Over the past sixteen years, Gallup has tracked Americans’ perceptions of capitalism and socialism. A year ago, some news was made when the percentage of Americans with positive views of capitalism fell to 54%, marking its lowest rating since the group began collecting data. At the same time, socialism was rated positively by 39% of Americans, a figure which has remained relatively stable since 2010.
Over the past year, Gallup did some follow-up research. Analysts sought to examine what aspects of capitalism and what aspects of socialism Americans find appealing and which they do not like. They also looked at why the term “free enterprise”–often used interchangeably with capitalism–appears to rate much higher at 81% favorable compared to capitalism’s 54%.
The results are interesting.
First, Americans view both capitalism and free enterprise as promoting economic opportunity, growth, and innovation. But they associate the term “wealth inequality” much more with capitalism than they do with free enterprise.
Second, when asked to name something good about socialism, the most common response to that question was “nothing.” A full 45% of Americans were either unable or unwilling to say anything positive about it. Of those who said something good about it, the most common responses referenced social safety nets and the perception of a more equal distribution of wealth.
Perhaps not surprisingly, on the question of socialism, responses varied by party affiliation and age. While a not-small percentage of Democrats and Independents refused to say anything positive about socialism (29% and 44%, respectively), that was the position of almost 70% of Republicans. Moreover, whereas 42% of Americans aged 55 and older refused to offer something good about socialism, only 13% of those aged 18-34 couldn’t or wouldn’t.
What can we make of all of this?
First, two hundred years of recorded history have taken a toll on socialism. Americans aged 50 and older were taught history, and many of them lived it themselves. They remember firsthand the Cold War. They had grandparents who fled Poland. And Czechoslovakia. And East Germany. And Hungary. And Bulgaria. And Romania. Some have met Vietnamese boat people who survived. Few forget the other 250,000 who didn’t. They have learned about China’s long legacy of state-directed political executions. And of the 80 million dead from forced labor or man-made famine there. These Americans don’t rely on today’s academies to relay socialism’s brutal truths.
Second, while over half a century of media messaging has succeeded in popularizing Che Guevara t-shirts on more than a couple of college campuses, the biggest toll it has taken is on capitalism. Hollywood and the academy—and professional pols’ villainization strategy against it—have enjoyed some success. The Wolf of Wall Street provided the caricature, Thomas Piketty provided the creed, and Zohran Mamdani provided the charisma.
And to the extent it has worked, it is because Americans are a compassionate people. We don’t respond well to the whiff of corruption. We don’t tolerate bullies. And we want to help victims. But Americans don’t accept incessant complaining devoid of effective solutions. That is the hard reality that Bernie, AOC, and their friends run up against. Whatever success socialists enjoy comes from railing against perceptions of inequality; it doesn’t come from the answers socialists are proposing.
Americans empathize with victims. We aren’t interested in becoming them.
It is said that politics is downstream of culture, which is, in part, because politics reflects culture. On the other hand, the rich tradition of Catholic social teaching does not reflect culture; it helps explain it.
None of the latest results from Gallup’s research should surprise faithful Catholics. Since Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum entered the fray between the tumult of Haymarket and Homestead over one hundred thirty-five years ago, the Catholic Church has been explaining the truth of the human person to anyone willing to listen.
Every human being is created in the loving image of God and called to share in God’s divinity. That calling includes our work. And our work not only contributes to the economy but has intrinsic value. As God’s creation, we have natural rights, which deserve protection, including a right to work, a right to a just wage, and a right to use that wage to acquire and own private property. Rerum Novarum declares private ownership “sacred and inviolable.”
To be clear: the Catholic Church has explicitly rejected socialism. Numerous times. Why? Because socialism is not compatible with the way we were made.
