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I think this is that one survey from 2016. If I remember right it only asked for reactions to certain words, positive or negative. Whenever I see similar polls it makes me consider the average American doesn't see the terms capitalism and socialism like we do. The average person sees these as character traits, not movements or distinct economic structures. Capitalist simply means greedy businessman, nothing structural. Socialism is high taxes and government doing stuff.
There's not a lot of coherent public discourse about this.
A lot of Americans who own ZERO capital consider themselves ideological capitalists. This isn't an impossible stance. I wouldn't even say it's a hypocritical one. But it is absolutely a moronic stance born from ignorance basically like you laid out above. I'd only argue with you that a lot do not even think of it as greedy. They conflate capitalism with "freedom" and socialism with "not freedom." And that happens because of the past 100 years+ of red scare bullshit.
Whenever I see similar polls it makes me consider the average American doesn't see the terms capitalism and socialism like we do. The average person sees these as character traits, not movements or distinct economic structures. Capitalist simply means greedy businessman, nothing structural. Socialism is high taxes and government doing stuff.
I would very much agree with your assessment. I think the public discourse has failed to get the idea of structural thought into these words. It's really sad to me that while most people would totally be onboard with socialism and communism but lack the language to even understand what they actually are. I always feel like you have describe Socialism in these very obtuse ways to obfuscate what it's called to get average Americans onboard. As soon as you call it what it is, they bug out.
and about 92% of them are NATO leftists who hate every AES country and think people like Vaush sound intelligent.
I think you're cutting yourself off at the knees if you assume that. Obviously I doubt the majority are theory-hardened communists, but this obviously represents a popular swell of public opinion despite our inability to act so far on anything as "the left" in the US
I wonder how many of the revolutionary proletarians during the rise of communism knew their shit. Not many I guess, but they had people they followed that did, like Lenin, even if they didn't completely understand the theory or fully agreed with it.
Then again people back then didn't have a century of propaganda to deal with..
It's pretty obvious almost none of them. The Chinese civil war picked up millions of conrades along the way and there is absolutely 0 chance most, or even a significant portion of them spent weeks or months cramming a bunch of theory in their free time while working for their feudal/war lords before defecting
A lot of them just heard that the communists were promising them their own land, guaranteed nourishment for their entire family, and how much better their followers were being treated
Hexbear stop overestimating Vaush's influence challenge (impossible).
come on, you know that's not true
I love talking politics with people and I have talked to A LOT of libs. Most agree that we need to tax the corporations more, the capitalists have gotten too greedy, we should spend more of the defense budget on healthcare, infrastructure etc.
Not a single one of them thinks that revolution should be anywhere on the table. And when some of them finally admit that China is doing something good, it’s only because China is not socialist, it is a capitalist country! That’s why it is able to raise the living standards of its people because they have adopted some of our capitalist policies! But unlike us, they’re totalitarians!
Hmmm, after spending their formative years with the boomer generation constantly rubbing their lucky breaks in our faces. Smug corpos laughing at us for being arbitrarily told we're unemployable....it truly is a mystery where the resentment comes from...
The lack of trust in the capitalist system is Harvard Business School’s biggest challenge, according to Dean Nitin Nohria[5]. The Business School has always been closely associated with broader trends in the business world, and it must work toward reassuring society that businesses and the capitalist system are productive. The school has taken several actions in an effort to answer that question, including introducing more courses focused on ideas about economic structure. The school is trying to find ways to engage students in conversations about capitalism and its flaws. The school has a second-year course called ‘Reimagining Capitalism’ that has become one of its most successful second-year electives. The school is also trying to bring that material back into the first year of its MBA curriculum.
Lol of course.
Only a business school grad could think the people who sign up to go to business school are the ones you need to sell capitalism to
Oh, well, since we live in a democracy that should be the end of the matter, then, shouldn't it? Shouldn't it?
I remember in school when we had US history for the sixth time for social studies class, they taught us again about the early debates in the Federalist Papers on how the baby democracy might turn into a monster by allowing the majority to win votes somehow
Obviously it's better to have a tyranny of the minority than the tyranny of the majority, some dead guy in a wig said so
I'm amazed that 49% support it.
In 1960 US minimum wage was $1.00/hour and the cost of the average house was $11,000.00* A high school grad could move out and be self supporting instantly.
*Unless you're ready to prove that inflation is the reason houses today are larger and have things like air conditioning, don't tell me that modern houses are 'better.'
A lot of older houses also had better passive cooling and more design consideration towards the environment (facing where prevailing winds come from, having wind funnels, chimneys that expel heat from the house, large cool basements that people would move into during the summer, not chopping down all trees within 3 miles)
I’m sure to some extent this is also survivorship bias but having lived in homes and apartments both 10-30 years old and 80-100+ years old, the old ones have all been way better.
This is cool but there's still a big leap to be taken between disliking capitalism and actually advocating for communism. A year or two ago a friend of mine admitted that capitalism is fucked, but he couldn't bring himself to support communism because he thinks that communism basically means universal concentration camps. "You get a concentration camp! And you get a concentration camp!" It's common enough for people to admit that things are fucked up, but their solution usually revolves around electing good capitalist puppets to replace the bad capitalist puppets, and/or to do some kind of genocide against minorities who have nothing to do with societal problems. Plenty of these respondents probably believe that something like "crony capitalism" is at fault and that we need to go back to the good old days when a man could get ahead if he worked hard (i.e., during the enclosures).
There is a particular irony about the proletarian from the country with the highest prisoner population per capita (probably of all time) thinking that 'communism' means 'concentration camps'.
I'm in a town where basic shelter is unaffordable and constantly features puff pieces about the plights of our landlords, and the local subreddit has the majority of locals calling landlords parasites. All that's missing is a vanguard that can organize and guide this sentiment.
the local subreddit has the majority of locals calling landlords parasites.
That's pretty rare. Most local subreddits are inhabited by landlords and landlord sympathizers.
why not start a tenant union? we founded one last year in my city from nothing, one guy organised a public meeting and advertised it on facebook/eventbrite and a few ppl came along, now we're a year old and growing fast.
I just wanna see a poll going over the percentage of outright communists someday (although tbh it would probably also have a selection for fascist that would have twice the percentage 
)
The cynic in me reads this as ~48% of youths want more libraries, but would still froth as hard as any boomer if you suggest union busting is wrong, or something cool like we should nationalize Amazon
I'm gonna BLOOOOOOOM 
This is a biased study.
A lot more don't support it.
Let me guess, a good 80% of them want nazism as the alternative. Don't they?