My reactions to poll results reported by James Freeman in the Wall Street Journal varied from incredulity to interest. The particular poll he was reporting on was a Harvard-Harris poll and the specific issues to which he drew attention were towards the economy. For example:
The new survey asks, “What do you think is a better economic system – capitalism or socialism?” Capitalism wins by a 59% to 41% margin, which is better than some recent findings but still not the complete repudiation that Marxism deserves. The most disturbing aspect is that socialism wins among Democrats, 54% to 46%.
The problem is that as phrased the question measures symbolic affiliation more than concrete policy preference. It’s not even particularly good as a Rorschach test. And this one:
Here’s another question in the new poll:
Do you think America should be run mostly as a free enterprise country or under socialism?
When asked this way, freedom wins by 76% to 24% and even Democrats vote for free enterprise over socialism by a healthy 68% to 32% margin.
is not much better. The key problem is that like most developed countries we don’t have either “free enterprise” or “socialism”. We have a mixed economy. Every developed economy has private property, markets, government regulations, transfer payments, and a provision for public goods. The real questions are how much redistribution should there be, how much regulation, and how much provision of goods by the state. Unfortunately, those questions were not asked. As stated the questions above were primarily symbolic declarations of affiliation.
Americans do not live in a capitalist or socialist system in the abstract. They live in a highly developed mixed economy with extensive redistribution and regulation layered onto private markets. Asking them to choose between ideological labels tells us less about their policy preferences than about the emotional associations those labels carry.
This question gets closer to the heart of the matter:
Here’s another Harvard-Harris question:
Do you think people should be able to buy and own their own [houses] or should the state own their houses?
A full 91% of respondents say people should have the right to buy and own their own houses.
According to the poll most Americans oppose government-run grocery stores, too.
The question I wished they had asked but didn’t was:
Should the government require individuals with extremely large property holdings to transfer some of their property to others to reduce inequality?
That would have been revealing.
The most interesting result is not what Americans think about socialism. It’s how dramatically their answers shift based on wording. Nearly every economic or political question was divided along party lines with Democrats on one side and Republicans/independents on the other. An exception to that was voter ID: a supermajority of self-identified Democrats supported it.
