> I think it's a broader class interest
> in keeping American workers weak,
> scared, and dependent.
And replied:
> Doesn't even Doug's explanation presume
> a bit too much organised self-
> consciousness of the US ruling class?
Good question. I don't have serious empirical evidence to answer it. So I'll just speculate.
What is the mechanism that would induce the U.S. ruling class to "keep American workers weak, scared, and dependent"? The usual thought is that the mechanism needs to be competition. If one looks at competition alone, an individual capitalist is supposed to care only about returns. They'd rather have someone else -- the workers, other capitalists, others -- pay for his and his workers' health care. The worst situation would be when he has to pay for his and others' health care.
In-between would be the public provision of health care out of tax revenues... to which this individual capital would have to contribute some "fair share." This wouldn't be terrible for an individual capitalist, as long as all capitalists (and preferably the workers) shared the burden "equitably." From this point of view, they may not resist public health care, but they don't have many reasons to help it either.
That said, individual capitalists ponder, not only what other individual capitalists may or may not do, but also *what workers may or may not do*. And not only their workers. The ghost of the united workers is not far from their thoughts. I'm sure individual capitalists make at least some of their decisions on the basis of their expected effect on the workers. The behavior of a capitalist is not described by profit maximization in the abstract. Capitalists also look at the big picture, from their standpoint of course. Ideology, the social norms of the class codify all this and are unquestioned parameters in their behavior.
Anti-communism is deeply rooted in the worldview of the U.S. ruling class. Through the National Review, WSJ, Fox, BusinessWeek, MSNBC, Fortune, Forbes, etc., U.S. capitalists tend to absorb a world-view and culture in which keeping the workers down, fragmented, disunited (couched as an insistence on the need for labor flexibility, low labor costs, etc.) is like breathing.