Heywood by the Numbers

Heywood’s list is a map of ideal types, not a census of American party loyalties. Although fascism is increasingly used as a label for the Republican Party or the MAGA movement, available survey evidence points to a much more differentiated ideological picture.¹

Almost no large U.S. survey asks people whether they “subscribe to liberalism, fascism, or ecologism” in Heywood’s doctrinal sense. What exists instead is a stack of proxies: ideological self-placement, favorability toward political and economic labels, religious identity, issue clusters, and Pew Research Center’s 2026 political typology. Those measures can establish broad orders of magnitude and patterns of overlap. They cannot produce a clean partition of the adult population into eleven non-overlapping ideological camps.

What the published data actually measure

Gallup’s 2024 ideological self-placement found 37% of U.S. adults identifying as conservative or very conservative, 34% as moderate, and 25% as liberal or very liberal.²

Pew’s 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study produced a similar result at the ideological wings: 33% conservative or very conservative and 24% liberal or very liberal.³

Party identification is a different measure: Pew’s 2026 National Public Opinion Reference Survey found 47% identifying with or leaning toward the Democratic Party and 43% identifying with or leaning toward the Republican Party.⁴

These are among the strongest repeated national measures of broad political identity, but they are not interchangeable with Heywood’s ideological categories. Much of what follows is therefore inference rather than direct measurement.

Pew’s June 2026 political typology is the best recent published substitute for Heywood-style clusters. It does not use Heywood’s names; it groups Americans according to responses to 30 questions about government, economics, immigration, elected officials and other issues.⁵

For this essay’s mapping, the four groups that most closely resemble ideological “anchors” are Leftward Progressives (7%), Loyal Liberals (11%), Faith First Conservatives (12%), and No Apologies Right (9%). Together they total 39%, not 38%. The remaining 61% occupy more mixed, pragmatic, disengaged, or cross-pressured combinations.

A note on evidence labels

This distinction matters because precise-looking percentages can otherwise imply a level of measurement that does not exist. The categories below therefore retain numbers where the evidence is direct or a reasonably transparent proxy and avoid false precision where no national survey measures the Heywood category itself.

Estimated size and reach of each Heywood category

The categories overlap. They are not slices of a pie and should not add to 100%.

Liberalism

Direct measure: roughly one-quarter of U.S. adults currently use “liberal” as a political self-description (24–25% in the Pew and Gallup measures above). Heywood’s classical liberalism—limited government, markets, civil liberty, individual rights—is a different construct and cuts across today’s liberal, moderate, libertarian and conservative populations. Gallup’s 2025 survey found 81% with a positive image of “free enterprise” and 54% with a positive image of “capitalism,” but those are market-attitude proxies, not a census of classical liberals.⁶

Conservatism

Direct measure: conservatism is the largest stable ideological self-label, at roughly one-third of adults (33–37%). Among Republicans, it is dominant: 77% described themselves as conservative in Gallup’s 2024 average. That is conservatism as Americans use the word—typically some combination of limited government, social tradition, national strength and skepticism toward rapid change—not a precise replication of Burkean conservatism.⁷

Socialism

Direct measure of favorability, not identity: Gallup’s 2025 survey found 39% of adults viewing socialism positively and 57% negatively. Democrats were the exception: 66% viewed socialism positively while 42% viewed capitalism positively; among Republicans, only 14% viewed socialism positively. Favorability toward the word “socialism” should not be converted into a 39% socialist population. Self-conscious socialist identity is plainly much smaller, but the available surveys do not justify assigning it a precise national percentage.⁸

Anarchism

No major contemporary national survey provides a defensible prevalence estimate for Heywood-style anarchism. Its electoral and organizational footprint is very small, and the safest description is fringe. Anti-state rhetoric on the libertarian right or radical left should not automatically be counted as anarchism in Heywood’s doctrinal sense.

