"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 18-to-29-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.
These findings are particularly remarkable because there's been no significant socialist movement in this country for decades. After Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, the word "socialism" started making a comeback. But it wasn't because the socialists were gaining momentum. It was because Obama's opponents -- the Republican Party, the Tea Party, the right-wing blogosphere, the Chamber of Commerce, and conservative media gurus like Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh -- labeled anything Obama proposed, including his modest health care reform proposal, as "socialism."
In March 2009, two months after Obama took office, the National Review put a picture of the new president on its cover over the headline, "Our Socialist Future." In 2010, Stanley Kurtz, a regular contributor to conservative publications and frequent guest on Fox News, published Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism. That year Newt Gingrich authored To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine. During his presidential campaign he's continued to use that label to attack Obama.
This primary season, in fact, every GOP candidate has attacked Obama for being a socialist, or for trying to make America more like Europe, which has become a code word for socialist. In South Carolina, Mitt Romney pledged to "stuff it down [Obama's] throat and point out it is capitalism and freedom that makes America strong." At the same time, Romney's GOP rivals have attacked his business practices at Bain Capital, unwittingly turning their party primaries into a debate over -- and defense of -- capitalism.
Dick Flacks, a sociologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara who has studied the political views of America's youth, thinks that right-wing attacks on Obama may have backfired with respect to the Millennial generation. "Young people generally like Obama, even if they are somewhat disappointed in what he's accomplished so far," said Flacks, who noted that in 2008 66 percent of under-30 voters favored Obama. "So when Beck or Gingrich attack Obama as a socialist, many young people react by saying, 'Well, then maybe socialism can't be that bad,' and it makes them at least skeptical of those who demonize the word socialism."
The Pew survey doesn't provide an in-depth study of Americans' political ideologies. "We didn't ask people to define what they mean by the terms," said Carroll Doherty, Pew's Associate Director, in an interview. In addition to "capitalism" and "socialism," Pew asked respondents for their reactions to "libertarian," "liberal," "conservative," and "progressive." Among these terms, "progressive" had the biggest positive (67 percent) and smallest negative (22 percent) responses in the overall public. "Progressive" garnered an even stronger positive (88 percent) and a smaller negative reaction (12 percent) among Millennials. Among young Americans, all the other terms scored better than the word "capitalism."
"Many young people associate capitalism with inequality, big corporations, and poverty," explained Joseph Schwartz, a Temple University political scientist and national vice president of Democratic Socialists of America.
Most Americans over 50 today think of socialism in terms of the Soviet Union, according to Schwartz. "That was the Cold War view. Socialism was identified with Communism, which meant totalitarianism and dictatorship. It wasn't a very positive image," says Schwartz. "But things have changed since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. If young people have any image of socialism at all, it is probably northern Europe, particularly Scandinavia. They know that northern Europe has less poverty, more equality, and more social mobility."
The high unemployment rate among today's youth, and the enormous increase in debt owed by college students and recent graduates, has something to do with their growing doubts about capitalism. So does their uncertainty about their own future and the country's future.
Anger, or at least lukewarm feelings, toward capitalism hasn't led to a groundswell of socialist activism. Only a handful of visible public figures -- including Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, writer Barbara Ehrenreich, theologian Cornel West, and sociologist Frances Fox Piven -- publicly identify themselves as socialists. Democratic Socialists of America, the nation's largest socialist organization, has 6,500 dues-paying members. The group's youth section has solid chapters on only 15 campuses and about 300 active members.
A better reflection of young people's disaffection with capitalism is the Occupy Wall Street movement, which was mainly fueled by people in their twenties and thirties, many of them political neophytes. Even many Americans who don't agree with the Occupiers' tactics or rhetoric nevertheless shared its indignation at outrageous corporate profits, widening inequality, and excessive executive compensation side-by-side with the epidemic of layoffs and foreclosures.
Another Pew Research Center survey released in December 2011 found that most Americans (77 percent) -- including a majority (53 percent) of Republicans -- agreed that "there is too much power in the hands of a few rich people and corporations." Not surprisingly, 83 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds shared that view. Pew also discovered that 61 percent of Americans believed that "the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy." A significant majority (57 percent) thought that wealthy people don't pay their fair share of taxes.
