Senator Bernie Sanders speaks during a news conference in Washington, D.C., January 30, 2019. (Yuri Gripas/REUTERS)

A new NBC/WSJ poll has only 18 percent of the public viewing “socialism” positively, while 50 percent view it negatively.

Gallup has tended to find greater support than that for socialism, and also has asked questions about capitalism and socialism for a few years and thereby allowed us to make comparisons over time.


From 2010 through 2018, Gallup has asked the public its views about capitalism and socialism four times. Over that span of time, public support for socialism has risen from 36 to 37 percent: which is to say, it has essentially been flat. In the same period, public support for capitalism has dropped from 61 to 56 percent.

Gallup also lets us look at the attitudes of young people. The 18-29-year-olds of 2010 were more favorable to capitalism than socialism by a 17-point margin, whereas the 18-29-year-olds of 2018 were more socialist by 6. The entire change came from falling support for capitalism (from 68 to 45 percent), not from rising support for socialism (flat at 51 percent).

In short, socialism hasn’t been gaining appeal; capitalism has been losing it. (Good news for distributivism?)