The Statist Temptation. - Review - book review

It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States, by Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks (Norton, 379 pp., $26.95)

Almost twenty years ago, just as Francois Mitterrand's Socialists were about to come to power with the promise of "Bread and Roses," I was sitting in a Paris auditorium listening to a debate on the question, "Why is there no socialism in America?" Today the better question might be, "Why is there no socialism in Europe?" but at the time the question that had haunted generations of American and European intellectuals was still on the table. The speaker was Seymour Martin Lipset, a tall, stocky, enormously learned middle-aged man whose very presence seemed to annoy the audience of young left-wing academics. But when Lipset explained that socialism in America had failed in large part because the distinctly American and liberal principles on which the country was founded were shared by Whigs and Democrats as well, the audience became positively apoplectic. One of the New Leftists could barely contain himself and whispered loudly enough for everyone to hear, "Enough of this dinosaur." Lipset was unruffled, but I was dismayed. He had laid out a strong case, and I wanted to hear a response that met the argument on its own terms. It turns out that there is no effective reply-and today it's the New Left that's extinct.

Now Lipset and his coauthor, Gary Marks, have elaborated on Lipset's persuasive argument with It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States. The question is worth going over once again precisely because arguments once made for socialism will reappear in new forms in the coming years.

The intensity of the clashes between American workers and capitalists during the industrial strikes of the late 19th century made it appear that socialism was on the horizon. Indeed, the German sociologist Werner Sombart thought it axiomatic that the United States, as the most advanced industrial country, should be leading the way to socialism. The problem, as the European socialist Max Beer explained, was that the United States was a "living contradiction . . . of Marxian theory," a contradiction that generated enormous anxiety among socialists. Trotsky, who briefly lived in the Bronx with his family in 1917, provided an answer of sorts when he explained that their apartment "in a workers district" 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 [his children] over to New York."

Was socialism defeated by affluence? Lipset and Marks aren't sure, although it is clearly one piece of the puzzle. In a dense and detailed but clearly developed series of chapters, they reason their way through all the primary explanations for why the U.S., alone among the industrialized countries, didn't develop a strong and enduring socialist movement. Here are some of the key explanations they dismiss:

The absence of a feudal past. Americans were, in a sense, born free. The absence of feudalism and the ready availability of land meant that almost everyone held the property needed to be a voting citizen. By contrast, so the argument goes, European socialist parties fastened onto the struggle to secure the voting franchise. But, as Lipset and Marks explain, this is not a sufficient answer, since Australia also enjoyed mass suffrage from the start and nevertheless developed a strong socialist party.

Federalism. Some, such as political scientist Theodore Lowi, argue that American federalism is the explanation. Federalism fragments authority and makes the individual units vie against one another, a competitive arrangement uniquely hospitable to capitalism. But Canada is also federalist, and the socialist New Democratic party that currently governs Saskatchewan has long been established as the country's third major party.

Repression. Some point to the repression of the Socialist party for its antiwar stance in World War I. But countries such as Germany, Spain, and Chile, which did far more for much longer to suppress their socialist parties, all have strong left-wing parties today.

Lipset and Marks argue that what makes the U.S. exceptional is not the absence of class but the fact that class conflict was not expressed in politics in the form of a workingman's party. This was partly due to the difficulty third parties have always had in establishing themselves in our first-past-the-post political culture. (Contrast this with countries like Italy and France, where systems of proportional representation have given socialist-and Communist-parties a foothold.) More fundamentally, the authors argue that the American social system, which expressed the fundamental values of individualism and antistatism, was inimical to socialism. They quote, as Lipset did in Paris, from Seth Luther, a leader of the Massachusetts shoeworkers, who in 1832 grounded his argument for social equality not on Jacobin radicalism but on the fact that, according to the Declaration of Independence, "all men are created equal."