Americans and Socialism: Some New Numbers

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Thanks to Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the past 40 years of American capitalism, the good folks at the Pew Research Center have begun polling regularly about Americans’ view of socialism. Their latest survey, released yesterday, digs a little deeper into what Americans think of when they think of socialism and capitalism. The divide here between those who have negative views of socialism (55 percent) and those who have positive views (42 percent) is quite revealing.

Those who have negative views, Pew concludes,

viewed socialism and capitalism in zero-sum terms. A large majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (68 percent) had both a positive impression of capitalism and a negative view of socialism.

However, Pew continued,

Democrats and Democratic leaners were more likely to view both terms positively; a plurality (38 percent) had a positive impression of both socialism and capitalism.

Not surprisingly, those who viewed socialism positively named Denmark and Finland as socialist nations; those who viewed it negatively identified it with Venezuela (which Sanders, in the last debate, labeled an authoritarian regime that was anything but socialist—at least, his kind of democratic socialist).

Which is to say, if I may go beyond Pew, that a majority of Democrats identify with mainstream European social democracy. And that the two groups who view the choice between socialism and capitalism as absolutely binary, with no wiggle room, are 1) Republicans and 2) the coalition of Trotskyists and Draperites who have flocked to DSA in the hope of keeping it from becoming—oh, the horror—a mass social democratic organization.

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