What with the shouting about socialism during the health care debate, the caricaturing of Obama as a socialist and the shrillness of rightwingers tossing the term around like paper airplanes, you’d think socialism was still a McCarthy-era scare word in this country.
But it’s not, according to surprising responses to surveys by the country’s leading polling firms. Apparently there’s something Americans need to know about each other and about the country’s real ideological profile.
A Pew Research Center poll of 1,546 people, published in May, found that 52 percent of respondents—a majority, but hardly an overwhelming one—said they thought of capitalism as a positive thing. Thirty-seven percent reported feeling a negative reaction to the term. The rest said they weren’t sure.
The Pew results are supported by the findings of a Rasmussen poll in 2009 in which 53 percent of respondents said they believed capitalism was “superior” to socialism. Meanwhile, in a Gallup poll this year, 37 percent of respondents actually said socialism was “superior” to capitalism. The Pew poll found that 29 percent of those polled considered socialism “positive”—no majority, certainly, but still over a quarter of those participating.
And an extremely important finding by the Pew Center was that 43 percent of Americans under 30 had negative feelings about capitalism, while the same percentage had positive feelings about socialism.
The Pew poll’s results may suggest that people understand that economic systems are no better than their effects on the wellbeing of people and on the environment. Its more detailed findings are also interesting. Less than 50 percent of women, for example, viewed capitalism as positive.
And while Republicans were more bullish on capitalism than Democrats, with 62 percent seeing capitalism as positive, a larger percentage of them, 81 percent, said they saw “free markets” as positive. The discrepancy, according to Boston College sociology professor Charles Derber, may be a sign that Republicans distinguish between free markets and large, dominating businesses that in practice undermine competition and the freedom of the marketplace.
Among other terms tested out in the poll, “family values” and “civil rights” got the most positive reactions, while “militia” got the most negative. To read the Pew report, visit http://people-press.org/report/610/socialism-capitalism.
