Actually it never went away, though many in the West assumed it had, and this article by Joel Kotkin sums it up.

I wrote about this in my book on Communism: Lampstand has published ten books (free to Lampstand members, see https://davidhlukenbill.wordpress.com/category/membership-info-organzation-overview/ for membership info) and each one is a response to a likely objection to Catholicism that will be encountered when doing ministry to professional criminals.

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An excerpt from Joel Kotkin’s article.

Karl Marx’s birthday may have been 200 years ago, but his philosophy has come back from the dead. Today, China, an emerging superpower, is celebrating his “genius,” while Marxist ideology is gaining adherents among a whole new generation in the West.

During the period of rapid social mobility after the Second World War, particularly following the collapse of the Soviet Union, socialist ideas fell into deserved disrepute. In contrast, today’s resurgence reflects both historical ignorance, particularly among the young, and the marked failure of contemporary capitalism to offer a credible scenario for a better future.

The big western comeback

Socialism’s comeback extends across a broad spectrum of countries, including Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, France as well as in the United States. In France’s election last year the former Trotskyite Jean-Luc Melenchon won the under-24 vote, beating the “youthful” Emmanuel Macron by almost two to one. Similarly, in the United Kingdom, the birthplace of modern capitalism, Labour, under the neo-Marxist Jeremy Corbyn, won over 60 percent of the vote among voters under 40, compared to just 23 percent for the Conservatives.

Youth support in 2016 for Bernie Sanders, the first openly socialist candidate running in a major-party American presidential race, shows the power of collectivist messaging even here. In the primaries, the Vermont septuagenarian easily outpolled Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump combined. Recently Clinton mused that one reason she failed with younger voters was her identification as a “capitalist.”

A Pew poll finds that 43 percent of millennials feel positively about the word “socialism” compared to less than half that for people over 50. By 2024, these millennials will be the biggest voting bloc. Left-wing candidates, including some Democratic socialists, did surprisingly well in the most recent primaries.

Socialism appeals where capitalism fails

Polls of millennials show consistently that economic issues, such as jobs and college debt, are their dominant concerns. Issues like transgender rights, or climate change, may motivate the media and denizens of university hothouses, but for most young people more critical are those that impact their lives in a more immediate way.

The current ruling oligarchy, centered on Wall Street and Silicon Valley, has no real program to address these concerns outside of occasional proposals to provide guaranteed incomes and subsidies for what they see as increasingly extraneous masses. But many millennials may not feel so positive about a dismal future as “gig economy” drones. They certainly show little signs of capitalist ardor. Relatively few are starting businesses and fully half, notes a Harvard study, believe “the American dream” is dead. Under these conditions promises of guaranteed jobs, free college and single-payer health care are far more attractive.

Similarly high rents and diminished prospects for home ownership naturally creates growing support for rent control and massive subsidies for housing. This is particularly true in the most overpriced markets (for young people especially) on the West Coast and in the Northeast. Even in Orange County, rent control has the support of nearly three in five voters, according to a recent Chapman University poll.

Retrieved May 21, 2018 from https://www.ocregister.com/2018/05/19/the-horrors-of-marxism-not-so-clear-to-americas-young/