Rerum Novarum points out that we were designed to live in families, not communes; a point strongly reiterated by Pope Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno, an encyclical issued on the fortieth anniversary of Rerum Novarum. Quadragesimo Anno rejects socialism outright. It notes that true Catholic teaching cannot be reconciled with the socialist class struggle and the denial of private property. Echoing Pope Leo XIII’s charge that socialism is rooted in “confusion” and “disorder” and is “directly contrary to the natural rights of mankind,” Pope Pius XI called socialism’s concept of society “utterly foreign to Christian truth.”
Pope Pius XI goes on to emphasize the importance of subsidiarity–the principle that the individual and the family’s competence and judgment should not be subordinated to the state–and that only a solidarity rooted in an authentic understanding of the common good will fit with God’s creation. State socialism is anathema to God’s creation.
While the principle of subsidiarity is aimed at protecting the human person and families from the state, it is also a warning against unbridled corporate power. Across multiple encyclicals and within the Catechism of the Catholic Church itself, Catholic social teaching refers to the family as “the natural, primary cell of human society.” It can be supplanted by neither an all-powerful state nor by an all-powerful corporation. And this is again because human beings have dignity. Even powerful market players cannot diminish personal freedom, family stability, and the capacity for human flourishing, points reiterated most recently in Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas, released in May.
This emphasis on human freedom and flourishing may help explain Gallup’s finding that Americans respond better to the term “free enterprise” than they do to “capitalism.” Someone else felt the same: the late, great Saint John Paul II. Writing in his brilliant 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus, which marked the 100th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Pope JP II responds to the question of whether the Church supports capitalism this way:
If by “capitalism” is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a “business economy,” “market economy” or simply “free economy.” But if by “capitalism” is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality and sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative.
John Paul II understood, even thirty-five years ago, that “capitalism” was becoming a loaded term. Having himself suffered the ravages of socialism and discovered true freedom, he knew that “market economy” and “free economy” could not be bastardized.
Further evidence that while some say we are living in post-Christian times, the Catholic Church continues to have a pretty good understanding of humanity.
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The single greatest triumph of socialists in the West was their insertion of “capitalism” into the lexicon. This accomplished two things. First, it enabled them to give a name to the enemy: capitalist. Second, it enabled them to paint “capitalism” as a government mandated economic system with socialism as it’s alternative, rather than as the natural consequence of the rights to private property and free association. He who controls the vocabulary controls the argument. This is the tactic of the left on every social and economic issue of the day, and one the rest of us have never really managed to counter effectively.
We not only share a surname, your comments say what I was about to post. Market economies should not be labeled capitalist. Free exchanges can exist without any leveraged capital. Verbal engineering does predetermine cultural responses. When some people hear the word capitalist, they only envision the top hat stuffed shirt on the Monopoly board. When they hear the words market economy, they recognize the sane private exchanges between individuals.
Dr. Ronald L. Jelinek’s article graphically highlights the modern conflict between form and substance from which movements like positivism and modernism derive much of their momentum, even acceptability to many people. People sometimes become focused on vague terminology to the point they neglect substance, especially in politics and religion. Slogans tossed around by demagogues become accepted doctrine while careful analysis gets rejected as “fake news” or worse.
Although this article seems to endorse capitalism in preference to socialism, Dr. Jelinek never defines either term. True, he implies socialism has something to do with a rejection of private property and free markets along with a correlative reliance on totalitarian government control. He also quotes Pope St. John Paul II’s two definitions of capitalism and implies he seems to be accepting capitalism as equated with the institution of the free market and the natural right of private property — but he does not explicitly state a definition of capitalism.
While this was probably not Dr. Jelinek’s intention, he comes across as equivocating. He seems ready to go either way if challenged by adherents of either system. This is an understandable stance today when far too many people will defend the terms socialism or capitalism to the death (usually someone else’s) but are unable to give a clear definition in many cases except that socialism is whatever capitalism is not and vice versa.
One is reminded of Michael Novak’s and Martin Gardener’s respective definitions of democratic capitalism and democratic socialism. Each claimed what he meant by his chosen term is what G.K. Chesterton meant by “distributism.” Unfortunately, as Chesterton’s definitions of distributism were so vague, and Hilaire Belloc’s distributist prescriptions so unworkable that one is left even more in the dark than before.
