By Matthew Continetti
Saturday, May 25, 2019
The United States of America has flummoxed socialists
since the nineteenth century. Marx himself couldn’t quite understand why the
most advanced economy in the world stubbornly refused to transition to
socialism. Marxist theory predicts the immiseration of the proletariat and
subsequent revolution from below. This never happened in America. Labor confronted
capital throughout the late nineteenth century, often violently, but American
democracy and constitutionalism withstood the clash. Socialist movements
remained minority persuasions. When Eugene V. Debs ran for president in 1912,
he topped out at 6 percent of the vote. Populist third-party candidates, from
George Wallace in 1968 (14 percent) to Ross Perot in 1992 (19 percent) have
done much better.
Keep this in mind when you read about the rebirth of
socialism. Yes, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are household
names. Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has spiked
since 2016. Forty percent of Americans told Gallup last month that “some form
of socialism” would be “a good thing for the country.” Media are filled with
trend pieces describing the socialist revival. A recent issue of The Economist devoted the cover package
to “Millennial socialism.” The current New
Republic includes four articles about “the socialist moment.” In March, New York magazine asked, “When did
everyone become a socialist?”
That question tells you more about the editors of New York than the country itself. As
Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute has observed, views toward
socialism are stable. In 2010, 36 percent of respondents to the Gallup poll had
a positive view of socialism. In 2018 the number was 37 percent. In 2009, 23
percent told the Fox News poll, “Moving away from capitalism and more toward
socialism would be a good thing.” In 2019 the number was 24 percent. Fifty-four
percent said it would be a bad thing. Gallup found that less than half of
America would vote for a socialist candidate.
Socialism is in vogue because no one is sure what it is.
The classic definition of abolishing private property, a planned economy, and
collective ownership of the means of production no longer applies. More people
today believe that socialism means “equality” than “government control.” Six
percent told Gallup that socialism is “talking to people” or “being social.”
The same Gallup poll that found 40 percent of the public has a positive view of
socialism, however you define it, also discovered large majorities in favor of
the free market leading the way on innovation, the distribution of wealth, the
economy overall, and wages, and smaller majorities for free-market approaches
to higher education and health care. Americans are very bad socialists.
And socialists know it. That’s why their most prominent
spokesmen frame their domestic agendas in the language of the welfare state and
social democracy, even as they celebrate, excuse, or defend socialist
authoritarians abroad. Sanders told NPR in March, “What I mean by democratic
socialism is that I want a vibrant democracy.” Okay, then — who doesn’t? The
following month he told Trevor Noah that socialism “means economic rights and
human rights. I believe from the bottom of my heart that health care is a human
right. . . . To be a democratic socialist means that we believe — I believe —
that human rights include a decent job, affordable housing, health care,
education, and, by the way, a clean environment.” But this is not so different
from FDR’s conception of the “four freedoms.” So what differentiates Sanders
from a New Deal Democrat?
The less prominent socialists are somewhat more specific.
Article II of the constitution of the DSA, to which Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida
Tlaib belong, states: “We are socialists because we share a vision of a humane
social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic
planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial equality, and non-oppressive
relationships.” That is closer to the traditional definition of socialism — a
definition that implies a set of institutional arrangements that inevitably
would limit freedom of choice.
“Our task is formidable. Democratic socialists must
secure decisive majorities in legislatures while winning hegemony in the
unions,” writes Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of Jacobin
magazine, in his Socialist Manifesto.
“Then our organizations must be willing to flex their social power in the form
of mass mobilizations and political strikes to counter the structural power of
capital and ensure that our leaders choose confrontation over accommodation
with elites.”
Good luck with that. Before they seize control of the
unions — which represent a paltry 11 percent of U.S. workers — today’s
socialists will have to overcome the same barriers that thwarted their
predecessors. Nowhere has “American exceptionalism” been more evident than in
the fact that the United States has been the only country without a major
socialist, social democratic, or Communist party. The articles celebrating the
rise in DSA membership to more than 40,000 fail to mention that there are tens
of millions of Republicans and Democrats. Socialist politicians, activists, and
theorists neglect the shaggy-dog history of their persuasion in the United
States. The historical examples in Sunkara’s book are almost entirely drawn
from Europe. It’s as if history began with Sanders’s candidacy in 2016.
