Summary of Lipset: Why no socialism in the United States -- Adam Brown, BYU Political Science

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Lipset: Why no socialism in the United States

Disclaimer. Don't rely on these old notes in lieu of reading the literature, but they can jog your memory. As a grad student long ago, my peers and I collaborated to write and exchange summaries of political science research. I posted them to a wiki-style website. "Wikisum" is now dead but archived here. I cannot vouch for these notes' accuracy, nor can I say who wrote them.

Lipset. 1977. Why no socialism in the United States?. In Radicalism in the Contemporary Age, eds. Seweryn Bialer and Sophia Sluzar, vol 1. Boulder: Westview Press..

In Brief

Lipset reviews what socialists say about socialism in America. Originally, Marx and Engels expected the most industrialized, advanced capitalist state to be the first to face social dilemmas and succumb to socialist revolution. When Russia caught everyone off guard (an agrarian, underdeveloped state leading the way toward socialism), Trotsky and others then began to suspect that America would be last, citing some of the same reasons Marx and Engels used.

See below for the reasons.

Why No Socialism: Two Main Answers

Answer 1: American society (sociological, economic, and political aspects).

A new society, without a feudal, class-stratifed past
Ideological empasis on equality, liberty, egalitarianism makes it hard to persuade Americans that they need socialism. US already emphasizes equal opportunity
Mobility: either move West, or fill a job vacated by somebody else who went West

Answer 2: Factors internal to the various radical movements in the U.S.

Too diverse (too many languages, since most workers were immigrants in late 1800s-early 1900s). Also racial divide (working whites didn't cooperate with working blacks)
Rapid economic growth: Workers better off in real terms than Europeans
Electoral rules favor two parties; primary system helps these parties absorb fringe factions (think FDR--he led a coalition of society's downtrodden). Harder for a third (socialist) party to emerge.

Research by the same authors

Lipset and Rokkan: Party systems and voter alignments

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Hochschild: What's fair (6 shared tags)
De Tocqueville: Democracy in America (5 shared tags)
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McCloskey and Zaller: The American Ethos (5 shared tags)
Smith: Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz (5 shared tags)
McCloskey and Brill: Dimensions of tolerance (3 shared tags)
Schlozman and Verba: Unemployment, class consciousness, and radical politics (3 shared tags)
Sniderman and Hagen: Race and inequality (3 shared tags)

Tags

Lipset, Seymour Martin (author) • American Politics • American Exceptionalism • Socialism • Culture • Public Opinion • Political Values

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