That is why we at the Center for Economic and Social Justice (CESJ), http://www.cesj.org, have chosen the term “Economic Personalism.” We define socialism/capitalism as the abolition of private property in capital (and the consequent concentration of capital ownership or control in the State and a bureaucratic elite), capitalism as the concentration of capital ownership or control in a private sector elite, and the Servile State as the concentration of capital ownership or control in the hands of a combined private and public sector elite.
We define Economic Personalism as an economic system centered on the dignity and economic empowerment of each human person. It recognizes human life, dignity, and liberty require each person have the power and independent means to support and sustain one’s own life, dignity and liberty — i.e., through one’s own private property rights: personal or shared control and rights to the full fruits or “profits” in what one owns. In contrast to monopolistic capitalism, collectivist socialism/communism, and their various forms of State or collective ownership of productive capital assets, economic personalism aims to structurally diffuse economic power by democratizing access to capital ownership for each person.
The Just Third Way version of Economic Personalism recognizes two categories of inputs that each person can contribute to, and gain consumption income from, the production of marketable goods and services. These are 1) one’s labor, including manual, intellectual, managerial, entrepreneurial, etc., and 2) one’s capital, including land, structures, machinery, patents, etc. The chief institutions for universalizing equal access to the means of acquiring and owning productive capital, while respecting the private property rights of current owners, include a just monetary system, a just tax system and a just inheritance system to remove barriers to equal opportunity for every citizen to become a capital owner in the future.
Economic Personalism holds the most democratic economic system for determining just wages, just prices and just profits is an open, anti-monopolistic free market guided by the three system principles of participative justice, distributive justice and social justice.
CESJ presented the principles of Economic Personalism to Pope St. John Paul II, and he encouraged CESJ’s work in a private audience prior to Centesimus Annus. Following Centesimus Annus, CESJ presented a seminar at the Vatican on the importance of widespread capital ownership for a sound, participative, free market economy. This led to CESJ’s 1994 compendium, “Curing World Poverty,” https://www.cesj.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/CuringWorldPoverty.pdf, and more recently the short book, “Economic Personalism: Property, Power and Justice for Every Person,” https://www.cesj.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/FIN-EconPersonal_Formatted-24-1223.pdf, prepared at the behest of some Vatican officials.
Thank you sincerely for the well presented information regarding the Center for Economic and Social Justice.
We often rush to conclusions without defining the terms or pointing to the implications and possible consequences of the same.
It is also interesting to note that the original Christian community founded by James (often referred to as “the Greater), an early martyr of the faith, “held all things in common” and shared such according to the needs of those served. It was not a “democracy” and was more conciliar or synodal and is best represented today by the independent communities of the Byzantine rite / Eastern Orthodox faith.
Yours in Christ.
We read “[Dr. Jelinek] seems ready to go either way if challenged by adherents of either system [capitalism, socialism].” And, “We define Economic Personalism as an economic system centered on the dignity and economic empowerment of each human person.”
Might the point be that a really free market economy (e.g., economic personalism) is not a “system?”
Socialism is not the answer but neither is predatory, late stage capitalism. Billionaires become trillionaires while the rest of us fall behind.
So you think you have a right to income or wealth that you have not earned? You didn’t create Microsoft. Who are you to decide what people should earn?
You recently posted that you made $4100 in a single day trading. Who did you prey upon?
The creation of wealth does not displace the wealth of others.
It is indeed shocking to see that so many Americans still view socialism positively, despite its abysmal record:
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, the former socialist Russia), the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), socialist Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, etc., the People’s Republic of China under Mao Zedong (not now, where people are a bit better thanks to the capitalist reforms introduced by Mao eventual successor Deng Xiaoping; China eve has billionaires now!), Cuba, and so forth.
