After my colleague, Clay Routledge, and I published our op-ed in the Chicago Tribune, we got to thinking about why the support for terms like “capitalism” is falling, even when support for free markets is quite high across all Americans.
In Profectus Magazine, an online magazine that is a part of Archbridge Institute (our employer), we published a piece (with a very cool graphic that our team always does a good job of doing for these pieces!) building on this idea.
The full piece can be read in the link above, but I’ll summarize our main ideas here:
Despite the overwhelming track record that free markets have in reducing poverty and expanding opportunities, public support for the word “capitalism” is eroding in the United States. Gallup data show favorable views dropping from 61% in 2010 to 54% in 2025. People across the country still support the underlying principles (free enterprise, small business, entrepreneurship), but the word “capitalism” surveys much worse. This suggests that the problem is more about branding and psychology than substance.
We see three compounding reasons to explain this:
Lay economic reasoning: everyday people reason about markets differently than economists. They are more likely to rely on zero-sum thinking about transactions. Humans spent most of our history in small societies with no specialization, investment, or economic growth. Perhaps our intuitions about economics are still largely wired for this new economic world. And this is not to diminish non-economic experts. This means that those of us who are experts in economics need to do a better job in making our case.
Conceptualization problem: many define capitalism to be different than what it actually is. In a survey of college students, when asked to define capitalism, about 25% chose “a system in which businesses use political connections and government favoritism to gain unfair advantages at the public’s expense.” But that’s cronyism, not capitalism. If that is the definition that many use, then the lack of support for that system is by no means a mystery. This again goes to framing. We instead should fight against real cronyism when it appears (and it won’t take long to find such cases…), as well as work to make the distinction clear.
Political polarization has turned economic labels into tribal identity markers, deepening confusion on both sides of the aisle. While easy, it’s not accurate to solely focus on people on the left’s growing hostility to capitalism. The fact that many Republicans support the term does not necessarily mean they understand or support the free market principles it describes.
We argue that rehabilitating the term requires working with people’s moral intuitions rather than against them, framing markets as cooperative and positive-sum, distinguishing genuine free enterprise from cronyism, and building on the broad cross-partisan consensus that already exists around entrepreneurship and economic freedom as a shared American identity.