Culture – Family Council

One in Four Likely Voters Now Supports Socialism

Mar 17, 2026Jerry CoxCultureCommunism, Socialism

Earlier this month Rasmussen reported that support for capitalism has declined since 2023, and a growing share of likely voters now say socialism is better. On the whole, most Americans still support free markets — but that support has dwindled.

Rasmussen writes:

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 25% of Likely U.S. Voters say socialism is a better system than capitalism. More than twice as many voters (51%) say capitalism is better. Fourteen percent (14%) are not sure. Support for capitalism has declined by 16 points since February 2023, when 67% of voters said capitalism was better than socialism.

We’ve seen support for socialism play out in recent elections. In November, Zohran Mamdani won New York City’s mayoral election. Mamdani, 34, belongs to the socialist Working Families Party. In his victory speech, Mamdani promised New Yorkers a “new age,” saying, “We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.”

Unfortunately, there is nothing “new” about what Mamdani is saying. During the last century, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong, and others made similar promises to their citizens, and they all met with the same results. Many young people have been taught that socialism and communism failed in the past because they weren’t properly implemented, but that’s not the case. Socialism and communism failed every time they were implemented, because they are fatally flawed.

After the election, our friend Joseph Backholm, Senior Fellow for Biblical Worldview and Strategic Engagement at Family Research Council, published a list of some of socialism’s and communism’s basic flaws:

1. Socialism misunderstands human nature and implies that people will be virtuous as long as they have enough money. Then, ironically, it assumes everyone with money is sinister.

2. Socialism takes from the capable and gives to the less capable, ensuring that resources won’t ever be used productively.

3. Socialism destroys competition and consequently destroys innovation.

4. Socialism destroys people’s incentive to be productive by denying them the benefit of their labor. It always produces fewer, lower-quality products.

5. Socialism assumes I have the right to other people’s property just because they have more than I do. It depends upon and incentivizes greed.

6. Socialism denies people the dignity of having what they earn and earning what they have.

7. Socialism assumes people engaged in commerce always operate with corrupt motives, but people in government never do.

8. While claiming to decentralize power, it always centralizes power with a handful of bureaucrats.

9. Socialism assumes it’s always unjust for one person to have more than another, when real justice means the dishonest and unskilled shouldn’t have as much as the honest and skilled.

10. Socialism assumes humanity’s natural state is prosperity and rages over the fact that we aren’t all rich, when in reality the natural state is poverty, and capitalism is the only reason we aren’t all poor.

Joseph concluded by rightly pointing out, “Of course, none of this means a capitalist system doesn’t have weaknesses, but it can produce good outcomes and has. Communism never has because it assumes a world that does not exist and never will.”

Over the decades, other pundits have pointed out that socialism and communism are oppressive and cannot work without using force against everyday citizens.

Americans — and especially Christians — need to understand socialism’s basic problems and its track record. This is a fatally flawed belief system that has produced disastrous results every time.

Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.

The Assassination of Charlie Kirk: Guest Column

Sep 19, 2025John StonestreetCulture, In MemoriamCurrent Events

*Above: Charlie Kirk speaks in Fayetteville, Arkansas. (File Photo: 2022)*

Unsurprisingly, on September 11, 2001, I wept. I also wept, unexpectedly, on September 11, 2011. Perhaps it was delayed grief, but mostly, it was a delayed realization. Sitting that Sunday morning with my young daughters, only 6, 4, and 2 at the time, it struck me how different their world was from the one I wanted for them.

The same sense struck this week, on September 10. The assassination of Charlie Kirk seems to mark a new era, a world no one wants but may very well be here. Calling the murder a “tragedy for all of us,” U.K. comedian and commentator Konstantin Kisin wrote:

I hope I’m wrong. But tonight feels like some sort of invisible line has been crossed that we didn’t even know was there. … [T]o murder a young father simply for doing debates and mobilising young people to vote for a party that represents half of America? This is something else.

Charlie’s death is a tragedy for his wife, his children and his family. I don’t pray often. I am praying for them tonight. But I fear his murder will be a tragedy for all of us in ways we will only understand as time unfolds.

I hope I’m wrong. I fear I’m not.

Kisin is not wrong about lines being crossed, though the Christian must not fear. We must, however, squarely face the sober realities of this moment.

Kirk’s murder followed another this week, in Charlotte, of a young woman from Ukraine riding a public train. Iryna Zarutska was stabbed by a man who should have been in prison or at least institutionalized, and she was then left to die by people too engrossed in their screens to notice or too jaded to care. Together, these atrocities reveal realities about our culture and how it has shaped those within it that many will find unthinkable. But we had better think about it anyway.

Zarutska’s killer is a terrible example of the mental and social brokenness that permeates modern life. The bystanders who did not come to her defense or to her aid are, like the social media commenters and media personalities who callously commented on Kirk’s assassination, examples of the rabid and pervasive dehumanization that infects the Western world.

