Support for socialism is growing in the United States, but what voters believe could be a system that rewards ordinary people with more power could end up reducing their quality of life and handing the Trump administration more control, experts say.A recent CBS News poll shows 58% of Democrats view socialism positively, compared to just 32% of Democrats who say the same of capitalism. Favorability toward socialism among Democrats rose from 50% in 2010 to 66% in 2025, according to historical data tracked by Statista. The view is particularly on the rise among young people, who will hold the power in both parties down the road. A CNBC poll with Generation Lab published in August found that nearly half of all Americans ages 18 to 34 have a favorable or very favorable view of socialism. Prominent socialist-styled leaders such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) have framed the system in terms of human dignity, arguing it marks the expansion of basic rights they believe include housing, healthcare, and education. The system promotes economic fairness that targets “corporate greed” and those they believe hold unnecessary wealth, they say.
“No American should be too poor to live,” according to Ocasio-Cortez.When pressed to define socialism in the CBS News poll, respondents most frequently referenced government control or government ownership. Respondents tended to emphasize more of the outcome they believe socialism brings, rather than the working process of how the system is implemented. By its dictionary definition, socialism is “a theory or system of social organization that advocates the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, capital, land, etc., by the community as a whole, usually through a centralized government.”Leading socialists in the U.S. have framed their proposals as ones that will return “power to the people,” denouncing the “extreme concentration of power” they believe an oligarchy holds in the U.S.Experts told the Washington Examiner that in practice, officials in Washington would have more control over issues ranging from artificial intelligence to healthcare if socialism were implemented at the federal level in the U.S. In areas like healthcare, President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would have more say over “who gets what type of medicine and where,” Adam Michel, the director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute, said during an interview. When it comes to the free housing, healthcare, and education that socialists push for, Michel said, “You can believe those things, and even want them for everyone.” But implementing that vision would necessitate “lots of centralization of power.” “What people mean when they say socialism … most of them are just hearing like, do you like good things, which is different than the sort of academic notion of the state has taken over or is the primary owner of all of the organizations that produce the things that we need for life,” Michel said. “It necessarily comes with controlling people’s personal lives and decisions … When you’re talking about the ideal, you don’t have to deal, you don’t necessarily have to confront all of that actual sort of machinery of implementation.” Dr. Gary Wolfram, the director of economics at Hillsdale College, agreed. When the DSA talks of “collectively owning the key economic drivers,” there has to be some entity that makes those decisions, “and that’s going to be the government,” he said. “How else would it be all collectively? We wouldn’t all get together and make a decision,” he said. “I mean, even if the state of Michigan got together and decided ‘oh yeah we’re going to build this,’ everybody in the state of Michigan would all get together and decide how big the data center is going to be, how much electricity can it use, right? So you couldn’t do that.” The root of why some people gravitate toward socialism and others toward capitalism lies in a fundamental difference in what they believe to be fundamental rights, Michel said. Capitalism operates on “positive rights,” generally found in the Constitution, that include the right to your personal property, the right to your person, and the right to be free from other people’s infringement on your freedom of speech or on your freedom of movement. Socialism operates on “negative rights,” or the right to be free of something or be provided something by someone else. “My right to health care is then dependent on someone providing it to me,” Michel said.
