Which of the following was a reason for the failure of socialism to take root in the united states?

Why there has been no socialism in the United States is a subject that encompasses my career. It goes back to my doctoral dissertation which also became my first book, Agrarian Socialism. It was a study of the social democratic movement in Canada, then known as the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), more specifically in Saskatchewan, the province just above North Dakota. The party won election and held office there—and was as the first socialist party to do so in North America in a unit larger than a city. I was a young socialist, interested in why socialists could not make headway in this country. Since I then believed Canada was much like the U.S., I thought looking at how socialists had succeeded in Canada would tell much about what should be done here. I was wrong as I have since learned. (See Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada.) Canada is culturally different from the U.S., although it is also more similar than to any other country. One of its great novelists, Robertson Davies, once described Canada as “a socialist monarchy.”

I studied the CCF in Saskatchewan to learn about the factors that prevented socialist movements from succeeding in the U.S. I have continued that interest, although I have changed my politics. It led to my latest book, It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States, written with Gary Marks, a former student and research assistant of mine at Stanford, who is now a professor at the University of North Carolina.

The question, why has there been no socialism in this country, addresses American exceptionalism. Why is the United States the only industrialized nation that never had an electorally viable socialist or labor party? Every other developed country has had one to one degree or another. The fact that the U.S. has not means that it is different from other countries. The research question tackled by Werner Sombart in 1906 has produced a library of responses. There are many answers, but basically, two seem most important. The most salient interpretation is culture, involving assumptions that the American value system and the American concept of the nation are antistatist and egalitarian. It follows upon Tocqueville’s analysis of what America is about. Antistatism, the suspicion of the state in lawyers’ terms, has been a deep-rooted sentiment in American society ever since the Revolution and to some extent even before. This value, of course, was produced by history.

The Revolution was a revolt against a strong state. The founding fathers laid out a doctrine in the Declaration of Independence, which implied that the state is to be distrusted. And of course they drew up a constitution designed to avoid a strong government. As we know, it was and is marked by checks and balances, two houses, the presidency, and the Supreme Court. All chosen in different ways for varying terms of office, all have to agree to get things done. This makes it very difficult to enact important legislation. The Gingrich “revolutionaries” of 1994 did not understand this. They thought they were going to make major reforms. They did not understand that the system had been explicitly planned to prevent a revolution, that it is necessary to win election to three different bodies, elected for varying terms of office. The system has frustrated both the right and the left. Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, said it best: “that government governs best which governs least.” Our first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, was the closest to a libertarian constitution in this world. It did not provide for an executive. Congress was given the power to pass laws but there was no president. The heads of departments were to carry out the laws which civil servants administered. It obviously did not work, but the succeeding document of 1787, the Constitution, though intended to create a stronger government than the Articles, contained the Bill of Rights, which was designed to prevent an oppressive state. We often forget that from a comparative perspective the presidency is a weak office, not a strong one as compared with the prime ministership. Tony Blair or Jean Chrétien has much more power within his nation than Bill Clinton.

Political antistatism is reinforced or perhaps also caused by our unique religious institutions. They are exceptional, to reiterate the term Tocqueville was the first to apply to America. Christianity in this country is different from that in every other nation in the world. It is Protestant sectarian. European Christianity is church rather than sect. It is Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican or Lutheran. The characteristics of churches are quite different from sects. The churches have been state-related. They have supported the state and in turn, been supported by it. Tocqueville noted religion in America was much stronger than elsewhere, and explained that strength by the fact that it was a voluntary institution, and therefore that the denominations have had to constantly campaign for support. Sects are also congregational. They do not have bishops, archbishops or cardinals. Their founders insisted that parishioners should read and interpret the Bible, come to judgment themselves about what is right and wrong, but then are obligated to follow their beliefs. This has produced an emphasis on moralism and individualism, and a disdain for hierarchies and authority. The antistatism of the sects is not just a by-product of voluntarism; it also derived from their experience in Britain. The sects were “dissenters” and “nonconformists,” to use the British terms about them. They dissented from the hierarchical state church. They left Britain because the monarchy and the state church were persecuting them and consequently, they distrusted the state.

