# Why Socialism Never Truly Took Root in America: An In-Depth Analysis
## A Thought Experiment: Imagining a Political YouTube Channel
Let’s embark on a thought experiment. Close your eyes (but not too tightly—there’s still some gorgeous premium stock footage to appreciate). Imagine you’re a YouTuber crafting political explainer videos. Now, don’t get carried away imagining yourself as a political commentator—doing so might plunge you into an abyss of sadness and frustration.
Here’s the scenario: it’s been nearly two years since you produced your most popular video, which dissected the American political spectrum. This episode has garnered over 7 minutes and 26 seconds of runtime—a modest effort, but one that left you with much more to say. Yet, fear held you back—fear that kept you from diving deeper into the subject.
Fast forward: your intern is now tasked with expanding on this topic, and it’s causing your ego a bit of harm. But perhaps it’s time to let go and explore new territory.
## The Evolution of the American Left
On this week’s episode, we’re examining the American left within an international context. Specifically, we’ll tackle the question: “Why hasn’t socialism truly taken root in America?”
When discussing the American left, it’s crucial to define our terms. For this discussion, we’re focusing on the elected left, which essentially boils down to the Democratic Party. While there are numerous small political parties and groups occupying various spots on the left-wing spectrum, their influence is minimal, holding few major elected positions. Consequently, they don’t significantly impact American electoral politics.
The Democrats, often labeled as the center-left party in the U.S., might protest this claim, citing Wikipedia’s classification. However, when we analyze their voting records and political discourse using the Political Compass—a tool designed to map political ideologies neutrally—their positioning shifts dramatically. Far from appearing as a center-left entity, they align more closely with a center-right stance.
This discrepancy arises because left and right are relative terms, not absolute ones. What’s considered radical or progressive evolves over time, shaped by shifting political battles. Similarly, what’s deemed conservative can regress when the left achieves its goals or when the right revisits outdated ideologies.
## The Two-Party System and Political Labels
In a two-party system, one party inevitably adopts the label of “left,” while the other claims “right,” regardless of their actual stance on the political spectrum. This dynamic creates a competitive environment where labels become more about preference than objective truth.
The Political Compass maps prominent American politicians in a way that reflects this dichotomy—placing most to the right, with only a few outliers (like Bernie Sanders) offering a counterpoint. This visualization underscores the U.S.’s conservative tilt compared to other Western nations.
## Comparing the U.S. to Other Countries
To understand why socialism hasn’t flourished in America, it’s essential to look at comparable countries. Consider the British Tory Party, which in its 2017 manifesto rejected unregulated capitalism and championed social justice—a stance that would be deemed shockingly progressive by American standards.
In contrast, European countries like Spain, Italy, and Germany exhibit more left-wing political movements, with socialist parties holding significant influence. These parties often advocate for policies that are considered mainstream elsewhere, such as nationalizing industries or implementing robust social safety nets.
The U.S., however, operates within a fundamentally different framework—liberal capitalism dominates, leaving little room for socialist alternatives to thrive.
## Electoral Systems and Third-Party Struggles
One key factor hindering socialism in the U.S. is its electoral system. The “first-past-the-post” voting method ensures that only two parties realistically have a chance of winning. This setup marginalizes third-party candidates, who often serve as spoilers rather than viable alternatives.
Even within the Democratic Party, attempts to push for more progressive policies face significant hurdles. Party leaders may reject candidates deemed too radical, further limiting opportunities for socialist ideas to gain traction.
## Historical and Cultural Factors
Historical events have also played a role in shaping America’s political landscape. The Red Scare of the early 20th century effectively demonized socialism and communism, associating these ideologies with un-American values. This backlash stifled socialist movements, making it difficult for them to gain public acceptance.
Organizational failures within socialist parties have compounded these challenges. These groups often struggled to unite diverse factions, leading to weak institutions that couldn’t sustain long-term progress. In contrast, European socialist movements benefited from stronger organizational structures and more favorable political climates.
## The Resilience of Capitalism
Ultimately, the resilience of capitalism in the U.S. has made it difficult for socialism to take root. The economy’s ability to adapt and evolve—whether through corporate restructuring or embracing new technologies like gig work—has allowed it to withstand socialist challenges.
Even in countries where socialist parties hold significant power, they often compromise with capitalist systems due to global economic pressures and military dominance by capitalist nations.
## Optimism for the Future of Socialism
Despite these obstacles, there’s reason to remain optimistic. Socialist ideas are gaining traction among younger generations, and movements like Bernie Sanders’ have reinvigorated left-wing politics in the U.S. While progress is slow, it’s a sign that change is possible.
