Steven C. Bush, chairman, president, and CEO of Apple Bank— the largest state-chartered savings bank in New York state — spoke with MRC Business about his optimism for the future of American capitalism amid troubling trends.
MRC Business staff met with Bush during the December 10, JBiz Expo in Atlantic City, New Jersey organized by Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce CEO Duvi Honig. As the leader of a bank that managed $19 billion in assets, he's concerned as support for socialism and communism grows amongst young Americans. Bush stipulated that this is “something we have to take seriously.”
In his view, while there are plenty of societal and historical factors that explain this trend — much of it driven by the explosion of social media — he expressed confidence that there will be a massive self-correction as in days past when the unworkability and destructiveness of socialist and communist policies was put on full display.
The Ameritopian Shift Towards Socialism and Communism
One of the most troubling trends discussed with Bush was the growing fascination with communist and socialist ideas amongst young people in the United States.
MRC presented Bush with a recent NBC poll that showed that support for capitalism and free markets fell under fifty percent for the first time in seven years. A recent survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov paints a troubling picture: 62 percent of Americans aged 18–29 say they hold a “favorable view” of socialism, and 34 percent say the same of communism. One of the reasons for this, said Bush, was that the spectre of the horrors of communism that was front-and-center during the Cold War has largely disappeared in the 21st century:
The [communist] model that used to occupy a significant part of the time during the Cold War is gone. So conscious awareness of that is gone. I was in the Soviet Union as Gorbachev was just coming in. I spent time in communist Hungary and communist Poland; communist East Germany — in particular, I criss-crossed Checkpoint Charlie multiple times … I’ve seen this from all angles. But I think the vividness of what that all was is largely lost on people because it feels like ancient history.
Bush argues we live today in an “Instagram world. And if you can just kind of bop around and have a catchy video then that’s what moves the world.” What made it easier in the 20th century for people to do a more realistic comparison of capitalism and communism was precisely because Americans were able to witness both systems operating in real time across a litany of countries, according to Bush:
You always find yourself including in those days — taking the actual reality of capitalism in a specific, actual context and comparing it to some idealized version of communism. So you had those things you could point to and say, ‘Here’s this. Here’s that. Why not try it out? Why not make a visit?’ That’s not really there anymore. So, in a way, the triumph of the West has been so complete that it’s kind of taken away those concrete examples.
Another problem, Bush observed, was that in winning the Cold War, there was a failure by the West to “deliver outcomes” to the economic problems that followed that would eradicate any flirtation with the dictatorial systems of the past. In effect, the West entered into a “stasis” where it would be unclear for the foreseeable future how well different problems were addressed. Therefore, frustration from the masses arose at the failures from the public-private sector like the 2008 financial crisis, 9/11 and COVID-19, which made the victory “sugar rush” post-Cold War dissipate relatively quickly.
Bush advised MRC that one strategy for policymakers would be to “understand the reasons” why people are now adopting this radical, left-wing view favorable to communist and socialist structures. He argued much of it can be explained by the intervening experiences of the populace during crises that the West reneged on addressing appropriately. However, he stipulated that in democratic societies, there is the capacity to self-correct:
One of the benefits of kind of — leaving even economics to the side — but just democratic systems is that they have some capacity to self-correct. So, look at New York 1973-1974 and then look at New York fifteen years later — dramatic recovery. Because people felt the sting of failure — bankruptcy, all these kinds of things — and enough people were willing to play it out over a longer period of time that the system self-corrected.
Bush did note that self-corrections can in fact take time and be very painful. But he concluded that he had “a lot of confidence that time will heal” the extreme leftward shift of the American electorate (particularly amongst younger voters) and that “there will be a self-correction.” “Was World War II a self-correction,” Bush asked rhetorically. “That was a pretty painful self-correction. So not all self-corrections are easy or desirable but I don’t know what choices we have. So I think it’s important to figure out why — it’s one thing to just sort of denounce [the skid towards pro-communist sentiments]. But what’s behind it and what can you do that go to root causes and try to improve that?”
One important point to consider, according to Bush, is whether today’s generation believes they will be able to live as well as their parents did given the current state of the inflation-rattled economy. “If you’re kind of gleaning the answer is ‘No,’” said Bush, it’s vital to realize that “loss is more painful than gain is pleasurable. So the experience of loss — even if it’s a loss of expectation; loss of hope, these are painful experiences to have and it generates resentment at the nominal causes of what’s there.”
The Apple Bank CEO noted that America — being a land founded by Puritans — is pretty big on moral panics: “There’s always a moral panic going on of one kind or another. Each one is different and you don’t want to take anything for granted.” However, Bush noted that the current movements towards communism amongst young people are being fomented by the “traditional enemies” of capitalism (ex. Antifa), which at this point “have the benefit” of “being critics of the status quo, which is a fun place to be, because you can just come up with solutions — get votes.”
The Social Media Monster: The 21st Century Vehicle of the Hammer and Sickle Movement
In Bush’s view, the effectiveness of communist and socialist messaging has been massively amplified by the social media phenomenon of the 21st century.
The media environment, as a result of social media, has been largely fragmented as Bush analyzed. As opposed to the 20th century where young people in school were watching public television in addition to shows on the same three news channels ABC, CBS and NBC — “that is so not the case right now,” Bush stated. Because of the new availability of social media platforms, “people are able to go down rabbit holes. And there’s so much to choose from. Any butterfly that passes by will attract people based on whatever they happen to be doing at the moment.”
Local coverage has also been gutted in Bush’s estimation as a result of this media fragmentation, leading consumers to just be peppered with a 24-hour, minute-to-minute, news flash flood about controversial national issues and while being largely oblivious to what’s going on in their own neighborhoods.
And with this new media dynamic comes a shockwave of bad ideas. And the knee-jerk reaction by the masses to double down on bad ideas like communism and socialism despite evidence to the contrary, argued Bush, is a major obstacle to self-correction that has been made much worse by social media:
In the world of social media where everything is public, it’s much more difficult to change your mind. Plus we have these roving bands of witch hunters looking around on social media to just pummel people. Whether it’s just the Twitter-sphere, or whatever it is now — the X-sphere, Instagram — you get all these people who are just weighing in on other people.
Bush joked in turn that these “people should get out of the house and meet some new people for real — face to face. So I think that has exacerbated a lot of this because it’s difficult to have long form conversations” through these mediums.
The algorithms on social media, Bush observed, “are not there to encourage thoughtfulness. They’re there to get clicks” and the subsequent “confirmation bias is just massive.” And the humorous aspect of it all is that most of the radical political commentators who take advantage of this algorithmic structure really “don’t know anything about” the issue they’re addressing “other than what they read somewhere in a Substack newsletter,” Bush quipped. In effect, just “criticizing the establishment wisdom” becomes the “primary virtue” in itself, rather than actually generating meaningful solutions to real problems.
The system of social media, Bush concluded, “is not a system built for self-correction. It’s a system built for self-gratification for an outrage generation and personal validation” based on performative entertainment. The irony is that these Big Tech platforms like Facebook, TikTok and Instagram that are fomenting communist and socialist ideas (whether wittingly or unwittingly) are in fact using the capitalist structure to do so:
It’s a consumer good. So you’re selling pleasure and you’re selling being right. And you’re selling calling out the evil-doer and that I think is — I don’t know how we fix this. This is a new genie loose in the world and I don’t know how that gets solved. But it’s not helping. It is impeding the self-correction — kind of natural process.
As a result, Bush theorized unfortunately that “we may have to fall farther before we change or the next generation just turns off social media.”
All we can do is hope and pray that this self-correction comes sooner rather than later.
