Let’s do a thought experiment.
Close your eyes and imagine you’re a youtuber making political explainer videos.
Okay, don’t actually close your eyes or you’ll miss that gorgeous, premium stock
footage and, actually, don’t imagine being a political youtuber either or you’ll fall
into the deepest, most inescapable pit of sadness.
You know what?
Just let me imagine it for you.
Let me imagine that it’s been almost two years since you made a video about the American
political spectrum.
It’s your second most popular episode since the rebrand but it’s a measly 7 minutes
and 26 seconds and you just had so many more things to say, but let’s be honest, you
were kinda scared.
You were a scared little man.
Let’s imagine your intern is writing all of this and it's starting to hurt your feelings
so we should really move on.
Now, would you remake that video, but this time allowing yourself to take a big dive
in the deep end?
Humph.
No.
Of course not!
You’re better than that!
Welp, I’m not.
On this week’s episode, we’re looking at the American left in an international context
and answering the question “why did socialism never really take root here?”
Let’s talk about the American left first.
When we talk about the left in this country it’s important to know who that is, and
for this episode, we mean the elected left, so really just the Democratic Party.
There’s a whole list of small parties and groups, each with its plot of land on the
political spectrum’s left-wing, but since they occupy next to no major elected positions
and primarily operate through influence, they don’t make for a very robust analysis of
American electoral politics.
So with all that in mind, we’re really just going to talk about the blue team.
Democrats are the center-left party in the US.
Look, that’s what it says right here on Wikipedia!
But, oh no, when you plot their voting records and party discourse on the political compass,
the completely neutral, absolutely zero bias, omnipotently objective metric of what politics
are, you don’t get a center-left party.
You get a center-right party.
How come?
The issue here is that left and right are relative terms.
There is no objective left or objective right that holds true in every scenario and can
reliably be attached to a certain set of policies across all of time and space.
What is considered radical and progressive is constantly updated as political battles
evolve and, by the same token, what is considered conservative or reactionary changes when the
left succeeds in making its goals mainstays or the right reaches further back into the
past for its political program.
This basically means that in a country with only two viable parties you’re going to
get one party that calls itself the right and one that calls itself the left regardless
of where their parties end up on your political grid.
They can’t both claim to be on the same side so those labels end up being about which
team you like better, not some marker of absolute truth.
So then why does the compass look like that?
Even if you disagree with its methodology, the reason that the political compass maps
prominent American politicians so uniformly to the right, with really just one big, centrist,
exception (hey you!) is because it’s trying to generalize the political spectrum beyond
the limits of the United States and assess our politics relative to those of comparable
countries, mainly other Western liberal republics.
And compared to other Western countries, the United State’s Democratic Party is a center-right
party.
It’s the party of economic liberalism.
Okay, let’s look at the 2017 manifesto for the British Tory Party, the conservative wing
of Britain’s own two-party system.
Get ready to clutch your pearls, because there is some scary, downright hedonistic communist
nonsense in there.
Take a look at what the manifesto says:
“We do not believe in untrammeled free markets.
We reject the cult of selfish individualism.
We abhor social division, injustice, unfairness and inequality.
[...] We will run public services in accordance with their values as important local and national
institutions.
We will not only guarantee but enhance workers’ rights and protections.
And we will develop our ambitious modern industrial strategy to get the economy working for everyone,
across the whole of our nation.
[...] We believe in the good that government can do”
Good God!
Lock them up!
Put them in commie jail!
Do something!
Who even uses “untrammeled”!
Oh god, why did I do a British accent?
Those words come from the British right wing, and even though most of this is pretty shameless
lying, the fact that this is the way they’re selling their political program tells us a
lot about where the left and the right stand in one of Western Europe’s more conservative
countries.
Reining in capitalism, providing social services, empowering workers, these are common sense,
bare minimum mainstream policies that even a right-wing government can’t justify denying
its citizens, at least not explicitly.
And look at the Labour Party, they’re also labeled center-left (look at Wikipedia!).
They’re the main political opponent to the Tories and when you plot them on the political
compass they end up remarkably close to our well-loved and always-treated-fairly-by-Fox-News,
definitely communists we have here in America.
Labour’s middle-ground proposals that convince around half the nation include ensuring continued
and supported access to their nationalized healthcare system, reaching net-zero carbon
emissions by the 2030s, and the nationalization of key industries.
These are policies that never make it to the outer left reaches of the Democratic Party
and are solidly in the mainstream left for the UK, barely qualifying as socialism there
and in most other Western European countries for that matter!
Not to mention countries where social democracy is even more well established and these policies
are boilerplate centrism, or countries and areas that aren’t as comparable to the US
but where communist or socialist governments are fully established.
If comparison to a relatively centrist, conservative government makes the US look so right-wing,
what is there to say about explicitly left-wing places around the world?
But if policy-by-policy comparisons aren’t really your vibe, this view of the EU Parliament
communicates essentially the same idea.
The dark red group is communists.
The lighter red color is socialists, and even though they, the greens to their right, and
the communists to their left end up promoting mostly social democratic, not outwardly socialist
politics in the short term, the ideological grounding they all draw from is largely anti-capitalistic,
Marxist literature, and they are explicit about transcending social democracy over time
and creating broad class consciousness in their electoral body.
The left in Europe is just more left than the one we have here and it actually gets
a spot at the table, albeit within an otherwise economically liberal institution and within
social democratic limits.
By contrast, liberal mainline US democrats would probably end up in one of the blue groups
around or just to the right of the center, with only a few figures within the party overlapping
with the center-left side of the chamber.
“What’s up with that?”
you’re now pondering while I subtly redirect the topic of this video.
“How come Europe gets all that and I get not one crumb of economic democracy?”
Well, there are a couple reasons.