The eventual stumble of capitalism could create an opening for socialism, much as Lenin once believed. Until then, the focus must be on laying the groundwork for future revolutions—through education, resistance to capitalist propaganda, and support for those suffering under the current system.
The American left may be weak today, but with persistence and vision, it can grow stronger tomorrow. The seeds of change are being planted, and the harvest could be closer than we think.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enLet’s do a thought experiment.Close your eyes and imagine you’re a youtubermaking political explainer videos.Okay, don’t actually close your eyes oryou’ll miss that gorgeous, premium stockfootage and, actually, don’t imagine beinga political youtuber either or you’ll fallinto the deepest, most inescapable pit ofsadness.You know what?Just let me imagine it for you.Let me imagine that it’s been almost twoyears since you made a video about the Americanpolitical spectrum.It’s your second most popular episode sincethe rebrand but it’s a measly 7 minutesand 26 seconds and you just had so many morethings to say, but let’s be honest, youwere kinda scared.You were a scared little man.Let’s imagine your intern is writing allof this and it's starting to hurt your feelingsso we should really move on.Now, would you remake that video, but thistime allowing yourself to take a big divein the deep end?Humph.No.Of course not!You’re better than that!Welp, I’m not.On this week’s episode, we’re lookingat the American left in an international contextand answering the question “why did socialismnever really take root here?”Let’s talk about the American left first.When we talk about the left in this countryit’s important to know who that is, andfor this episode, we mean the elected left,so really just the Democratic Party.There’s a whole list of small parties andgroups, each with its plot of land on thepolitical spectrum’s left-wing, but sincethey occupy next to no major elected positionsand primarily operate through influence, theydon’t make for a very robust analysis ofAmerican electoral politics.So with all that in mind, we’re really justgoing to talk about the blue team.Democrats are the center-left party in theUS.Look, that’s what it says right here onWikipedia!But, oh no, when you plot their voting recordsand party discourse on the political compass,the completely neutral, absolutely zero bias,omnipotently objective metric of what politicsare, you don’t get a center-left party.You get a center-right party.How come?The issue here is that left and right arerelative terms.There is no objective left or objective rightthat holds true in every scenario and canreliably be attached to a certain set of policiesacross all of time and space.What is considered radical and progressiveis constantly updated as political battlesevolve and, by the same token, what is consideredconservative or reactionary changes when theleft succeeds in making its goals mainstaysor the right reaches further back into thepast for its political program.This basically means that in a country withonly two viable parties you’re going toget one party that calls itself the rightand one that calls itself the left regardlessof where their parties end up on your politicalgrid.They can’t both claim to be on the sameside so those labels end up being about whichteam you like better, not some marker of absolutetruth.So then why does the compass look like that?Even if you disagree with its methodology,the reason that the political compass mapsprominent American politicians so uniformlyto the right, with really just one big, centrist,exception (hey you!) is because it’s tryingto generalize the political spectrum beyondthe limits of the United States and assessour politics relative to those of comparablecountries, mainly other Western liberal republics.And compared to other Western countries, theUnited State’s Democratic Party is a center-rightparty.It’s the party of economic liberalism.Okay, let’s look at the 2017 manifesto forthe British Tory Party, the conservative wingof Britain’s own two-party system.Get ready to clutch your pearls, because thereis some scary, downright hedonistic communistnonsense 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, unfairnessand inequality.We will run public services in accordancewith their values as important local and nationalinstitutions.We will not only guarantee but enhance workers’rights and protections.And we will develop our ambitious modern industrialstrategy to get the economy working for everyone,across the whole of our nation.We believe in the good that governmentcan 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 shamelesslying, the fact that this is the way they’reselling their political program tells us alot about where the left and the right standin one of Western Europe’s more conservativecountries.Reining in capitalism, providing social services,empowering workers, these are common sense,bare minimum mainstream policies that evena right-wing government can’t justify denyingits citizens, at least not explicitly.And look at the Labour Party, they’re alsolabeled center-left (look at Wikipedia!).They’re the main political opponent to theTories and when you plot them on the politicalcompass they end up remarkably close to ourwell-loved and always-treated-fairly-by-Fox-News,definitely communists we have here in America.Labour’s middle-ground proposals that convincearound half the nation include ensuring continuedand supported access to their nationalizedhealthcare system, reaching net-zero carbonemissions by the 2030s, and the nationalizationof key industries.These are policies that never make it to theouter left reaches of the Democratic Partyand are solidly in the mainstream left forthe UK, barely qualifying as socialism thereand in most other Western European countriesfor that matter!Not to mention countries where social democracyis even more well established and these policiesare boilerplate