Clearly in the United States antistatism has both political and religious sources, which also fostered individualism, egalitarianism, antielitism and populism. These, of course, changed considerably over time. We now have a more statist polity and the religious composition of the country is somewhat different. The Great Depression introduced a “social democratic tinge” in America to quote Richard Hofstadter. Massive immigration brought large numbers of Catholics and Lutherans with a hierarchical state church background, as well as millions of Jews. The Catholics and Jews are communitarian and have helped undermine the individualistic self-help sectarian tradition. But the original cultural emphases on antistatism, individualism, egalitarianism, and populism have remained. A French Dominican, Father R. L. Bruckberger, who came here in the early 1950s, wrote in The Image of America that American Catholics have assimilated to Protestant norms, that European Catholics do not recognize them as fellow congregants, that they had become individualistic and moralistic.

Politics here still operates within a cultural context that makes it different than elsewhere. In Europe, conservatism has been statist, i.e., Tory. European conservatives believe in noblesse oblige, that the state and the privileged classes have an obligation to take care of the lower classes, of the poor. To use a term, in current use, Tories were and are compassionate conservatives. Two conservatives, Bismarck and Disraeli, fostered the welfare state. Harold Macmillan once defined Toryism as “paternalistic socialism,” not egalitarian, but paternalistic, traditional, elitist, aristocratic. As a Tory Conservative, he detested Margaret Thatcher for her lack of compassion. Thatcher, of course, is not a Tory; she is a classical liberal, a libertarian. She is very much an American in her sense of the good society. I heard her speak in these terms at the Hoover Institution last July. Clearly she is a Hayekian liberal, not a conservative. Her model society is the United States. In this country, as H. G. Wells wrote in 1906 and as Louis Hartz reiterated in the fifties, we have lacked two statist parties, conservatives and socialists.

The weakness of socialism and trade unions in America cannot be explained solely by reference to culture. National values and culture may raise the odds against statist solutions, but they cannot determine the outcome. Max Weber once said that history affects contemporary events the way loading the dice in gambling does. He used the analogy of a game in which the dice are unbiased at the start, but with every throw of the dice, they become weighted in the direction of previous outcomes. They become more likely to do so the next time, the third time, the fourth time, etc. Past events predispose to subsequent ones. This does not mean that the bias totally dominates future outcomes but it makes the chances of changing direction more difficult. Such a pattern helps to explain why statist efforts and proposals have been weaker here than in Europe and Canada (the country in which the American Revolution failed). The bias of history is in the opposite direction, in the latter.

In Europe, both the right and the left, the conservatives, Tories, and the social democrats, have been statist and communitarian. The classical liberals, the libertarians, have been squeezed between the two. They never dominated the values of any polity except for the U.S. The Republican Party is the only major libertarian party in the world, i.e., one that has a chance to hold government. (Canada may have one in the making.) The Democratic Party is obviously not libertarian (it was in the nineteenth century), but it is not socialist or social democratic either. With its most recent leader proclaiming, “The era of big government is over,” it has moved back in the antistatist direction.

There are of course, many other factors that have had negative impacts on the socialist efforts in the United States. Very important is the constitutional mandate that our national elections focus on filling one office, the presidency. Hence, party coalitions by diverse groups are almost impossible here. Unlike the electoral situation in parliamentary polities, everything is geared to the presidency: there can only be two viable major candidates for the job. Other nominees representing third, fourth, and fifth parties cannot win, and supporters, even if sympathetic, wind up voting for one of the two established parties. This process has happened recurrently. I used to think this was one of the biggest factors undermining the Socialist party’s efforts. Ross Perot changed my mind, when he received 19 percent of the vote in 1992. I suddenly realized that many more Americans have been willing to vote for a nonsocialist third-party presidential nominee than for the socialists. Robert La Follette, George Wallace and John Anderson were all third party nominees who received more than the Socialists ever did. The Socialists never secured more than 6 percent, and they did that only once, in 1912, and they got 2 percent or less in all other contests. Norman Thomas used to say that most of the people who preferred him did not want to waste their votes. But many more people have wasted their votes on Ross Perot, John Anderson, George Wallace, and Robert La Follette. The electoral system is clearly not an adequate explanation for socialist weakness, although there is no question that socialists and other third party candidates would have received more votes in another kind of system, the parliamentary contests which elected M.P.’s, not the President.

