Fifty-seven percent of Democrats and 51 percent of young people
have a positive view of socialism, Gallup reports, slightly more than those who
have a positive view of capitalism. That’s frightening. The
record of socialist countries, from the Soviet Union and Mao
Zedong’s China to today’s Venezuela, is horrific:
little or no economic growth, hunger, authoritarian government,
people risking their lives to flee.

So why are people talking about socialism again? It seemed to
start with Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential
campaign in 2016. Then came a new breed of Democrats fed up with
the influence of money in both parties, typified by Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez’s upset victory over a prominent Democratic
congressman. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) says its
membership skyrocketed after Ocasio-Cortez’s June win.

Americans like free
enterprise, and very few of them want a more powerful
government.

Socialism is back, after seemingly being buried in the dustbin
of history with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, for
several reasons. Young people never knew, and many older voters
have forgotten, what the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)
and its Eastern European client states were like. The financial
crisis of 2008 certainly gave capitalism a bad name. Bailouts for
Wall Street, a very slow economic recovery, and endless wars left
people on all sides of the political spectrum looking for
alternatives. For some people that alternative was a tough-talking
billionaire president, but with his harsh rhetoric toward
immigrants and other groups, he seemed like a typical unfeeling
capitalist to many other voters.

So now half of Americans 18-29 say they have a positive view of
socialism. But there’s a lot of confusion about what that
means. The traditional definition of socialism, as summarized in
the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, is “a
centrally planned economy in which the government controls all
means of production.” That’s what the Communist Party
implemented in the Soviet Union and China. It was the goal of the
British Labour Party, and the nationalizations of coal, iron and
steel, railroads, utilities, and international telecommunications
after World War II led to decades of economic stagnation.

But most American “socialists” probably don’t
support government ownership of the means of production. Ask
self-proclaimed socialists what they want, and you get vague and
lovely answers. Ocasio-Cortez says that “in a modern, moral
and wealthy society, no person in America should be too poor to
live.” In the Liza Minnelli musical Flora the Red
Menace, the Communist organizer sings, “Are you in favor
of democracy, the rights of man, everlasting peace, milk and
cookies for the kids, security, jobs for everyone, and against
slums, the filthy rich, and making cannon fodder of our youth? Then
you’re a Communist!”

Sanders has often pointed to Denmark as an example of democratic
socialism. But don’t tell that to the Danes. In 2015 the
Danish prime minister said he knew that “some people in the
U.S. associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. I
would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist
planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”

If Denmark is the model for today’s American socialists,
then they should leave the DSA and join Democrats for Higher Taxes
and Transfer Payments.

A deeper dive into Gallup’s latest poll shows a decided
lack of interest in the kind of government control that socialism
would entail. Asked if they had a positive or negative image of
various things, respondents gave very high marks to small business,
entrepreneurship, and free enterprise, and 56 percent approval to
capitalism. The federal government and socialism lagged far behind
at 39 and 37 percent. (These are numbers for all respondents, not
just young people as above.)

Only 44 percent agreed that “government should do more to
solve our country’s problems.” Only 25 percent said
there is too little government regulation of business, 39 percent
said too much, and 33 percent the right amount. In 2017 Gallup found that 67 percent of Americans
believed big government was a bigger threat to the future than big
business was. Only 26 percent picked big business, and 5 percent
said big labor.

Perhaps most telling: If socialism means anything, it means
giving more power to government. But almost no one in the new
Gallup poll thinks the federal government has too little power:
just 8 percent in the new poll, about where it’s been since
2002.

There’s lots of talk in the United States about socialism these
days, and lots of debate about how high taxes and spending ought to
be. But Americans like free enterprise, and very few of them want a
more powerful government.