I'd like to hear your response to Shane's question: what about East Germany?
SA
^^^^^ CB: Given they "had" Nazism, they were pretty backward or had a large section of their population who had fallen way backward from their democratic and republican experiences, or rejected the advanced thinking that might have developed from those experiences.
Americans have had a bourgeois democratic republic for more than two hundred years, much longer than Germany had had, and the US population don't act ready for socialism.
In both countries, the "advanced" bourgeiosies developed special anti-Communist, anti-Marxist, anti-socialist cultural, educational and propaganda systems to counter the natural tendency of the democratic histories to create socialist consciousness in the working class.