Favoring socialism

Young people – the collegiate and post-college crowd, who have served as the most visible face of the Occupy Wall Street movement – might be getting more comfortable with socialism. That’s the surprising result from a Pew Research Center poll that aims to measure American sentiments toward different political labels.

The poll … found that while Americans overall tend to oppose socialism by a strong margin – 60 percent say they have a negative view of it, versus just 31 percent who say they have a positive view – socialism has more fans than opponents among the 18-29 crowd. Forty-nine percent of people in that age bracket say they have a positive view of socialism; only 43 percent say they have a negative view.

And while those numbers aren’t very far apart, it’s noteworthy that they were reversed just 20 months ago, when Pew conducted a similar poll. In that survey, published May 2010, 43 percent of people age 18-29 said they had a positive view of socialism, and 49 percent said their opinion was negative.
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Indeed, the Pew poll also found that just 46 percent of people age 18-29 have positive views of capitalism, and 47 percent have negative views – making this the only age group where support for socialism outweighs support for capitalism.

– Alexander Elchler for the Huffington Post