Page 47 - American Conservative September/October 2015

Why America Isn’t Socialist
by SAMUEL GOLDMAN
The Socialist Party of America: A
Complete History, Jack Ross, Potomac Books, 824 pages
efore it became a favorite trope of Republican presiden- tial candidates, “American ex- ceptionalism” belonged to the
left. The phrase referred to the United States’ puzzling divergence from the pattern of development proposed by Karl Marx. According to Marx, powerful socialist movements or la- bor parties should arise in advanced economies as workers recognized the opposition of interests between them- selves and capital. Why did this fail to occur in America?
Jack Ross is the latest to raise this question, joining an honor roll of intellectuals including Friedrich En- gels, Werner Sombart, H.G. Wells, Daniel Bell, and more recently Gary Marks and Seymour Martin Lipset. His book—ostensibly a history of the Socialist Party of America (SPA), which existed formally from 1901 to 1972—reconsiders the successes and, mostly, failures of socialist organiz- ing from the end of the Civil War up to the present. Ross argues that the fundamental error of American socialism was its leaders’ refusal to build a political party on a founda- tion of unions and agricultural asso- ciations, as was done in Britain and Germany. The resulting split between labor and politics condemned the SPA to marginality.
Resisting the social and cultural approaches that dominate academic historiography, Ross argues that the main obstacle to American social- ism was bad decisions taken by pro- fessional activists in conventions or meeting rooms. In Ross’s view, a terrible precedent was set in 1896
when the Populist Party endorsed the Democrat William Jennings Bryan rather than nominating Eugene Debs as its candidate for president. Debs then took his followers into the So- cial Democratic Party, a direct ances- tor of the SPA, as a dissenting rump. Although it enjoyed electoral success in a few regional strongholds, the SPA would never really get established at the national level.
As the story proceeds into the 20th century, Ross blames sinister forces for pushing the socialist movement toward cooperation with the two-par- ty system. Reversing the conventional interpretation, he associates this “con- servative” tendency with the Com- munists. Usually remembered as the radical wing of American socialism, Ross presents them as its collabora- tionist “right.”
This vision was appealing to the Northern European immigrants, theologically liberal Protestants, and skilled workers who were central to America’s socialist movements before the First World War. But it was anath- ema to those self-styled radicals who took their cues from The Communist Manifesto. For enthusiasts of the early Marx, war and imperialism were ac- tually desirable because they hastened the final crisis of capitalism and pro- moted economic rationalization.
Leon Trotsky was the seminal theorist of this position. During his sojourn in the United States in early 1917, Trotsky mocked American socialists as petit bourgeois dream- ers who thought socialism could be achieved by winning elections and who opposed American entry to the First World War. He believed the true
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 47
Because Ross
pays little atten-
tion to ideas and
proceeds chrono-
logically rather than
analytically, it is not
easy to understand
the basis for this characterization.
Apparently it rests
on the observation that leading figures in the SPA were less enthusiastic about the centralized state than we might ex- pect socialists to be. Drawing on the Jeffersonian tradition, they envisioned a socialist America as an economic de- mocracy embodied by cooperative en- terprises and local government rather than a centralized bureaucracy.
These Jeffersonian socialists knew from the experience of the Civil War that military conflict has centralizing and bureaucratizing consequences. They also recognized that overseas expansion was a recipe for permanent militarism. So anti-imperialism, if not outright pacifism, was an impor- tant part of their socialist vision. In a phrase Ross repeats throughout the book, they wanted America to be a re- public, not an empire.
Before it became a favorite trope of Repub- lican presidential candidates, “American exceptionalism” belonged to the left.
road to socialism lay in temporary support for elected governments un- til a tiny cadre of militants could seize control of the vast powers already consolidated in the state apparatus.
Ross argues that this strategy of boring from within explains the fail- ure of the Socialist Party after World War I. A strong showing in the 1920 presidential election demonstrated the SPA’s resilience in the face of un- precedented harassment by the Wil- son administration. But the SPA was hobbled by the defection of Commu- nists to their own party and by the in- ternal influence of doctrinaire Marx- ists who saw the best opportunity for promoting socialism in cooperation with the Democrats.
Most historians present the Popular Front of the 1930s, which combined