Nationalism

Patriotism, national attachment and nationalism are not the same thing. Heywood’s nationalism ranges from civic nationhood to ethnic, cultural and religious forms. Pew’s cross-national work shows that Americans are sharply divided by ideology over whether birthplace, Christianity, language, customs and traditions are important to being “truly American.” That demonstrates the presence of competing conceptions of national identity, but it does not yield one defensible percentage for “nationalists.” Civic national attachment is broad; ethnoreligious nationalism is substantially narrower.⁹

Fascism

There is no serious published basis for treating fascism as a mass U.S. ideology, and there is no valid national survey that simply maps “fascist” onto Republican, conservative or MAGA identity. Surveys of adjacent extremist ideas sometimes find explicit support in the single digits; for example, a peer-reviewed analysis of the 2021 Baylor Religion Survey reported that 3.77% of all respondents expressed support for white nationalism. But white nationalism is not identical to fascism, and neither is conservatism. The defensible conclusion is that fascism, as Heywood defines it, is a fringe ideology in the United States; assigning a precise national percentage would imply measurement that does not exist.¹⁰

Populism

Populism is better understood as a political logic or style—“the people” versus “the elite”—than as a membership card. Pew’s Unconventional Right (12%) and No Apologies Right (9%) contain strong populist elements, while Left-Out Left also expresses anti-establishment attitudes from the other side. A working analytical range of roughly 15–25% for a concentrated populist core is plausible from those clusters, but it is not a published prevalence estimate; broader anti-elite sentiment is much more common.

Feminism

There is no single 2026 national census of people who “are feminists,” and equal-rights attitudes are much broader than activist or theoretical feminism. Gallup’s 2017–2024 averages found 40% of women ages 18–29 identifying as politically liberal, compared with 25% of men the same age. That helps explain why feminist positions are especially visible among younger women, but liberal identity is only a proxy and should not be relabeled feminism.¹¹

Ecologism (green ideology)

Concern about climate change is common; Heywood’s ecologism—especially ecocentrism, limits to growth and a comprehensive green political philosophy—is much narrower. Pew found in 2026 that 48% of U.S. adults said the Earth is warming mostly because of human activity. That is a direct measure of one climate belief, not of ecologism. The data support saying that environmental concern is a mass attitude while full green ideology is a much smaller political doctrine; they do not support a precise national ecologist percentage.¹²

Multiculturalism

Almost no one is asked to self-identify nationally as a “multiculturalist.” Support for diversity in the descriptive sense is not the same as Heywood’s political theory of cultural recognition or group-differentiated rights. Pew’s national-identity research shows substantial ideological polarization over assimilation, religion, birthplace, language and tradition. The safest quantitative treatment is therefore to locate multiculturalism primarily within left-liberal clusters rather than assign a precise standalone percentage.¹³

Religious fundamentalism

The best published proxies require careful separation. Pew’s 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study found evangelical Protestants at 23% of U.S. adults, while the specific “nondenominational fundamentalist” subcategory was about 1%. Evangelical identity is much broader than Heywood’s fundamentalism. For a political proxy, Pew’s 2026 “Faith First Conservatives,” at 12% of adults, is more useful: religion strongly shapes morality and voting in this group. That 12% should be treated as a close empirical proxy for a tightly religious-conservative political cluster, not as a literal census of fundamentalists.¹⁴

How the categories overlap

Overlap is the normal condition, not an exception.

Religious traditionalism and conservatism

This is one of the cleanest published overlaps. In the 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study, 59% of evangelical Protestants identified as conservative and 70% identified with or leaned toward the Republican Party; among White evangelicals, 80% identified with or leaned Republican. Latter-day Saints were similarly aligned: 56% conservative and 73% Republican or Republican-leaning. Pew’s Faith First Conservatives are 12% of all adults. The conclusion is asymmetrical: religious traditionalists disproportionately sit inside the conservative coalition, but the conservative coalition is much larger and contains many voters whose politics are not primarily church-centered.¹⁵

Liberalism, feminism, multiculturalism and ecologism

These currents overlap strongly on the left, particularly among Pew’s Leftward Progressives (7%) and Loyal Liberals (11%). For this essay’s mapping, those two groups—18% of adults—form the clearest left ideological anchor. Not every member holds all four doctrines, and issue agreement should not be mistaken for complete ideological consistency.

