My 25-year old son fits this to a T.
I am about to turn 60 and have only been unemployed for one month since 1986. I have worked side hustles plus a full-time job for over 25 years but due to a combination of bad choices, a divorce, and not wanting to move out of my home town, I am grinding and living paycheck to paycheck with less than 6 figures put away that is offset by a mortgage and other debt. His mother (my ex) is also in a similar situation.
My son supports the DSA and frames it as sympathy for me and his mother. “You guys have slaved away your entire lives at jobs you can’t stand in a capitalistic system where almost all of the benefits go to the 1%, there’s a better way, you deserve a better system.”
On the one hand, I think your son is correct. You do deserve a better system. We all do. But the DSA and socialism is not that better system.
But I can no longer look around at our current incarnation of Big Government and Big Business where no one cares about the employees, and no one cares about the customers, and the only thing that ever matters is for the executives to get that big quarterly bonus because they “made their numbers” and satisfied the shareholders. A lot of people (young and old) are looking at that whole system and thinking, “There’s nothing in that for me.”