The failure of the trade unions to back the Socialists was a major source of the party’s weakness. The labor movement has been a major force in the creation and growth of social democratic parties in many countries. The fact that efforts to create labor parties did not succeed here contributed to the weakness of American socialism. From the 1890s on, Socialists tried hard to win over the American Federation of Labor (AFL), but though they always had some support within, it was never enough. The majority voted against them. But this failure was not due to the AFL members or leaders being conservative, as many writers on American labor conclude. They are wrong. The AFL was syndicalist, believing in more power for the workers through militant trade union action, not through the state. American unions before World War I had a much higher strike rate than the European, and engaged in violence to a much greater degree. The AFL’s 40-year-long president, Samuel Gompers, once when asked about his politics, replied “three-quarters an anarchist.” He was right; he did not believe in the state. He said that workers could only rely on themselves, that the state as an employer would be much tougher to deal with than a private owner. We also had a radical revolutionary leftist labor movement, the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World. The Wobblies were not socialists, they were anarcho-syndicalists. Both labor movements were antistate. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), founded in the thirties during the Great Depression, was different; it was social democratic, and linked to Roosevelt and the New Deal.

The Depression changed the country. The Democrats, the CIO, even major segments of the AFL, supported state action to deal with economic collapse, large-scale unemployment and mass poverty. But they had not become socialists. The New Deal fostered a large measure of statism, but not as much as the European social democrats did. As a result of the Depression-inspired policies, the United States today is much more of a welfare state than before the thirties, but much less so than Canada or Europe. Many Americans complain about high taxes. The Republican Party has made tax reduction one of its major issues. But the United States is the least taxed country in the west. The proportion of the GNP that goes to the government is lower than anywhere else. The Canadians, the British, the Swedes pay much higher tax rates.

Comparative public opinion research has inquired about the role of the state. The findings are consistent. Europeans and Canadians are much more likely than Americans to say that they favor state intervention to redistribute income, to pay for health care, to reduce or avoid unemployment, etc. The cross-national differences are not minute, the variations between American and European respondents often run between 20 and 40 percent. Although it is accurate to say that the United States has moved in a social democratic direction, the state still does much less here than elsewhere, and the American public does not want the gap closed.

If we look at changes in public policy and popular opinion since the 1970s, the United States has clearly become more libertarian, more supportive of a weak state, than at any time since the Great Depression. Presidents from Reagan to Clinton have sought to cut back on big government, to reduce social welfare, regulation and taxes. From a comparative standpoint, the political culture is more libertarian.

There are, of course, still other factors which have worked against the socialists. Ethnic and racial diversity, internal migration and immigration have hurt. Most workers before World War I were immigrants. The majority of the industrial and urban working class was Catholic. The church organized strongly and effectively to fight the socialists inside the AFL. The Socialists helped to provoke this opposition by their rejection of religion, a policy that reflected the party’s greater dogmatism, greater sectarianism, compared with parties in the English-speaking world and elsewhere. In Britain and Australia, for example, Catholics worked with the Labor parties and did not oppose them. The big issue for the Catholic Church in America was not socialist policies but religion. The American Socialist party was antireligious. Party members adhered to Marxism more than their comrades abroad. They constituted one of the most left-wing parties in the democratic world. Many European radicals from Lenin to Lafargue testified to this. And left-wing Marxism was irreligious. Consequently, the church, which favored trade unions and the welfare state, felt it had to oppose the American Socialists. In Britain and other English-speaking countries, many socialist leaders were religious, and Catholics could support their party.

Ethnic diversity, fostered by massive immigration of Catholics and Jews, contributed—as Marx and Engels themselves emphasized—to the difficulties of encouraging American workers to think in class terms, to back unions and labor class politics. Racial differences were less important before World War I since most blacks could not vote, but intra-class tensions across racial, religious and ethnic lines did not help. It should be noted the effects of immigration were more varied than I have indicated. Immigrants, coming here with socialist backgrounds, as many East European Jews, Germans, and Scandinavians did, continued to support unions and socialism. They created centers of Socialist strength in Milwaukee, Minnesota, and the East Side of New York. But historians of immigration, such as Marcus Hanson and Oscar Handlin, find that the large majority of immigrants opposed the socialists and were positively impressed by America. In general, their standards of living moved up, they had more freedom, and perhaps most important of all, there were greater opportunities for their children to be educated and to get ahead.

