Here’s a stunning fact I had missed: According to a Rasmussen poll released last week, 37 percent of Americans under age 30 prefer capitalism, 33 percent prefer socialism and 30 percent are undecided.

This is unprecedented in American history. See Harold Meyerson’s column on it in the WaPo.

Meyerson argues that twenty-somethings’ view of socialism is no longer poisoned by the Soviet Union, old history of which they know little. To them it either means European social democracy, which they see as positive, or it’s something the Rush Limbaugh Republicans are foaming at the mouth over, accusing Obama of promoting, which must mean it’s good. So to them it means socially oriented capitalism, as in Europe or Obamaland, capitalism plus universal health insurance, not an end to the market, to private ownership or profit.

Maybe there really is a chance to go back to the root of socialism, before it meant state control of the economy, or some kind of anti-democratic rule. A biographer wrote of Keir Hardie (1856 – 1915), founder of Britain’s Labour Party:

The moving impulse of Keir Hardie’s work was a profound belief in the common people. He believed in their capacity, and he burned with indignation at their unmerited sufferings. He never argued on the platform the economic theories of socialism. His socialism was a great human conception of the equal right of all men and women to the wealth of the world and to the enjoyment of the fullness of life.

A quote from Hardie himself:

I have said, both in writing and from the platform many times, that the impetus which drove me first into the Labour movement, and the inspiration which has carried me on in it, has been derived more from the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth than from all other sources combined.