Somebody: I agree about the political prospects, but I wonder if sometimes the left doesn't exaggerate the stakes at all. After everything's said and done, the gap between the U.S. and Sweden isn't that great. American life expectancy and mortality rates are a bit worse than they should be (say life expectancy could be 80 instead of 78), economic inequality is a little higher than the industrialized world's average, but these aren't world-historical differences.
If a revolution promised to make up the gap between the U.S. and say France today, we'd say it was a modest affair indeed. I'm dismissing the possibility of thorough-going socialist revolution here, frankly, because no socialist country has ever attained living standards higher than the imperialist West.
Actually, what strikes me about American politics is that *despite* the overwhelming weakness of organized labor, the lack of social democratic, let alone socialist, values in the working class, indeed the absence of working class identity period, the bourgeoisie has not utterly crushed the mass of the population underfoot. Even with cuts looming, there is still social insurance of a sort, there is still public education however under threat, and most of all, there is still the continued improvement in living conditions inherent in the development of the productive forces.