Pew Research has terrifying poll results measuring the willingness of various Americans to curtail free speech that might be ‘offensive’ to minorities.
We asked whether people believe that citizens should be able to make public statements that are offensive to minority groups, or whether the government should be able to prevent people from saying these things. Four-in-ten Millennials say the government should be able to prevent people publicly making statements that are offensive to minority groups, while 58% said such speech is OK.
Even though a larger share of Millennials favor allowing offensive speech against minorities, the 40% who oppose it is striking given that only around a quarter of Gen Xers (27%) and Boomers (24%) and roughly one-in-ten Silents (12%) say the government should be able to prevent such speech.
Among the findings:
- Non-whites are more likely (38%) to support government prevention of such speech than non-Hispanic whites (23%).
- Nearly twice as many Democrats say the government should be able to stop speech against minorities (35%) compared with Republicans (18%).
- One-third of all women say the government should be able to curtail speech that is offensive to minorities vs. 23% of men who say the same.
In other words, among the widest swings in position are non-white, female, Democrats.
Meanwhile, in a piece on “Bernie Sanders’s New Deal Socialism”, Jedediah Purdy writes:
The new eagerness to embrace the word reflects the climate that a Pew poll captured, in 2011, when more respondents between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine reported a positive view of “socialism” (forty-nine per cent) than “capitalism” (forty-six per cent). (Gallup polls regularly find that a slim majority of Democrats express a positive view of socialism, but an overwhelming majority supports “free enterprise,” suggesting, charitably, some ideological flexibility.) Those under-thirty respondents are, of course, the first voters of the post-Soviet era, whose formative experiences are of a not very heroic unipolar world of American power and market-oriented ideas. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire put the word “socialism” up for grabs again: it may have landed in the dustbin of history at first, but that left it free for scavenging and repurposing.
