A surprising poll from the Pew Research Center found that a surprising number of Americans believe that a dictatorship would be good for our country.

According to Pew, 22 percent of respondents in the U.S. said that “a system in which a strong leader can make decisions without interference from parliament or the courts” would be a good thing. While 76 percent said that this would be awful for America, 22 percent is far too high a number.

For comparison, in Venezuela, where a dictator actually is making the decisions by eliminating troublesome elements within the government, only 17 percent believe an autocracy works well.

In 20 countries, a quarter or more of people polled say a strong leader without constraints is a good way to govern https://t.co/EN1N9eSFhY pic.twitter.com/vY0M1L8BBf — Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) October 16, 2017

Thankfully, we still live in a world that rejects strongman dictators for the most part. Many of the nations have experienced what that’s like, and have had their fill.

While Pew didn’t get into details as to who was giving the “yes” answers, an educated guess says that much of the strongman support comes from a younger crowd.

Many in the U.S. have never had to experience the suffering an oligarchy or a dictatorship can cause as communism survivor Professor Florin Curta of the University of Florida told College Fix last year. According to him, many of the Universities in the U.S. do nothing to actually teach young adults about the dangers of governments like communism, and in some cases, even encourage its growth.

I would say the school system is responsible for that. You get courses at the university on the Holocaust, but you don’t get courses on the history of communism. Last time I checked, [it was estimated] 100 million people were killed under communism by various regimes in various parts of the world. That seems to have passed without a note in the academic world. I think that lack of prominence in the curriculum, in other words, not teaching what really happened, and the sheer ignorance about the disaster in terms of human cost, economic cost, in tragedy in general is responsible for this rosy picture of socialism.

A fondness for overbearing governments lead by idealized leaders like Bernie Sanders seems to be a young person’s disease, and perhaps they’ll cure themselves of the notion as they age.