‘The view among European socialists was that the US was an outlier, and in a bad way’

Adam Smith is Edward Orsborn Professor of US Politics & Political History at the University of Oxford

Marx and Engels could never quite decide whether the advanced development of capitalism in the United States would make it more or less susceptible to socialist revolution. Might the relatively wide franchise and availability of land make hierarchies based on the accumulation of capital intolerable, or would it hamper the development of class consciousness? By the early 20th century, the general view among European socialists was that the US was an outlier, and in a bad way. The German sociologist Werner Sombart’s 1906 book asked Why is there no socialism in the United States? Sombart concluded that ethnic divisions fatally weakened the development of class consciousness.

In the 1920s, US communist leaders passed a resolution stating that, because American capitalism was so strong and the nature of its political system so distinctive, it would take much longer for a socialist revolution there than elsewhere. The US, they claimed, was not susceptible to the laws of history as laid out by Marx. For this ‘heresy’ they were denounced by Stalin, who held the orthodox Marxist-Leninist doctrine that there were general rules of historical development which should apply equally everywhere in all societies. In the early years of the Cold War, when there was a premium on asserting the underlying consensus that characterised American history, the Harvard political scientist Louis Hartz argued that there was no ideological space for ‘isms’ since the US, with no feudal past, was ‘born free’. Another answer is that state authorities in the US were more willing to use violence to suppress labour unrest than their European counterparts.

A pedantic response to the ‘why no socialism’ debate is that there has always been socialism in America – during the New Deal era levels of tax and government intervention mirrored trends elsewhere. But what the question meant, more narrowly, was why an American equivalent of the British Labour Party or the German SPD did not develop at the end of the 19th century. The answer to that, though, is why should it have done? Rather than being a story of American exceptionalism, perhaps the better question is to examine the circumstances of those European societies where it did develop.

‘There is one notable exception: the military’

Susan-Mary Grant is Professor of American History at the University of Newcastle

American hostility to socialism is often more asserted than assured. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2022 36 per cent of Americans polled regarded socialism positively compared to 57 per cent who preferred capitalism. This may not be surprising. The US was founded on the principle of all men being created equal, but grew economically and geographically on the basis of racial and class inequalities.

This deviation from its founding ideals prompts a perennial circling of the contradictions at the heart of the American Dream. The ethnic, class and racial tensions of the Gilded Age ushered socialism into mainstream politics via the Socialist Party of America (1901). The party was not, however, driven to right racial alongside economic wrongs. The imperative to do so, given the immutable link between the two, was highlighted by Martin Luther King who, in the year before his death, spoke of ‘two Americas’, one which was ‘overflowing with the miracle of prosperity’, while in the other ‘millions of work-starved men walk the streets daily in search of jobs that do not exist’. It was, King noted, ‘much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee a liveable income and a good, solid job’.

Integration, indeed, may be the nub of the problem as far as hostility to socialism is concerned; not just racial integration, but the bridging of social and economic divisions in a nation that has, since the Puritans first brought their rigorous branch of religious morality to America’s shores, traditionally equated success with salvation. From Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack to Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick, the rags to riches recipe is still deemed infallible, but reliant on individual skill and effort. State intervention of any kind is perceived as problematic, state welfare provision especially so.

There have been few occasions where it has been attempted without conservative challenge – Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, for example. But there is one notable exception: the military. From the Revolutionary War onwards, the provision of state support for service personnel, veterans and their families makes the American military as close to an integrated welfare state as is possible in a nation hostile to socialism in principle, but prepared, when national security is at stake, to implement at least some elements of it in practice.

‘The perceived ineluctability of socialist gain was a worry driving America’s Cold Warriors’

Zachary Jonathan Jacobson is the author of On Nixon’s Madness: An Emotional History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023)

A struggle between a world ordered by capitalism or communism spanned from Chile to Angola, from Greece to Vietnam during the second half of the 20th century. American ‘Cold Warriors’ had nightmarish visions of ideological toxins spreading from state to state. Willing to support authoritarian regimes, the US maintained itself as a bulwark against what it saw as a growing socialist revolution.

When asked why socialism let alone communism had not made greater gains in the US, Irving Howe retorted: ‘How could [the labouring class] all stay in the same party – the stolid social democrats of Wisconsin with the fierce syndicalists of the West, the Jewish immigrant workers of New York with the inflamed tenant farmers of Oklahoma, the Christian socialists with the orthodox Marxists?’ Howe grew discouraged at a movement simply too diffuse to coalesce. The nature of the US made ethnic loyalties and geography too great an obstacle for a party to unite.

But Howe’s analysis made an assumption. He presumed that, if not for the curious blend of American life, a socialist movement would have flourished. And similarly, an assumption in the question is that a socialist movement would have coalesced in the US by now if not for (fill in the blank). The framing of the debate sets the ‘hostile’ US as exceptional for not taking up socialism whereas states in Europe serve as an implicit model for a more ‘regular’ course of historical progress. The first principles of Marx’s understanding of history are taken for granted: that labouring sorts will consciously and instinctively unite due to their common woe. That if not forestalled, socialists will seize the means of production; that if not so divided and petulant, Americans would embrace the working-class cause.

Curiously, the perceived ineluctability of socialist gain was a worry driving America’s Cold Warriors. They feared that if not for America’s stand against the ‘Red tide’, state after state would fall like dominoes to communism. They, too, took for granted an inherently attractive pull in the promises made by a socialist revolution.

‘US anti-communism proved far more powerful than Washington’s commitment to anti-colonialism’

Vincent Bevins is the author of If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (Headline, 2023)

In the United States, deep ideological commitments and self-interested realpolitik combined to create a potent – and very often deadly – opposition to anything that could be considered vaguely socialist. But the vehemence of US anti-communism did not arise from one cause alone.

According to Eric Hobsbawm, the very ideas of nationhood and subjectivity in the US can be ‘virtually defined as the polar opposite of communism’. The US is a settler colony recognising no feudal, collective or pre-liberal traditions, and the individual has always reigned supreme. From the nation’s beginning, the very thing that made a man count as a free individual was private property.

From 1917 – and especially after the end of the Second World War in 1945 – the Soviet Union emerged as a challenge to US power and influence. This was still true even in the (many) moments that Moscow had no interest in conflict with Washington. As Odd Arne Westad put it, the Soviet Union provided an ‘alternative modernity; a way poor and downtrodden peoples could challenge their conditions without replicating the American model’. The more this path appealed to people around the world, the more it seemed rational for the US government to act to block it. As a result, a historically rare and dangerous combination emerged in which powerful state officials could further their own interests by acting on some of their most profound unconscious biases.

As it became the world’s strongest power, leftist leaders such as Ho Chi Minh and Sukarno hoped for good relations with Washington. They assumed that America’s historical commitment to anti-colonial revolution would be more powerful than its commitment to anti-communism. They were wrong. In the second half of the 20th century, mass murder was employed against leftists and perceived leftists in more than 20 countries as military juntas and death squads relied on varying levels of US support to execute far more innocent people than the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries did in the same period. US hostility to socialism did not end at its own borders.