The Occupy movement has changed the national conversation on these issues, among the public and in the media. For example, between October 2010 and September 2011, the number of newspaper stories with the word "greed" fluctuated between 452 and 728 per month. But in October, only weeks after the Occupiers gained a foothold in New York and elsewhere, newspapers ran 2,285 stories with that word. A similar trend occurred with the word "inequality," according to a Lexis/Nexis search.
Some politicians and pundits have suddenly changed their rhetoric to give voice to the growing anger toward Wall Street and big business. In his December 5 speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, Obama sought to channel the growing populist outrage unleashed by the Occupy movement. He criticized the "breathtaking greed" that has led to a widening income divide. "This isn't about class warfare," he said. "This is about the nation's welfare." Obama noted that the average income of the top 1 percent has increased by more than 250 percent, to $1.2 million a year. He returned to those themes in his January 24 State of the Union address, where he called on Congress to raise taxes on millionaires. "Now, you can call this class warfare all you want," he said, "Most Americans would call that common sense."
Obama also recently sent Alan Krueger, head of his Council of Economic Advisors, to make an unprecedented presentation to the Center for American Progress about the dangers of growing income inequality, declining wages, and stagnating social mobility. Many Democrats running for Congress this year will hitch their campaign to these themes, even if they don't directly give credit to the Occupiers for putting these issues on the nation's agenda.
But nowhere can the impact of the Occupy insurgency be better seen than in the fumbling efforts of Romney's GOP rivals to capture the new anti-corporate sentiment. The Republicans are trying to figure out how to tap into the national mood without sounding too anti-business and offending their corporate sponsors. They're finding that it's a difficult tightrope to walk.
From 1984 through 1999, Romney ran the Boston-based Bain Capital, which, according to a Los Angeles Times investigation, made billions by "firing workers, seeking government subsidies, and flipping companies quickly for large profits." According to the Times, "Sometimes Bain investors gained even when companies slid into bankruptcy. Romney himself became wealthy at Bain. He is now worth between $190 million and $250 million, much of it derived from his time running the investment firm."
Earlier this month, Texas Governor Rick Perry told Fox News's Sean Hannity that there's a real difference between venture capitalism and vulture capitalism. Venture capitalism we like. Vulture capitalism, no. And the fact of the matter is that [Romney's] going to have to face up to this at some time or another, and South Carolina is as good a place to draw that line in the sand as any, because those people in Gaffney, South Carolina, understand what happened to that photo album company.
(Perry was referring to the Holson Burnes factory, which made photo albums and picture frames. In 1992, just four years after the factory opened, the Bain-controlled firm fired more than 100 workers and shipped some of the operation overseas).
"I think there's a real difference between people who believed in the free market and people who go around, take financial advantage, loot companies, leave behind broken families, broken towns, people on unemployment," Gingrich said on Hannity's show. On the campaign trail, Gingrich told a crowd, "Crony capitalism, where people pay each other off at the expense of the people of this country, is not free enterprise, and raising questions about that is not wrong." Voters should know, Gingrich argued, whether businesses are "fair to the American people, or are the deals being cut on behalf of Wall Street institutions and very rich people."
At a South Carolina debate Romney turned that phrase on Obama, accusing the president of "crony capitalism." Obama, he said, "is taking our country down a path that is very dangerous. He's making us more and more like a European social welfare state. He's making us an entitlement society. He's taking away the rights of our citizens. He believes government should run this country."
The attacks on Romney have triggered a backlash by some conservatives. They don't like to hear fellow Republicans vilifying capitalism and the profit motive. Republicans and conservative pundits have recently become fond of quoting economist Joseph Schumpeter, who argued that capitalism involves "creative destruction" that can take a human toll but ultimately promotes innovation and economic growth. This has become the justification for Bain Capital's predatory practices.
