Over the past few years, there has been a deluge of popular accounts announcing that many Americans, especially young Americans, are not only fed up with capitalism but also broadly supportive of the once feared S-word: socialism. According to a 2021 Fortune/SurveyMonkey poll, 42 percent of Americans have a positive perception of socialism, jumping to 55 percent among Americans aged eighteen to thirty-four. Concretely, this shift in popular support has manifested in the election of multiple self-described socialists to important local, state, and national political offices; the exponential growth of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA); and increasing social movement activism and labor organizing.

However, it is one thing to have a positive perception of socialism and quite another to make the jump to identifying as a socialist. If DSA’s membership numbers are any indication (growing from around 7,000 in 2016 to nearly 100,000 in 2021), it is likely that socialist identification has increased in the United States. Unfortunately, no contemporary major survey of Americans actually bothers to ask respondents if they identify as socialist — much less what socialist-identifying Americans actually think. Instead, American surveys typically stick to the liberal-conservative, two-dimensional scale of political ideology. Are you “very liberal” or “somewhat conservative”? This, it is alleged, encompasses all meaningful ideological variation among Americans.

There are many reasons to be skeptical of relying on the liberal-conservative scale. First, despite the well-worn narrative that Americans are becoming more ideologically polarized, the empirical findings on polarization are, at best, mixed. I imagine that the reader would be surprised to discover that a majority of Republicans, despite their supposed conservatism, support stricter gun laws, believe that income inequality in the United States is too high, favor increases in the minimum wage, and believe that “the government in Washington ought to see to it that everyone who wants to work can find a job.” Supermajorities of Americans — and I’ve always thought of this as the best-kept secret in the social sciences — support a broadly redistributive political agenda, far further to the left than even the most liberal Democratic politician would deign to consider implementing.