Socialism and liberalism

In the United States, “liberal” has absorbed much of the policy space occupied by social democracy elsewhere. Gallup’s 2025 result—66% of Democrats positive toward socialism, compared with 14% of Republicans—shows how common socialist sympathy has become inside the Democratic coalition. It does not show that most Democrats are socialists. Favorability, party identity and doctrinal identity remain different variables.¹⁶

Nationalism, populism and conservatism

The contemporary right is best understood as a braid rather than one ideology: Faith First Conservatives emphasize religion; No Apologies Right combines hard conservatism, nationalism and populism; Unconventional Right is more populist and less conventionally religious; Pragmatic and Polite Right is more institutional and less culture-war oriented. Trump-era politics strengthened the nationalist-populist strands without converting the entire conservative third of the country into those strands.

Fascism does not sit on top of conservatism in the data

The conservative self-label encompasses roughly one-third of adults, while explicit support for adjacent extremist labels such as white nationalism is far smaller in survey research. Those are different constructs. Collapsing conservatism, MAGA, white nationalism and fascism into a single category makes quantitative analysis less—not more—informative.

A compact picture of the main intersections:

• Conservative + religious traditionalist: Faith First Conservatives, about 12% of adults; the broader evangelical-conservative overlap is larger.

• Conservative + nationalist-populist: No Apologies Right plus part of Unconventional Right; roughly a 10–20% analytical band, not a direct survey category.

• Liberal + feminist + multicultural + green concern: the clearest left anchors are Leftward Progressives and Loyal Liberals, together about 18%, though individual issue combinations vary.

• Socialism-positive + Democrat: a majority of Democrats in Gallup’s favorability measure; socialist identity remains a smaller and unmeasured subset.

• Mixed / pragmatic / weakly ideological: 61% of adults lie outside the four anchor groups used in this essay’s mapping.

How coherent and informed are the political beliefs of adults under 30?

Some young adults can articulate highly systematic political worldviews; many cannot. That is not unique to the young. Philip Converse’s classic work on mass belief systems argued that ideological constraint is much weaker in mass publics than among political elites. The empirical question is therefore comparative: are younger adults, on average, less politically knowledgeable and less tightly attached to coherent ideological packages?¹⁷

Pew’s 2026 typology gives a clear snapshot of what younger adults believe, not how well they can explain it. Among 18–29-year-olds, 14% are Leftward Progressives and 19% Left-Out Left, compared with 9% Faith First Conservatives and 3% No Apologies Right. The group is shifted left, but it is also unusually dispersed: 14% fall into the Tuned-Out Middle and 12% into the Unconventional Right.¹⁸

On political knowledge, Pew found substantial age gaps even after sorting adults by overall civic and political engagement. Among highly engaged “Mobilizers,” 49% of adults ages 18–29 answered all four factual political-knowledge questions correctly, compared with 83% of Mobilizers ages 50 and older. Among the least engaged “Outsiders,” the corresponding figures were 20% and 53%. Similar age gaps appeared in every engagement group.¹⁹

News habits point in the same direction. In a 2025 Pew survey, 15% of adults ages 18–29 said they follow the news all or most of the time, compared with 62% of adults 65 and older. A separate 2025 Pew study found that 19% of adults under 30 did not regularly get news from any of the 30 major news sources it tracked—although younger adults are also more likely to rely on social media, podcasts and newer information sources not captured by that list.^20,21

Gender also matters. Gallup’s 2017–2024 averages found 40% of women ages 18–29 identifying as liberal versus 25% of men that age. “What young people believe” is therefore already at least two overlapping stories rather than one generational ideology.²²

None of this means young adults are irrational. It means that political intensity and political coherence are different things. Many people of every age hold moral slogans and issue bundles without a fully constrained belief system that specifies how the pieces fit together, which values take priority when they conflict, and what costs follow from each choice. Lower average political knowledge and lower news attention among younger adults make that problem more visible, but they do not make it uniquely youthful.

A useful rule is: intensity does not equal coherence. A 22-year-old can be passionately feminist, green and anti-nationalist and still be unable to explain how those commitments rank when they collide—for example, energy abundance versus degrowth, women’s spaces versus gender self-identification, or free speech versus multicultural harm claims. The same is true of a 22-year-old nationalist who cannot distinguish conservatism from populism, patriotism from ethnonationalism, or religious traditionalism from Christian nationalism.