The economic factor in tandem with the social class system affected all Americans of course, not just the immigrants. Workers simply did better here than in Europe. Without going into detailed statistical comparisons, I would cite the second most important leader of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky. Trotsky and his family resided in New York City early in 1917. They lived in an apartment in the East Bronx. And twelve years later, Trotsky, after having led the Revolution and the Red Army, still could not get over life in the Bronx. He described, almost in awe, his experience of “an apartment in a workers’ district” in New York, in the East Bronx, where he and his family lived for two months in 1917. “That apartment, at eighteen dollars a month, was equipped with all sorts of conveniences that we Europeans were quite unused to: electric lights, gas cooking-range, bath, telephone, automatic service elevator, and even a chute for the garbage. These things completely won the boys [his children] over to New York.” Trotsky was reporting that American workers were living a European middle-class existence in consumption terms. He did not draw any political conclusions; he was just reporting the living standards of people in East Bronx, comparing them with those in working-class areas of Paris and Vienna.

More than a half-century later, another then-Communist leader, Boris Yeltsin, was overwhelmed when walking through a supermarket in Houston, Texas. As Leon Aron describes the event, Yeltsin went around asking people how much they earned, and how much they were spending on the week’s food supply, what percent the cost was of their income. He was told on average about twenty percent. He then flew from Houston to Florida. Someone on the plane noticed him sitting alone and crying, he was literally crying, saying repeatedly: “Our poor people, our poor people, what they did to them.” Like Trotsky, he was overwhelmed by the American cornucopia.

The politically relevant differences in class structures, in the situations of less privileged Americans and Europeans, have of course, reflected more than variations in economic circumstances. In discussing American egalitarianism, Tocqueville emphasized social relationships as well as opportunity and income. He stressed that Americans did not have to show deference to their status superiors, they did not have to bow down to them. Americans were brought up to feel equal to those who were wealthier or in more powerful positions. He pointed out that unlike the situation in Europe, dress and language did not call attention to social superiority or inferiority. People in the lower strata could and did aspire to move up the economic ladder. Marx, too, emphasized that the United States was a country in which the lower classes could realistically hope to better themselves.

There is considerable data bearing on social mobility which indicate that it has not declined. More opportunity for upward mobility is inherent in the changes in the technological and occupational structures. Manual and industrial work have declined greatly to about 15 percent of the economy. Professional, technical, white-collar positions have increased. There are more better and higher status positions, hence more upward movement.

There is, however, some agreement that income inegalitarianism has grown, that the gap between the higher income groups and the lower has increased. Interestingly, this conclusion has been challenged recently in an article in the British New Left Review by James K. Gailbraith and two economist colleagues who reviewed the published evidence. But whatever the “right” answer about trends in income inequality, there can be little question but that the differences in economic rewards between the summits and the lower levels, between the CEOs and those on the factory floor, is greater in the United States than in Europe and Japan. America inordinately rewards “stars” in Hollywood, in sports, and in business.

Why this difference, one that seems to challenge the assumption that our values emphasize egalitarianism? It may be hypothesized that the gap is a function of the American stress on achievement as opposed to ascription, inherited position. In post-feudal cultures such as Japan and Britain, greater emphasis on family background and aristocratic values, leads to a focus on the right group memberships, on proper behavior by the privileged strata. Stress on monetary reward is deprecated, is regarded as vulgar. The scions of the privileged are expected to serve in leadership roles, whether in politics and government, in the military, in the professions, in charitable organizations, and the like. Those in high positions are not given extraordinary salaries even in business. Aristocratic norms imply that summits are filled by the upper strata, and, therefore should not receive high incomes, salaries, for winning the race. Whereas in America, precisely because we stress competition and meritocracy, we believe that winners should be rewarded extraordinarily well. My analysis, which implies that egalitarian values, meritocracy, should foster greater income inequality than aristocratic norms, may seem like the opposite of common sense, but this is how it appears to me.

