a freshman at Brown University majoring in philosophy, and Atlanta-based Harper Bruner (17), a senior at Stanford Online High School focusing on history.

Despite communism’s collapse in 20 th century Soviet bloc countries, the last decade has witnessed a surprising surge in interest in communism and socialism among the US public and journalists globally.

Analysis by my consultancy AKAS reveals that Google searches for communism have reached an all-time high in the US, up 82% since 2006.

Ahrefs analysis of 684 million English-language news pages published globally between 2016 and 2026 revealed that news mentions of socialism are now on a par with mentions of capitalism, while mentions of communism, although at a lower level, are at recent high.

In our conversation, Bruner observed that young adults are picking up on the heightened communism- and socialism-related rhetoric being “ thrown around ” by politicians and news commentators.

Indeed, President Trump drastically escalated his warnings about communism this summer , mentioning the term 81 times in the two weeks surrounding 4 th July.