A shocking, new survey has found that U.S. Millennials are more likely to want to live in a socialist rather than a capitalist society.
A recently released poll and report by YouGov and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that 42 percent of young Americans would opt for a capitalist society, with 44 percent choosing socialism.
These statistics mean that Millennials are “the leading force” behind a sway toward socialism, with an additional 7 percent opting for fascism and 7 percent preferring to live under communism.
Among Americans overall, 59 percent would choose capitalism, 34 percent would choose socialism, 3 percent would opt for communism and 4 percent would like to live under fascism.
The report speculated that one of the reasons for the divide between Millennials and the general public could be that more than half — 53 percent — of Millennials believe that the economy works against them.
Millennials are also the least likely to have a very unfavorable view of communism, with just 36 percent expressing this perspective compared to 56 percent of the nation overall.
Still, though, more Millennials than in the 2016 wave of the report now believe that communism is still a modern-day problem, with 65 percent embracing this paradigm, up 10 percent when compared to last year’s numbers. Overall, 75 percent of respondents said that communism was and still is a problem.
But despite these statistics, it appears many Millennials — and Americans more broadly — have a hard time pinning down the definitions of socialism and communism. In fact, the YouGov report reads, “7 in 10 Millennials (like Americans as a whole) either don’t know the definition of communism or misidentify it.”
The definition of communism reads, “Socioeconomic order structured upon the common ownership of the means of production and the absence of social classes, money and the state.”
A whopping 69 percent of American respondents got this definition incorrect.
Meanwhile, socialism is defined as follows, “Economic and social systems characterized by social ownership and state control of the means of production, as well as the political theories, and movements associated with them,” with 66 percent getting that definition incorrect.
Read the full survey results here.