Bottom line

The published data are good enough to support several conclusions, provided the distinction between direct measures and proxies is kept visible:

• Conservatism is the largest explicit ideological self-label, at about one-third of adults.

• U.S. liberalism is about one-quarter of adults by self-label.

• Socialism has substantial favorable sentiment, especially inside the Democratic coalition, but favorable opinion is not the same as socialist identity.

• Religious traditionalism overlaps conservatism strongly; Pew’s Faith First Conservatives, at 12%, are a useful tight-cluster proxy, while evangelical identity is much broader.

• Populism and nationalism are widespread as attitudes and political styles but narrower as comprehensive doctrines.

• Feminism, multiculturalism and ecologism are important currents on the left but are poorly measured as standalone mass identities.

• Anarchism and fascism are fringe ideologies in the United States; available survey evidence does not justify equating fascism with conservatism, the Republican Party or MAGA.

• Most Americans do not inhabit one Heywood box. They occupy intersections, and ideological coherence is incomplete across the mass public, not only among the young. For that discussion, learn why Philip Ernest Converse Is Famous for Discovering Ignorance.

Notes and Sources

1. Andrew Heywood, Political Ideologies: An Introduction, 7th ed. (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), whose chapters separately treat liberalism, conservatism, socialism, anarchism, nationalism, fascism, populism, feminism, ecologism, multiculturalism, and fundamentalism. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/political-ideologies-9781350928800/↩︎

2. Gallup, “U.S. Political Parties Historically Polarized Ideologically,” January 16, 2025. Gallup’s 2024 average was 37% conservative/very conservative, 34% moderate, and 25% liberal/very liberal. https://news.gallup.com/poll/655190/political-parties-historically-polarized-ideologically.aspx↩︎

3. Pew Research Center, “Religion, Partisanship and Ideology,” February 26, 2025, based on the 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study: 33% conservative/very conservative, 38% moderate, 24% liberal/very liberal. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/religion-partisanship-and-ideology/↩︎

4. Pew Research Center, National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS), conducted January 30–June 18, 2026: 47% Democrat/lean Democrat, 43% Republican/lean Republican, 10% refused to lean. https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/fact-sheet/national-public-opinion-reference-survey-npors/↩︎

5. Pew Research Center, “Beyond Red vs. Blue: The Political Typology,” June 10, 2026. Pew classifies adults into nine groups using responses to 30 questions; group shares are 7%, 11%, 12%, 18%, 9%, 11%, 12%, 12%, and 9%. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/06/10/beyond-red-vs-blue-the-political-typology/↩︎

6. Gallup, “Image of Capitalism Slips to 54% in U.S.,” September 8, 2025. Gallup found 81% positive toward free enterprise, 54% positive toward capitalism, and 39% positive toward socialism. https://news.gallup.com/poll/694835/image-capitalism-slips.aspx↩︎

7. Gallup, “U.S. Political Parties Historically Polarized Ideologically,” January 16, 2025. In 2024, 77% of Republicans described themselves as conservative, a Gallup high. https://news.gallup.com/poll/655190/political-parties-historically-polarized-ideologically.aspx↩︎

8. Gallup, “Image of Capitalism Slips to 54% in U.S.,” September 8, 2025. Overall: socialism 39% positive/57% negative. Democrats: socialism 66% positive, capitalism 42%; Republicans: socialism 14%. https://news.gallup.com/poll/694835/image-capitalism-slips.aspx↩︎

9. Pew Research Center, “What makes someone ‘truly’ belong in a country? Views differ on importance of language, birthplace, other factors,” January 28, 2025. The U.S. results show especially large ideological gaps over language, customs, birthplace, and Christianity as components of national identity. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/28/what-makes-someone-truly-belong-in-a-country-views-differ-on-importance-of-language-birthplace-and-other-factors/↩︎