All horrible societies from which people tried to escape constantly (despite the dangers of trying to do so; the German Democratic Republic even built a wall to help stop Germans from fleeing to capitalist Germany and many Germans died trying to escape).
One reason is ignorance. Schools and colleges and universities in the U.S., managed and taught largely by left wing inclined people, do not teach the horrors of those socialist countries. So the “educated” in those schools do not know of them.
Another reason, pointed out by Kenneth Minogue, is the attractiveness of the ideology for a certain type of mind:
You will be free from the oppression of religion, family, tradition….the State will take care of you and protect you and offer all these safety nets….There is no inequality or at least far more equality than under capitalism…so many things are free….
Kenneth Minogue examines this frame of mind in his excellent book The Servile Mind, reviewed here as “A Pathology of Democracy” along with a review of a film that won First Prize at the prestigious German film festival of Tribeca, Una Noche, a film that shows devastatingly the results of presumably achieved social equality in Cuba (a socialist society still loved by Hollywood people, professors, etc.):
https://lawliberty.org/author/dario-fernandez-morera/
Print money, crony capitalism and high cost of the American dream – who could possibly be concerned?
It’s better than the alternatives.
“Government is not the solution to our problem. Government IS the problem.”
-President Ronald Reagan
Not when it bankrupts the treasury
And all you cite are the result of partial socialism.
Another touchy and seldom mentioned motivation for the lingering ideals of socialism and the hate of capitalism (“market” or “free market” economy) is Envy.
We feel envy at that rich guy with his great house, while we still live in an apartment, or in a little house, and have difficulties paying our mortgage. He is no better than me. Why should he live like that?
We feel envy at the creativity and entrepreneurial ability and disgusting financial success of a Henry Ford. We feel envy at the creativity and entrepreneurial ability and financial success of an Elon Musk. We feel envy at the creativity and entrepreneurial ability and financial success of of a Bill Gates.
And we feel a secret satisfaction when we learn of their less than exemplary and even rotten personal lives.
The case of Bill Gates is particularly interesting. This man’s personal life has caused harm to himself and to others. Even his philanthropy may be self-serving and even harmful, as his interventions in public health may also have been harmful. And yet, unlike his personal life, his creativity and entrepreneurship are exemplary and have been very beneficial to humanity, as in the case of Ford or Musk. “Gates was critically important to the development of the personal computer, acting as a primary architect of the software ecosystem that made personal computing accessible and viable for the masses. His contributions shifted the industry focus from hardware to software, establishing the business models and technological standards that defined the modern PC era.” Again, his creativity and entrepreneurial ability have been impressively beneficial to humanity. Like Ford, like Musk, like so many others among the disgusting super rich, he deserves every penny he has.
Yet we still feel envy. They are rotten capitalists. They are robber barons.
We should force them to give to the good government much more than they already give or not give, so we can all benefit when those disinterested people in government distribute their money fairly and without fraud for our benefit….
Hurrah for socialism, or at least for distributing the “social” wealth more fairly through the disinterested public servants in charge, for equalizing incomes more, for more collectivism and less robber baron individualism, etc. And btw, all the socialist experiments so far have not been real socialism. When we have real socialism things will be much better!
And and and look at Sweden! A socialist country and so happy.
Actually, no. Sweden is not a socialist country. It has a capitalist (free market) economy. It has billionaires, etc.
It has a wide social welfare net supported by very high levels of taxation far more than in the U.S., especially in the sales tax though it has no inheritance tax unlike in the U.S. with a top marginal tax of 52% vs 37% in U.S. and a sales tax or VAT at 25% vs U.S. no federal sales tax and state sales taxes from 0% to 10.25%; neither country has wealth tax.
AND PEOPLE VOTE WITH THEIR FEET:
AS A SHARE OF POPULATION FAR MORE SWEDES LEAVE SWEDEN THAN AMERICANS LEAVE THE U.S.
sweden us
total emigration rate ~0.82% of population ~0.05% (us citizens only)
citizen emigration rate ~0.24% ~0.05%