Social and economic factors apart, some blame the failure of socialists on the capacity of the American state, the polity, to repress radicals. There is a considerable literature describing and documenting the persecution, of socialists, anarchists, Trotskyites, Communists and trade unionists. There can be no arguing but that such actions have occurred. But looking at the issue in a comparative context, as Marks and I do in It Didn’t Happen Here conclusively reveals that leftists were subject to much more repression abroad, in Eastern Europe, in Wilhelmine Germany (the anti-Socialist laws), in France, Spain and elsewhere. But revolutionary movements prospered in these countries, and came out of repressive periods, stronger than ever. A nineteenth-century French revolutionary, Auguste Blanqui, developed the thesis that radical movements must deliberately try to force authority to be indiscriminately repressive, so as to lead the populace to support oppressed radicalism. Some, like Lenin himself, argued that democracy, freedom of organization action and the ballot, made it much more difficult for American socialists than for European. Lenin pointed out that Marxists in Russia, Germany, and elsewhere grew strong fighting for freedom of organization and the right to vote. In this country, the IWW, the civil rights activists, the student New Left of the ’60s, sought to provoke repression, to “fill the jails.” Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael and Carl Oglesby of Students for a Democratic Society, noted that suppression of demonstrations, and arrests, were good for the movement. Radicals under attack by the state, Anarchists, Socialists, Wobblies, Trotskyites, stood up for their rights, and used persecution as an argument for the cause. They insisted that they were entitled to free speech, free press, and argued for anarchism or socialism in and out of prisons and the courts. That is, all did this except for the Communists. The Stalinists undermined the radical cause and the struggle for civil liberties by never saying, in the face of repression we are Communists and proud of it, that the Constitution and democratic norms guarantee our rights. They never admitted they were communists. They lied, committed perjury, or took the Fifth Amendment.

Finally on this subject, I would note that Norman Thomas, the six-time candidate for President on the Socialist Party ticket, explicitly denied that he or his party had not been given their democratic rights. His predecessor as party leader and presidential candidate, Eugene Victor Debs, was arrested in 1918 and went to prison for a number of years for opposing World War I. Yet, Debs had almost insisted on being arrested, making increasingly inflammatory speeches until he was jailed. After finishing a talk in Canton, Ohio, he said “That should do it.” It did.

While repressive actions against radicals occurred through much of the last century, the record indicates that such violations of civil liberties, were most intense during war time, e.g., during World War I when the Socialist party opposed the war, and during the Korean War. In a war with Communist states, North Korea and China, Joseph McCarthy and others whipped up hysteria against Communist supporters of the enemy. The years of the Korean War, 1950 to 1954, were precisely the years of McCarthyism. In any case I agree with Norman Thomas that the failure of socialists cannot be blamed on repression, or other failings of democracy.

In this effort to answer Sombart’s question, “Why No Socialism in the United States?” I should note that part of the responsibility could be given to the American Socialists themselves. As various foreign Socialists, including Friedrich Engels, noted, the Americans were among the most left-wing radical, sectarian parties in the Socialist International. To give two examples, they refused to join with nonsocialist trade unions to create a labor party. They expelled members and leaders who successfully tried to have socialists contest within Democratic or Republican primaries.

Finally, I would note that American political exceptionalism is declining, not because of the growth of socialism here, but as a result of European left moving in an American direction. The socialist, social democratic, and labor parties of Europe have become more like the American Democrats. Ironically, it can be argued that this development is in harmony with an apolitical Marxist theory. Marx wrote in The Capital: “The most developed country shows to the less developed the image of their future.” The axiom set down by Marx was based on his assumption that the culture, the institutions, the politics of countries, the so-called superstructure, are determined by the basic or underlying structure, the level of technology or economic development. Hence, the culture of the most advanced, i.e., most developed, country, as determined by its substructure, will emerge in others as they industrialize or “modernize.” This meant for Marxists before 1914 that the U.S. would have a very strong socialist and labor movement, and would become the first socialist country in the world.

