The Harvard Public Opinion project ran an experiment. HPOP asked half of the respondents questions about –isms such as, “Do you support socialism?” In all, HPOP asked about socialism, capitalism, progressivism, patriotism, feminism, and social justice activism. The other half of respondents got similar questions like, “Do you identify as a socialist?”
On the whole, young Americans are reluctant to support causes. Only patriotism garnered net support, with 57 points and the remaining -isms ranged from a midpoint of 49 percent to a low of 33 percent.
Even more so than supporting causes, young Americans don’t like to identify with them. While 57 percent of respondents support patriotism, only 31 percent identify as patriots. In fact, Millennials are more likely to support the least popular cause (socialism) than they are to self-identify as members of the most popular cause (patriotism). This suggests an overall reluctance to commit to an ideology.
Some of this reluctance comes from bona fide diversity of opinion. After all, there usually is a limit to how united any group of people will be. In the Harvard Public Opinion Project’s Spring 2016 Poll, respondents are most united by their disapproval for Republicans in Congress (76 percent) and unfavorable views on Donald Trump (74 percent). We can think of these numbers as the current maximum proportion of young Americans who can gather behind a single cause.
Another chunk of this reluctance comes from partisan differences. Take feminism as an example: while only 49 percent of young Americans support it, that figure jumps to 70 percent among liberals and drops to 34 percent among conservatives, carving a 36-point rift between the groups. This large split between the groups limits how much overall support feminism gets among young Americans.
However, ideology doesn’t always explain low support numbers. In the case of patriotism, the gap between liberals and conservatives is still 12 points. So, even when accounting for natural limits on support and partisanship, young Americans are far less united behind a range of causes than they could be.
It isn’t clear what the implications of this reluctance are for the coming presidential race. For one, young Americans don’t seem enthusiastic enough to play a large role in the election. And those who do vote, questions of labels and –isms may not play a role at all. After all, 54 percent of young Americans view Bernie Sanders favorably even though they generally oppose supporting socialism. One of the safe conclusions we can draw from that data is that questions of identity are far from straightforward for young Americans. So when writers argue that Hilary Clinton has to appeal to identity politics or that Donald Trump represents white identity politics, their arguments may not be as black and white for Millennials.