The business-oriented Club for Growth called Gingrich's critique of Romney's work at Bain "disgusting" and "just beyond the pale for any purported 'Reagan conservative.'" The right-wing American Spectator magazine added that Gingrich's attack on Romney's Bain experience was an "attack on capitalism itself, something that should be anathema to a self-described 'Reagan conservative.'" On his radio show, Glenn Beck said that Bain has become the "new Halliburton--the company that has done nothing wrong yet is completely vilified merely for being a company that attempts to earn a profit." The widely read conservative blogger Roger Simon, who had earlier supported Perry and then Gingrich, wrote, "This basically anti-market propaganda from Perry would more normally come from a Norwegian socialist."
Even Romney's opponent Rick Santorum (who may want to be Romney's running mate) refused to join the pile-on against the former Massachusetts governor. "[I] just don't think as a conservative and someone who believes in business that we should be out there... saying somehow capitalism is bad," he said.
"The Republicans seem to be saying that any criticism of the rich, or of big business, is anti-capitalist," observed sociologist Flacks. "This is new in American politics. And it is dangerous for conservatives and Republicans. It provides an opening for a real debate about the nature of capitalism and about how we can bring more democracy to our economic system."
Frank Luntz agrees. He offered tips for fighting back and framing the issues that the Occupiers have raised. For example, he urged Republican politicians to avoid using the word "capitalism."
"I'm trying to get that word removed and we're replacing it with either 'economic freedom' or 'free market,'" Luntz said. "The public... still prefers capitalism to socialism, but they think capitalism is immoral. And if we're seen as defenders of quote, Wall Street, end quote, we've got a problem."
Peter Dreier teaches politics and chairs the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. His next book, The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame, will be published by Nation Books in the spring. This article originally appeared on the Dissent magazine website.
Spot on. I'm seeing a huge flaw in it myself, where before I didn't give it too much thought. Quick, who can we blame!
Several decades ago, Margaret Thatcher claimed: "There is no alternative".
She was referring to capitalism. Today, this negative attitude still persists.
I would like to offer an alternative to capitalism for the American people to consider.
Please click on the following link. It will take you to an essay titled: "Home of the Brave?"
which was published by the Athenaeum Library of Philosophy:
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/steinsvold.htm
John Steinsvold
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result."
~ Albert Einstein
OSHA is not the reason we have safer workign environments. Technology and economic progress is. OSHA is just a bunch of people who jumped in front of the parade to pretend to be leading it.
Any system based on growth in perpetuity that involves using violence to wrest resources from the people, that turns the commons into a wasteland thanks to it's vociferous appetite should be put to death.
FURTHER ....whether it is salaries for employees, health care expenses, rent on the factory, rent on the warehouse, tires for the truck which hauled to stuff to WalMart, electricity, water, garbage disposal utilities, property taxes the manufacturer, or WalMart, may have paid, income taxes the CEO paid on his little sliver of the wholesale price, whatever. FOR THAT SPECIFIC PRODUCT.... that bottle of shampoo, maybe, you paid all the costs including all the taxes, be they sales, income, whatever, for that bottle of shampoo.
So, the very idea that a Corporation pays "income tax", or "business tax", is just b.s. ...... all Corporations do is collect tax revenue and hand it to the government ........ the idea that Corps pay taxes is a scam that has been sold to the common people ever since taxes have been collected from businesses .............
Thats not capitalism at work.
Do you really think that those corporations would sit on those trillions of dollars of money if they could make more profits by hiring workers?
American socialism did indeed undergo a near death experience with the fall of the USSR, but socialism subsequently evolved into an asymmetric form and gained political power with the Obama Administration.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B006N0X5LM/ref=redir_mdp_mobile?m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&ref_=tmm_kin_title_0&qid=1324334526&sr=1-1
Want to privatize all the roadways in the country? (the military, the police department) This would be capitalism.... but it would not be as efficient as social allocation. It really is a simple distinction. We, like the NFL, have a combination of the private and the social..... it's more efficient.
The supposedly efficient allocation of roads in this counutry results in roads to nowhere and traffic jams. So think again.
It really amounts to an insult of intelligence for the republican base. But it does not seem they can figure it out, or they have no interest in the truth. Pretty sad for us as a people.
Just because a baseball player plays for the Cleveland Indians, it does not make him an Indian, eh?
