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Poll: Americans’ views of socialism, capitalism unchanged
While it’s been a topsy-turvy couple of years for the U.S. economy, Americans have kept a pretty consistent view of such words as capitalism and socialism, a new survey found.
The Pew Research Center found that half of U.S. adults reacted favorably to capitalism, while 4 in 10 responded negatively.
Meanwhile, 6 out of 10 adults disapproved of socialism, while 31 percent endorsed it.
All those responses, Pew said, are largely unchanged from April 2010, the last time the group checked on those words.
As Pew noted, Americans’ views of socialism and capitalism stayed roughly the same even as the Occupy movements were questioning corporate excess in this country.
In the last year and a half, some Republicans and conservatives have also continued to try to tar President Obama and Democrats as socialists for their economic policies.
While capitalism received a largely favorable response, Pew also found that at least 25 percent of respondents across all age groups, races, income levels and ideologies were dismissive of capitalism.
Almost 50 percent of those aged 18 to 29, those making less than $30,000 a year and Occupy Wall Street backers also had an unfavorable reaction to capitalism.
A majority of blacks and liberal Democrats, meanwhile, reacted positively to socialism. But while reactions to capitalism were fairly consistent across all age groups, 18-to-29-year-olds were more than three times more likely (49 percent to 13 percent) to endorse socialism than those older than 65.
The Pew poll also found that close to a quarter of Americans had no opinion on libertarianism, with the rest split down the middle.
Americans also, on average, responded more positively to the term conservative than liberal, though the two words scored roughly equal on the negative side.
But the word progressive scored the highest on the Pew poll, with Republicans responding far more positively to that term than to liberal.
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