In fact, socialists have recognized the difficulty they
face in the United States for over a century. In 1906 the German sociologist
Werner Sombart devoted a monograph to answering the question, Why Is There No
Socialism in the United States? Sombart noted the comparatively high and rising
standard of living of American workers. “On the reefs of roast beef and apple
pie,” he said, “socialistic Utopias of every sort are sent to their doom.”
American workers had won political rights earlier than
their European counterparts, making them less likely to conflate civil rights
with economic benefits. America’s liberal culture emphasized social mobility.
The staggering racial, ethnic, and religious diversity of America made
class-consciousness almost impossible. As Max Beer, an Australian socialist of
the early twentieth century, wrote,
Even when the time is ripe for a
Socialist movement, it can only produce one when the working people form a
certain cultural unity, that is, when they have a common language, a common
history, a common mode of life. This is the case in Europe, but not in the
United States. Its factories, mines, farms, and the organizations based on them
are composite bodies, containing the most heterogeneous elements, and lacking
stability and the sentiment of solidarity.
When it comes to preventing socialism, diversity really
is our strength.
The two-party system marginalizes small, independent
parties and accommodates rising tendencies and programs within preexisting
electoral coalitions. Most important of all, the Constitution decentralizes and
diffuses power, making it extremely difficult to expand drastically the power
of the state in the name of social justice.
In 1967, Daniel Bell offered an additional explanation
for the weakness of American socialism: “At one crucial turning point after
another,” he wrote in Marxian Socialism
in the United States, “when the socialist movement could have entered more
directly into American life — as did so many individual socialists who played a
formative role in liberal political development — it was prevented from doing
so by its ideological dogmatism.”
All of these various obstacles remain in place. In
January, Gallup found that 77 percent of Americans are happy “with the overall
quality of life in the U.S.” Sixty-five percent are satisfied with the
“opportunity for a person to get ahead by working hard.” Fifty-three percent
like the “influence of organized religion.” We have the best employment
situation in half a century. Real disposable income continues to rise. Last
year the Congressional Budget Office reported that all Americans have enjoyed
an increase of post-tax income since 1979. “It’s doubtful that most Americans
would prefer to revert to the world as it was in 1979,” wrote Robert Samuelson,
“a world without smartphones, the Internet, most cable television, or
laparoscopic surgery,” and with the Soviet Union.
The United States is far more heterogeneous than it was
40 years ago. The success of identity politics and “woke capitalism”
underscores the difficulty of making the sort of class-based appeals Sanders
learned at meetings of the Young People’s Socialist League. Americans put their
familial, racial, ethnic, and religious attachments ahead of membership in an
income or occupational group. Besides, some 70 percent of America considers
itself middle class.
One of the reasons the socialist and socialist-curious
candidates in the Democratic primary have been arguing against the Electoral
College and for expanding the Supreme Court is they understand the challenge
the Constitution poses to their dreams. The type of centralization and
bureaucratic administration socialism requires is incompatible with a system of
federalism, checks and balances, and enumerated powers. Fortunately, structural
change is extremely difficult in our vast and squabbling country. It was meant
to be.
The self-defeating tendencies toward radicalism and
sectarianism are also visible. Expanding government to provide more resources
to the poor is popular; eliminating private and employer-based insurance is
not. Protecting the environment and reducing carbon emissions is popular;
abolishing air travel and declaring war on cows is not. More money for teachers
is popular; freezing support for charter schools, as Sanders called for this
week, is not. DSA member Doug Henwood writes in the New Republic of a split emerging within the organization between
“Bread and Roses” and the “Socialist Majority Caucus.” The narcissism of small
differences has doomed such movements in the past.
Note also that Sanders has faded in recent weeks after
Democratic voters encountered a viable non-socialist alternative in Joe Biden.
Ocasio-Cortez’s favorability is underwater. Medicare for All polls well with
voters in the abstract — when they assume it means simply more of the current
Medicare program — but support falls as soon as they hear about the conformity
and control it will entail.
The good news is America contains antibodies against
socialism. As Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks wrote in 2000, “Features of
the United States that Tocqueville, and many others since, have focused on
include its relatively high levels of social egalitarianism, economic
productivity, and social mobility (particularly into elite strata), alongside
the strength of religion, the weakness of the central state, the earlier timing
of electoral democracy, ethnic and racial diversity, and the absence of feudal
remnants, especially fixed social classes.” The title of Lipset and Marks’s
book is It Didn’t Happen Here. And as
long as we uphold and defend the political and cultural elements that make
America exceptional, it won’t.
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