And words mean only what they mean. One can torture someone using language untill the word "Love" makes them vomit on command, BUT....
The root of Socialism is stilll "Social".
The root of Communism is still "Community".
Deal with that truth.
""Too much cannot be said against the men of wealth who sacrifice everything to getting wealth. There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American, insensible to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune, and putting his fortune only to the basest uses —whether these uses be to speculate in stocks and wreck railroads himself, or to allow his son to lead a life of foolish and expensive idleness and gross debauchery, or to purchase some scoundrel of high social position, foreign or native, for his daughter. Such a man is only the more dangerous if he occasionally does some deed like founding a college or endowing a church, which makes those good people who are also foolish forget his real iniquity. These men are equally careless of the working men, whom they oppress, and of the State, whose existence they imperil. There are not very many of them, but there is a very great number of men who approach more or less closely to the type, and, just in so far as they do so approach, they are curses to the country." (Forum, February 1895.) Mem. Ed. XV, 10; Nat. Ed. XIII, 9.
Yep Teddy.... No not Teddy Kennedy.. Teddy Roosevelt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Government_Pension_Fund_of_Norway
Norway GDP is approximately $400 billion and total government debt $200 billion.
Schools and health care are provided by the state and the state church is also funded by the state.
Quite an accomplishment and even more so when you consider they lack poverty in the populace.
If the people chose, all government debt could be paid in full and a check for $60000 could be remitted to every man woman and child in the country. However.... (and this is the interesting point) it is quite essential that a country have its own government debt as a liquid short term investment for its banking system. Ahhh.... the necessity of debt.
It's not that capitalism the economic system is immoral. Like any other mathematical construct, it is amoral. It's when you have real human beings living within capitalism that it becomes immoral. This is because the people most willing to do the most horrible things will have an advantage. The most predatory economic practices, the lowest wages, the worst worker conditions, the lowest possible overhead...these are what will always be glorified and rewarded in a culture that has embraced capitalism. To refuse to do whatever will gain the highest profits, no matter how despicable, is a failure and weakness under the culture of capitalism.
Capitalism says the value of art is as a commodity. It says that the value of love is in advertising and creating markets. The value of family is the creation of new markets. The value of war is as a market. The value of a person's life is a return on an investment. This leveling of all possible values into one, wealth, is what makes capitalism amoral. Human nature does the rest, and makes it immoral. All it takes is one person competing and doing despicable things to start the whole chain reaction, which means it requires a perfect population to remain amoral.
Little 10 year old Jane wants to raise money for her school books so she utilizes an empty cardboard box from the garage paints a sign on it, makes lemonade and markets her product to passersby in her neighborhood at .5 cents a paper togo cup.
She quinches the thirst of the some of the neighborhood, builds a relationship and nets a profit towhich she buys her books and studies harder to build her growth in an effort to contribute further to her life, her neighborhood and her communities future.
-----that’s not what’s happening in our economy but that’s true capitalism-----
Jane is not the problem
Capitalism is not the problem BECAUSE Jane’s parents are good people with good intentions and watchover their daughter in support of her growth and contribution.
Jane’s parents are the US Government
Jane is the capitalist
The free market is the HOA and other neighbors that allow Jane to conduct fair business trade
America needs better parents if they want capitalism. We are now realizing we may not be able to replace, elect or find better parents regardless of the carbon units available because the system is poisoned by other parents who are themselves poisoned by greed and corruption. So instead of changing parents we’re beginning to discuss capitalism.
The parents had better get their &&^%$# together and fast or they’re gonna find themselves stewards of realocation system .
Capitalism is based on private property rights. Our present system violates private property in many ways. The most obvious is eminent domain abuse. Kelo decision anyone?
Our present monetary system, with fiat money controlled by a central bank violates private property rights by stealing the value of people's savings through inflation.
Bailouts, subsidies, protectionism and high government spending are all violations of capitalism.
Our system is based on capitalism, but its foundations are violated every day.
Capitalism requires rule of law, but has anyone read the book "Three Felonies a Day"? Our legal system is now so complex with all sorts of arbitrary rules and regulations that the average American commits three felonies a day without even knowing it.