Socialism? Voted a Negative in the American Vocabulary

Socialism? Voted a Negative in the American Vocabulary

The word "socialism" has certainly been making its biggest comeback in U.S. political rhetoric since labor leader Eugene Debs peaked at about 900,000 votes as the presidential candidate of the Socialist Party in 1920 (even though he was in prison at the time), or a few decades later when President Dwight Eisenhower famously repeated a charge that Republicans had started making during the New Deal when he said, "in the last 20 years creeping socialism has been striking in the United States."

Now, the conversation is mostly about whether President Obama is pushing the country towards socialism (52 percent said he was in a recent New York Times/CBS News poll). Glenn Beck did a here's-the-facts-you decide broadcast last month headlined "Barack Obama? Socialist." Newt Gingrich expounded on examples of the socialist tendencies of Obama and congressional Democrats in a Washington Post column.

Whether the public believes Obama and Democrats are practicing it or not, Beck, Gingrich and others are on to one thing: "socialism" comes out high on the list of words Americans don't like.
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A Pew Research Center survey conducted April 21-26 asked Americans their reactions to a list of political buzzwords, and "socialism" placed second among the word phrases viewed most negatively with 59 percent not liking it compared to 21 percent who regarded it positively.

(The word that drew the most negative response was "militia" which 65 percent viewed negatively and 21 percent viewed positively).

Unsurprisingly, Republicans had the most negative reaction to "socialism" with 77 percent disdaining it. Sixty-four percent of independents shared that view. Democrats were split with 44 percent regarding it positively and 43 percent negatively.

Americans split on what they thought of "libertarianism" with 38 percent giving a positive response and 37 percent a negative one. "Capitalism" was endorsed as positive by 52 percent and labeled as negative by 23 percent.

"Progressive" did well across party lines, so it's a question of how those surveyed interpreted the word. Overall, 68 percent saw it as positive compared to 23 percent who described their reaction as negative. Fifty-six percent of Republicans were in the positive camp as were 81 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of independents.

The most positively-regard words or phrases were "family values," "civil rights," "civil liberties," and "state's rights," in that order.