In a recent Breakpoint commentary, released prior to the atrocities of this week, Abdu Murray argued that this “post-truth world that elevates feelings and preferences above facts and truth has collapsed the distinction between a person’s ideas and their identity. And so, the social erasure of cancel culture has calcified into something darker.” That something darker, he argued, is “assassination culture.” He continued, “Unmoored from that objective standard for human value, we have made gods of ourselves and therefore justify eradicating any who dare to have other gods before us.”

This is precisely what Os Guinness warned of in the new film Truth Rising, that the West is squandering a unique heritage. A civilization built upon the ideal of human dignity, with a mixed and troubled history of working out that ideal, has now replaced it with something else. But racialized, sexualized, and politicized conceptions of human dignity only produce victims.

George Orwell is often credited as saying, “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Charlie Kirk was a committed truth teller, with a remarkable gift for exposing and answering deceit. And yet, as he did this, he treated the deceived with the dignity they had as image bearers of their Creator, recognizing that they too were victims of their own bad ideas.

There is a cost to telling the truth. Our Lord has told us to count this cost. If Kisin is indeed correct, that cost is higher than we have imagined. This is indeed a civilizational moment. It is to this moment that we have been called as His people. As His people, we know that this moment is not some fatalistic inevitability, nor does it determine or define the Story of which we are part.

In a video circulating on social media, Charlie is asked why he went on campuses to talk with and try to persuade those who disagree with him. Charlie responded, “Because when people stop talking, that’s when violence happens.” It was a prophetic moment, but Kirk also demonstrated that we need not accept that. He showed that the conversation can be had; that it must be had. He showed that the truth still wins hearts and minds, and that lies can be opposed. And that it can all be done with a big smile.

It takes courage to tell the truth and to, as Paul wrote, “regard no one from a worldly point of view.” As Murray wrote, only the “ancient biblical truth about what it means to be human can heal our contemporary malady.”

It can be healed. This is not wishful thinking. This is the hope Christ secured for us all. As the banner on the Turning Point USA website proclaims, Charlie Kirk has been “received into the merciful arms of our loving Savior, who suffered and died for Charlie.”

Why the HENRYs Aren’t Happy: Guest Column

Mar 6, 2025John StonestreetCultureChristianity, Culture

A recent Wall Street Journal article highlighted a group of people called “The HENRYs,” an acronym for “high earner, not rich yet.” The piece showcased earners with incomes well into the hundreds of thousands who still feel they are living paycheck to paycheck. According to author Callum Borchers, “The essence of being a HENRY is feeling a gap between what you have and what you think you need to be comfortable.”

Of course, it’s true that prices on many things, from housing to eggs to childcare, have never been higher. But some of the HENRY’s featured in the article have more than the economy to blame. For example, one mentioned her hefty student loan debt and Audi car payments as weighing down her list of expenses. Others seemed to find social status in living in very expensive cities while still trying to keep up with the Joneses. As Borchers noted, “What these high earners consider essentials might be termed luxuries (or nonsense) by the rest of us.”

What people believe to be truly essential perhaps, more than anything else, reflects their deepest loves and allegiances. “Where your treasure is,” Jesus said, “there your heart will be.” Today, with food supply relatively secure and basic necessities widely accessible, we are told to pursue happiness, which will come in the accumulation of things. But that is not the way happiness works. Studies show that once our most basic needs are met, there is no significant difference in levels of reported happiness in correlation with level of income. In other words, money can buy security, but it cannot buy happiness.

When Jesus told how difficult it is for the wealthy to come to Christ, He was probably referencing a level of security most of us have achieved. It’s less about the amount earned, and more about what we look to in order to secure our worship and devotion, and to fill the “God-shaped hole” each of us has. One must choose to serve either God or mammon, a term that refers to more than just money. But those who tie their contentment to the number of commas in their bank account will never truly find it.

The discontentment of the HENRYs is deeply connected to the larger, culture-wide crisis of what life is about and who we are. Simply put, we look for meaning and identity in all the wrong places. Comfort is not a big enough cause for which to live. Neither is luxury, especially the kind achieved through debt. (U.S. household debt is now over $18 trillion.)

In Romans, Paul lists generosity as a gift of grace, alongside service, teaching, acts of mercy, and other ways of living for others. As David Bahnsen described in his book Full-Time, a Christian vision understands our work as a calling, the way we steward what belongs to God and fulfills our creational calling. It is not merely a means to store up what is, in the end, perishable. Bahnsen’s book summarizes the inherent connection between work and the meaning of life, and what that means for how we should think about wealth.

This is why Christians have hope in all economic times. This hope is an incredible witness to the One who made us, but especially in times when we just lose sight of what life is about. We’ve been bought with a price, even greater than what eggs cost these days.

Request a copy of Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life with a gift of any amount to the Colson Center this month at colsoncenter.org/February.