Is Capitalism on Trial?

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from Dissent magazine:



Is Capitalism on Trial?
Peter Dreier - January 27, 2012


“I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death,” Frank Luntz, an influential GOP pollster and strategist, warned the Republican Governors Association at a meeting in Florida last month, referring to the Occupy movement. “They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”

Perhaps Luntz had already discovered this startling finding, buried in a recent Pew Research Center survey: roughly the same number of eighteen-to-twenty-nine year old Americans have positive views of socialism as of capitalism. In a survey conducted in early December last year, 49 percent had a positive view of socialism, while 47 percent had a positive view of capitalism. Similarly, only 43 percent had a negative view of socialism, compared with 47 percent who had a negative view of capitalism.

The approval figure for socialism is even larger than the results of polling from May 2010, where 43 percent of eighteen-to-twenty-nine year olds registered positive feeling for socialism. (This put it in a dead heat with capitalism).

In some ways, the Millennials are out of sync with the rest of the country. The new Pew survey found that, overall, only 31 percent of Americans had a positive reaction to the word “socialism,” while 60 percent had a negative response. But, as Luntz might have predicted, capitalism didn’t fare very well either. Only 50 percent of Americans had a positive view of capitalism, and 40 percent had a negative response. That’s hardly a ringing endorsement. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=578

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