The Marxist logic underlying these generalizations implied that an industrializing capitalist society would result in a growing bourgeois (independent business) class and proletariat (or working class), whose class and social relations would generally result in class consciousness, an awareness of, and concern with class interests. The bourgeoisie would reject the old structure of monarchy and aristocracy and demand rule through a democratic system which they would dominate. The business classes would seek to reduce the power of the state, of mercantilism, seeking to remove monarchically imposed restrictions on trade. And according to the Marxist scenario, they fostered the liberal democratic revolutions, e.g., the American in 1776, the French in 1789 and those of 1848 and later. From the U.S. to France, to Western Europe, to Russia, to China, the revolutions were to be bourgeois democratic, before these nations could move to socialism. The more economically developed countries would come first, the less developed, e.g., Russia and China, subsequently.

Capitalism would produce a growing proletariat, a working class, which in conflict with capitalists, the owners of industry, would become class conscious and form unions and labor-socialist political parties. The social logic of industrial capitalism would demand this. Then as the proletariat became a majority, they would overthrow capitalism and create a worker dominated socialist society. Given these assumptions, Marxist logic demanded that the U.S. would have a mass socialist party, which would take office and create the first socialist society. The failure of the U.S. to live up to the schema worried Marxists before World War I. Many such as Kautsky, Bebel, Lafargue (Marx’s son-in-law), Maxim Gorki, all reiterated that the U.S. would be the first socialist country. Bebel, the leader of the German Social Democrats, said we would learn how socialism works from the U.S., this at a time that his party had one-third of the seats in Parliament (1912), and the American Socialists had one member in Congress.

Max Beer who worked for the Socialist International for over 30 years wrote in his autobiography, that in private meetings, European socialist leaders worriedly discussed what was happening or rather not happening in America. They understood that the weakness of American socialism raised questions about the very validity of Marxism. They were concerned that it meant that Marxism as a theory was wrong.

This discussion was ended by the Russian Revolution. A Marxist party came to power for the first time, but in a less developed, less industrialized country. This event also contradicted Marxism. It ran counter to what many Marxists, including the Russian Plekhanov and Lenin, had written. Prior to 1917, all Marxist theorists, except Trotsky, believed that the Russian Revolution would be bourgeois democratic, that only after Russia developed a capitalist economy and polity could socialists take the helm. This evolutionary pattern did not happen. When the Bolsheviks seized power, they thought it was an accident, an anomaly, brought about by wartime disruptions, which affected the Czarist Empire earlier and more severely than other countries. Lenin did not believe that the Bolsheviks could build socialism in Russia, if other nations did not make a revolution.

To return now to developments in the United States, socialism became even weaker. After World War II, the Socialist Party dissolved, the Communist Party remained minuscule, union membership declined. The economic system prospered, the United States remained the wealthiest, most productive, economy. Consumption levels, standards of living continued to increase. Today 67 percent of Americans own their homes, almost all have telephones, televisions, automobiles, 90 percent graduate from high school; more than half go on to universities. Social mobility remains high. America leads the technological, the computer revolution, and steadily creates many more new jobs than the entirety of Europe.

In most of Europe and Japan, economic growth has raised productivity and mass consumption to near U.S. standards. And with the spread of consumption and education, class tensions fell. Belief in and support for Marxist doctrines declined dramatically. The fall of Soviet communism served to conceal a development in western socialist parties, the end of their belief in and advocacy of socialism. Everywhere they have accepted the market and capitalism. The European social democratic governments have sharply reduced state ownership of industry, and cut back on corporate taxes. In 1995, Rudolf Scharping, a German Social Democrat leader and then chairman of the socialist fraction in the European Parliament, wrote “We have been wrong for 50 years,” in our economic policies. In Australia the Labor Prime Minister said the movement never understood that wages do not create jobs, only profits do. The policies of the Australian, New Zealand and Spanish Socialist and Labor governments in the eighties were described as “Thatcherite.” A month before the victory of the Labour party in the United Kingdom in 1997, Margaret Thatcher herself told an interviewer, “Britain will be safe in the hands of Mr. Blair.” The Socialist International has been succeeded by “The Third Way,” in which the Democratic Party (the D.L.C. not the left) and the Liberal Party represent the United States and Canada. After the last British election a City banker noted that “politics is no longer capitalists versus socialists, it is now Democrats against Republicans.” Though Europe still has a much stronger welfare state than America, there is no socialism there, either.