How Hey Arnold! taught a generation of viewers to hate capitalism

Slate

"It’s not so much that Hey Arnold! radicalized millennials in their youth, it seems, but that it infused their inchoate political and social consciousnesses with ways to respond to their material realities later on," says Hannah Borenstein of the 1996-2004 Nickelodeon series. "A lot of the rhetoric of liberal capitalism—that it is driven by natural turns in the market—was flipped on its head in Hey Arnold! In the show, capitalism was nothing more than the destroyer of fun. It threatened not only the displacement of the city’s working class, but also the places in which young viewers played. And as millennials are now feeling many of the neoliberal structural changes of the 1990s, including being unable to buy homes or even rent in cities, it’s no surprise that the majority of young Americans now look unfavorably upon capitalism—just as their favorite cartoon characters did two decades ago. Hey Arnold! is not a perfect anti-capitalist show. Sometimes it embraces a very pro-work stance, espousing the virtues of loving one’s occupation. And sometimes it gets labor struggles very wrong.  However, there are millennial leftists who remember this show fondly, returned to it, and found meaning in it having a place in the development of their political consciousnesses."