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This is an introductory section from Adamson's book Walking the High-Tech High Wire: The Technical Entrepreneur's Guide to Running a Successful Enterprise. I found it to be a useful review of Kuhn's paradigm concept in the context of a new healthcare start-up I'm a part of.

Rereading it, however, got me to thinking about the same topic in a political context. Significant change in politics is also a Kuhnian paradigm shift. As Machiavelli pointed out, there are always people with a vested interest in the past, but as Kuhn points out, this vested interest is not necessarily financial or power-oriented, but may be "computational". Over time people build or acquire internal representations and inference methods that enable them to think about the world and solve problems in it. The "FDR paradigm" sets people up to think that government can make them prosperous. The "Reagan paradigm" sets people up to think that government is what's keeping them from being prosperous.

As I remember Kuhn, new paradigms take over either when the keepers of the old paradigm retire/die off, or when the new paradigm becomes so successful that all the new scientists naturally take to it. What could be the political success story that will make the next generation of Americans gravitate to a new, non-socialist political paradigm?

Actually it is not true that Kuhn meant his notion of "Paradigm Shift" to be applied outside of Science. He was particularly talking about the nature of theory and empiricism in the context of scientific methodology or emerging scientific methodology. To apply this to say, styles of music, is to miss his point. That point being that when empirical evidence invalidates theory or forces it into difficult convolutions then a new theory will arise provided that their is enough data and, by implication the right sort of observational and experimental equipment.

Kuhn sure had an interesting idea.

Anyway...
"What could be the political success story that will make the next generation of Americans gravitate to a new, non-socialist political paradigm?"

I assume that by "socialist political paradigm" you mean (centralized) state administration of the economy. One way to get away from that paradigm might be by a massive failure of that paradigm (Social Security?)

But to look at the bright side, maybe it will be surpassed by the idea that we can cooperate and be nice without the threat of being put in jail for tax evasion. The free software movement may serve to shift the paradigm.

I think the socialist state gets a lot support because people think that the state is what unites us. Maybe it will become apparent that the state is what divides us (Democrats vs. Republicans for example). There are a lot of ways that Americans are trying to improve the country outside of the political system. This makes the politicos nervous. Something needs to break down the barriers that they have established. The Internet?