If I did the classic youtube explainer video thing, focusing on just one of them and pretending
like it explained the whole question, you’d probably hurt my feelings in the comments.
And I don’t like that sort of thing.
So there’s a couple reasons labour politics never took root in America in any major way
and none of them fully explains it on its own.
Instead, they all overlap and reinforce one another, leading us to the place we are today
with two ostensibly right-wing parties, of which only one has a tiny subcurrent with
a somewhat left-wing political program.
For starters, I should acknowledge that there is a substantial current of socialism in America
today just like there has been at various times in history.
The DSA and communist parties like the CPUSA have had record recruitment in recent years,
socialism has broad approval among younger generations, and political parties that represent
some version of a socialist agenda have successfully shaped local politics and in a few cases have
gained electoral success.
Back at the start of the 20th century, socialist parties won several elections locally and
nationally, a socialist candidate (Eugene V. Debs) managed around 6% of the national
vote in a presidential election and, although isolated and very limited in number, communes
structured around loosely socialist principles have existed around the country at various
points in its history, not to mention other important figures in the American socialist
movement like MLK.
Despite this, no major reformist or revolutionary socialist party has ever appeared the same
way it has in many countries the US shares a common history with.
Why?
One big reason is our electoral system.
The electoral college and first-past-the-post voting, in which you vote for one candidate
and whoever has the most votes wins, even if that ends up being less than 50% support,
ensures that only two parties ever govern.
Every vote is tactical and, in that kind of environment, third-parties struggle to make
it through without accidentally becoming spoilers for one of the two bigger parties they’re
closer to.
This means that, at the end of the day, you don’t end up having much of a choice and
vote for the option you dislike the least.
Democrats and Republicans can be confident they’ll keep their job and no third-party
will ever pose a real threat to them so long as they don’t screw things up in a seriously
major way, which they’re apparently somehow still doing considering no third-party poses
a real challenge, at least at the national level.
Some figures within the Democratic party can try to influence it and pull it further left,
but there are obvious limits to that influence and, if it is too important, the party could
just not let you run on their ticket.
Still, that obviously doesn’t explain why one of those two parties couldn’t be more
left-wing right off the bat, the way that a somewhat socialistic party like Labour exists
in the UK, another country with first-past-the-post voting.
So voting alone doesn’t give us the whole picture.
But looking at historical developments can help with that.
The big one is the red scare, which poisoned the well on words like socialism, communism,
and anarchism.
Propaganda efforts, government crackdowns, imprisonments, and union busting across the
country tried to subdue American labor movements and, man, it worked really well.
Organizing on socialist ideals or being a leftist of any form was practically illegal,
and downright un-American, un-christian, godless, or even satanic in much of the public discourse.
We still feel the echoes of that movement today, with every mild social policy being
branded as socialism doing enough to make half the country hate it.
Here, have some nepotism and go watch my buddy Yugopnik’s video about it, you’ll see
what I mean.
Ultimately, it’s going to be decades until this history can be overcome by the majority
of the American public and you can finally live out what communism is really about, telling
other people you’re a communist.
But even the red scare and voting systems don’t explain why socialism hasn’t taken
hold.
After all, many countries with social democratic or leftist parties further to our left like
Spain, Italy, and Germany in the West and India and China outside of the Imperial Core
have had equally, if not more brutal “red-scare”-like movements.
According to American historian Eric Foner, another variable to take into account is straight
up organizational failures.
Too much compromise at some times, not enough at other times, the socialist and communist
parties of the US couldn’t always make it work sustainably and often picked the wrong
battles when it came to organizational survival.
They couldn’t unify enough of the American public under the same banner, couldn’t fight
the cultural battles they were the target of by the state, couldn’t get the legitimacy
their European siblings did.
Ultimately, they didn’t last in such a hostile environment because of both their choices
and their constraints.
This is just another piece to the puzzle and Foner’s work is quick to point out that
it isn’t any more satisfying of an answer than the other two.
And this lack of a satisfying answer sadly testifies to the strength of the capitalist
economy and its ability to adapt to the socialist challenge, constantly evolving in its operation
to make its exploitative nature survive in a new way, from factory floors, to white collar
corporatism, to the new gig economy, and to its future incarnation in whatever consumerist
hell the metaverse will be.
Its political and economic arms have always found new ways to respond to its challengers.
Even if the left is more developed in other capitalist countries, it isn’t really socialism
either.
Even if other places have socialist and communist parties at their helm, they are forced to
compromise with a capitalist global economy and the military power of its greatest supporter
at some point.
The question “why doesn’t the US have a socialist party?”
ultimately has the same answer as “Why hasn’t socialism replaced capitalism?”
– capitalism has created an environment in which socialism is both more likely to
arise and simultaneously more difficult to achieve.
Few are those who have been able to make some version of it work.
But enough of this doom and gloom.
All socialists should be optimistic.
Not blindly optimistic, not ignorant of the very real challenges our movement faces, but
optimistic based on the belief that humanity has always been able to overcome roadblocks
like capitalism.
Massive structural problems always seem insurmountable until suddenly they’re not.
There will come a time when capitalism stumbles a little too severely, when the weight of
all its past failures provide an opening for the people to take charge and say, “we’re
trying something new.”
I believe that time is coming, and it’s closer than most of us think.
You probably weren’t taught about it in history class, but Lenin himself thought he
would never see revolution in his lifetime.
Two years later, he was helping to guide one of the most significant events in modern history.
If we want to make sure that our eventual revolution is successful, that socialism can
flourish in the United States, we need to plant the seed in fertile ground - educate
ourselves and our peers, push back against capitalist propaganda, help those who are
struggling under the current system, and look towards the future with optimism.
The American Left may be lacking today, but we’ll make sure it’s stronger tomorrow.