10. Samuel L. Perry et al., “Not all Christian nationalists are White (and not all White Christians are Christian nationalists): exploring the predictors of Christian nationalism,” Frontiers in Social Psychology (2024). Using the 2021 Baylor Religion Survey, the authors report that 3.77% of all respondents supported or strongly supported white nationalism; this is an adjacent extremist measure, not a measure of fascism. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/social-psychology/articles/10.3389/frsps.2024.1465810/full↩︎

11. Gallup, “Exploring Young Women’s Leftward Expansion,” reporting 2017–2024 averages: 40% of women ages 18–29 identified as liberal, compared with 25% of men ages 18–29. https://news.gallup.com/poll/649826/exploring-young-women-leftward-expansion.aspx↩︎

12. Pew Research Center, “Americans on What Causes Climate Change: Human Activity or Natural Patterns?,” May 28, 2026. In the March 2026 survey, 48% said the Earth is warming mostly because of human activity. https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2026/05/28/americans-on-what-causes-climate-change-human-activity-or-natural-patterns/↩︎

13. Pew Research Center, “What makes someone ‘truly’ belong in a country?,” January 28, 2025. The analysis documents strong ideological differences in U.S. views of national identity and belonging. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/28/what-makes-someone-truly-belong-in-a-country-views-differ-on-importance-of-language-birthplace-and-other-factors/↩︎

14. Pew Research Center, 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study: evangelical Protestants make up 23% of U.S. adults and the “nondenominational fundamentalist” subcategory about 1%. Pew’s 2026 typology places Faith First Conservatives at 12% of adults. https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/region/united-states/ ; https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/06/10/faith-first-conservatives/↩︎

15. Pew Research Center, “Religion, Partisanship and Ideology,” February 26, 2025. Evangelical Protestants: 59% conservative and 70% Republican/lean Republican; White evangelicals: 80% Republican/lean Republican; Latter-day Saints: 56% conservative and 73% Republican/lean Republican. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/religion-partisanship-and-ideology/↩︎

16. Gallup, “Image of Capitalism Slips to 54% in U.S.,” September 8, 2025. Democrats were 66% positive toward socialism, compared with 14% of Republicans. https://news.gallup.com/poll/694835/image-capitalism-slips.aspx↩︎

17. Philip E. Converse, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” in David E. Apter, ed., Ideology and Discontent (Free Press, 1964). Converse’s classic argument concerns the weaker ideological constraint and organization found in mass publics relative to political elites. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780203723302-6/nature-belief-systems-mass-publics-1964-philip-converse↩︎

18. Pew Research Center, “The political typology by age,” June 10, 2026. Among ages 18–29: Leftward Progressives 14%, Loyal Liberals 9%, Left-Out Left 19%, Order and Opportunity Left 15%, Tuned-Out Middle 14%, Pragmatic and Polite Right 5%, Unconventional Right 12%, Faith First Conservatives 9%, No Apologies Right 3%. https://www.pewresearch.org/chart/the-political-typology-by-age/↩︎

19. Pew Research Center, “Older adults are more likely to correctly answer factual questions about politics across engagement groups,” July 16, 2026. Mobilizers: 49% ages 18–29 versus 83% ages 50+ answered all four knowledge questions correctly; Outsiders: 20% versus 53%. https://www.pewresearch.org/chart/older-adults-are-more-likely-to-correctly-answer-factual-questions-about-politics-across-engagement-groups/↩︎

20. Pew Research Center, “Young Adults and the Future of News,” December 3, 2025. In the August 2025 survey, 15% of adults under 30 said they followed the news all or most of the time, compared with 62% of adults 65 and older. https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2025/12/03/young-adults-and-the-future-of-news/↩︎

21. Pew Research Center, “How the audiences of 30 major news sources differ by age,” August 28, 2025. Nineteen percent of adults under 30 said they did not regularly get news from any of the 30 major sources in the survey; Pew notes that younger adults are more likely to turn to social media and newer information sources. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/28/how-the-audiences-of-30-major-news-sources-differ-by-age/↩︎

22. Gallup, “Exploring Young Women’s Leftward Expansion,” reporting 2017–2024 averages: 40% of women ages 18–29 identified as liberal, 15 percentage points above men the same age. https://news.gallup.com/poll/649826/exploring-young-women-leftward-expansion.aspx↩︎