American Exceptionalism Part 3: Why Americans rejected Socialism

In a speech delivered on October 2, 2000, the great American sociologist, Seymour Martin Lipset explained “Why Socialism Failed in the United States.”  He writes, “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?” He argues that the main reason for rejecting socialism is that our culture has always been “antistatist.” Not only was the American Revolution a revolt against a strong state, but our founding system of government, enshrined in the Constitution, was based on both federalism and a system of checks and balances which made it difficult for the government to get anything done.  After all, Thomas Jefferson once said, “That government governs best which governs least.”

According to Lipset, the governmental design found in the constitution was reinforced by America’s unique religious institutions. Churches in America are quite different from their European counterparts, where, for the most part, there exists a state church, be it Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican or Orthodox. On the other hand, American Protestant churches are largely based on the dissenting churches of the Reformation. They are congregational and non-hierarchical. Despite the waves of immigration of Irish, Italians, Jews and Eastern Europeans, all of whom brought a more communitarian version of the church, “the original cultural emphases on anti-statism, individualism, egalitarianism, and populism have remained.” So much so, Lipset says that, “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.”  

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that politics in America is different from politics in Europe. Even Europe’s conservatives supported statist solutions.  In Germany and Britain, two Conservatives, Bismark and Disraeli fostered the welfare state. The traditional anti-statist parties, the Liberals, have all but disappeared from Europe. Historically, European politics has been a contest between Christian Democratic Parties and Socialist-Labor Parties. However, even the Christian Democrats favor a strong government role in social policy and were supportive of the welfare state.

Finally, American labor unions never backed socialism. They were more interested in expanding their own power than in getting what they wanted for workers through the state.  According to Lipset, “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 Depression changed the country. Roosevelt fostered a number of statist programs such as social security and food stamps, but not as much as the European Social Democrats did. The post-war expansion of the welfare state in such areas as health insurance, welfare programs, and affordable housing, did not change the prevailing ideology against statism.

American ethnic diversity made it difficult for Americans to think in “class” terms. Because of the frontier, it was always possible for the working classes to set off on their own and build their lives unconstrained by the forces of capitalism. Americans were also better off than their European counterparts. Lipset quotes at length the experience of 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.”

Conclusions.  The failure of socialism to gain traction in the United States can be explained by several important historical reasons:

• The U.S. has always been anti-statist as demonstrated by both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.
• Churches in America were primarily congregational and anti-hierarchical; the absence of a state religion (prohibited by the First Amendment), reinforced the anti-statism of the Founders.
• From its beginnings, America was a classless society socially; workers never paid deference to a non-existent aristocracy.
• Americans, divided by ethnicity and race, never conceived of themselves as made up of economic classes; class was not part of their history nor the way they viewed themselves.
• The presence of the Frontier served as a safety valve for wage-workers and gave credence to the American Dream of social and economic mobility.
• American workers were better off than their European counterparts and thus less likely to embrace socialism.
• The American labor movement concentrated on strengthening unions against capitalists and saw strong unions as the best path to higher wages and workers’ rights, rather than trying to get control of the state.
• The Great Depression led to the expansion of the “welfare state,” serving as a pressure valve providing the American working class with a number of benefits within the structure of the American economy.

With the rejection of socialism, America developed a politics of limited government and limited social welfare assistance. The Republican Party is the 21^st century equivalent of 19^th century liberals in Europe. The Democratic Party more closely resembles the 19^th century conservative parties of Disraeli and Bismark. Thus, political parties and politics in America are much to the right of politics and political parties in Europe.

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