On Sun 8 Feb, Ulhas Joglekar wrote:
> Why the US doesn't have a strong Left or social-democratic tradition?
Ulhas, does this mean you didn't like the answer I gave you back in November? Or was it unclear? If you want a short answer, just pick the paragraph you like best and ignore the rest.
From: Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> To: Ulhas Joglekar <joglekarulhas at hotmail.com> Subject: Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen Sozialismus?
> I read the transcript of Doug's interview on PBS and I was wondering why
> the US has not developed a strong social democratic movement in the 20th
> century? What's your take on this?
You probably know this is favorite old question. There was a famous book written in 1906 by Werner Sombart, a German political economist and economic historian, whose title is often used to name the debate: _Why Is There No Socialism In The United States?_ (by "socialism" he meant a social democratic labor party like the SPD). His most famous line was that socialism in the United Stated came to grief "on roast beef and apple pie" -- i.e., that American workers were paid a lot better than European ones, so had less impetus. They also had the vote from 1820 onwards, long before most other countries. But more crucial, as Sombart and everyone that came afterwards notes, was that there was no medieval history of feudal classes. Therefore there were no clearly stratified class cultures to hand down -- distinct ways of speaking and acting that you were born into -- which in European countries were passed into the new classes to give them both a much greater class consciousness. Manners were more eqaligarian and earning a living wasn't treated with contempt.
In addition, everyone also cites race and ethnicity. Under that we include the two great political compromises over blacks that marked both the constitution and post-reconstruction [Footnote 1], and the ethnic divisions that marked an immigrant nation. These latter were important not only as barriers to solidarity when compared to Britain, France or Germany (the three other countries that essentially constituted the 19th century working class, since during the formative 19th century 2/3rds of the human beings in the world who fell in that class lived in one of those four countries), but also because of regional alliances made necessary by the size of the country and the extent of local control. Urban immigrant machines, representing the northern working class, fell into alliance with reactionary southern planters to jointly oppose the national policies of northern industrial interests.
All of those things are true and they had effects. I would also add three more things to this usual litany.
One, I would emphasize the exceptional political system, namely that we don't have a parliament. Our implacable two party system discourages clearly defined ideological politics because it makes it impossible for parties based on them to start small and then grow.
Two, there was the political compromise that took shape between the national union federation and the government during the New Deal, WWII and the Cold War that started immediately thereafter. Essentially the unions legally gave up their right to have a direct voice in politics. And they vehemently purged themselves of radicals and communists who thought otherwise. In an alternate universe, it is possible to imagine the Democratic party becoming the labor party in the US during that period. Instead it became the New Deal party in which unions didn't have an institutionally privileged role. Although even in that alternative universe, if there had still been the same cold war, there couldn't have been an explicitly marist wing to such a party, so it wouldn't have been quite the same thing.
And, lastly there was the welfare state structures that grew out of the New Deal. The details are probably more than you want to know, but let's just say the American principle when subsidizing housing or health or education has been to maximize freedom of choice. The flipside is to minimize both visibility and solidarity. (We generally do everything through tax deductions rather than providing free services, so people often think thought they hadn't gotten any aid And this completely severed the visible connection between the labor movement and the welfare state. So not only did we not get as big a welfare state, but we didn't perceive the one we had. And so we didn't see any reason to be grateful to the labor movement for winning it for us. Nor see it as anything we needed to defend.
I meant to write a shorter answer. This is not only longish, but there's a huge footnote! I hope you don't mind. I think it pretty much answers it though.
[Footnote: The US civil war was 1861-1865. "Reconstruction" was the effort to revolutionize southern institutions after the abolition of slavery during the post-civil war period 1865-1877. Post-reconstruction is when that effort, vehemently resented, was abandoned, and a new system of "Jim Crow" laws were introduced that effectively prevented all black men from voting even though on paper they supposedly still had the right. This naturally has a deep effect on the politics available to the working class in the American South -- and thanks to the state-weighted Senate, this also effected the politics of the nation for the next century, until the Civil Rights Act finally gave blacks the vote. (Or gave it back to them -- they did have it for the 10 years of reconstruction, during which they elected lots of black legislators and white liberals. Which is exactly why the Southerners hated Reconstruction so much and fought so hard to kill it.)]
Michael