centrism, or countries andareas that aren’t as comparable to the USbut where communist or socialist governmentsare fully established.If comparison to a relatively centrist, conservativegovernment makes the US look so right-wing,what is there to say about explicitly left-wingplaces around the world?But if policy-by-policy comparisons aren’treally your vibe, this view of the EU Parliamentcommunicates essentially the same idea.The dark red group is communists.The lighter red color is socialists, and eventhough they, the greens to their right, andthe communists to their left end up promotingmostly social democratic, not outwardly socialistpolitics in the short term, the ideologicalgrounding they all draw from is largely anti-capitalistic,Marxist literature, and they are explicitabout transcending social democracy over timeand creating broad class consciousness intheir electoral body.The left in Europe is just more left thanthe one we have here and it actually getsa spot at the table, albeit within an otherwiseeconomically liberal institution and withinsocial democratic limits.By contrast, liberal mainline US democratswould probably end up in one of the blue groupsaround or just to the right of the center,with only a few figures within the party overlappingwith the center-left side of the chamber.“What’s up with that?”you’re now pondering while I subtly redirectthe topic of this video.“How come Europe gets all that and I getnot one crumb of economic democracy?”Well, there are a couple reasons.If I did the classic youtube explainer videothing, focusing on just one of them and pretendinglike it explained the whole question, you’dprobably hurt my feelings in the comments.And I don’t like that sort of thing.So there’s a couple reasons labour politicsnever took root in America in any major wayand none of them fully explains it on itsown.Instead, they all overlap and reinforce oneanother, leading us to the place we are todaywith two ostensibly right-wing parties, ofwhich only one has a tiny subcurrent witha somewhat left-wing political program.For starters, I should acknowledge that thereis a substantial current of socialism in Americatoday just like there has been at varioustimes in history.The DSA and communist parties like the CPUSAhave had record recruitment in recent years,socialism has broad approval among youngergenerations, and political parties that representsome version of a socialist agenda have successfullyshaped local politics and in a few cases havegained electoral success.Back at the start of the 20th century, socialistparties won several elections locally andnationally, a socialist candidate (EugeneV. Debs) managed around 6% of the nationalvote in a presidential election and, althoughisolated and very limited in number, communesstructured around loosely socialist principleshave existed around the country at variouspoints in its history, not to mention otherimportant figures in the American socialistmovement like MLK.Despite this, no major reformist or revolutionarysocialist party has ever appeared the sameway it has in many countries the US sharesa common history with.Why?One big reason is our electoral system.The electoral college and first-past-the-postvoting, in which you vote for one candidateand whoever has the most votes wins, evenif that ends up being less than 50% support,ensures that only two parties ever govern.Every vote is tactical and, in that kind ofenvironment, third-parties struggle to makeit through without accidentally becoming spoilersfor one of the two bigger parties they’recloser to.This means that, at the end of the day, youdon’t end up having much of a choice andvote for the option you dislike the least.Democrats and Republicans can be confidentthey’ll keep their job and no third-partywill ever pose a real threat to them so longas they don’t screw things up in a seriouslymajor way, which they’re apparently somehowstill doing considering no third-party posesa real challenge, at least at the nationallevel.Some figures within the Democratic party cantry to influence it and pull it further left,but there are obvious limits to that influenceand, if it is too important, the party couldjust not let you run on their ticket.Still, that obviously doesn’t explain whyone of those two parties couldn’t be moreleft-wing right off the bat, the way thata somewhat socialistic party like Labour existsin the UK, another country with first-past-the-postvoting.So voting alone doesn’t give us the wholepicture.But looking at historical developments canhelp with that.The big one is the red scare, which poisonedthe well on words like socialism, communism,and anarchism.Propaganda efforts, government crackdowns,imprisonments, and union busting across thecountry tried to subdue American labor movementsand, man, it worked really well.Organizing on socialist ideals or being aleftist 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 movementtoday, with every mild social policy beingbranded as socialism doing enough to makehalf the country hate it.Here, have some nepotism and go watch my buddyYugopnik’s video about it, you’ll seewhat I mean.Ultimately, it’s going to be decades untilthis history can be overcome by the majorityof the American public and you can finallylive out what communism is really about, tellingother people you’re a communist.But even the red scare and voting systemsdon’t explain why socialism hasn’t takenhold.After all, many countries with social democraticor leftist parties further to our left likeSpain, Italy, and Germany in the West andIndia and China outside of the Imperial Corehave had equally, if not more brutal “red-scare”-likemovements.According to American historian Eric Foner,another variable to take into account is straightup organizational failures.Too much compromise at some times, not enoughat other times, the socialist and communistparties of the US couldn’t always make itwork sustainably and often picked the wrongbattles when it came to organizational survival.They couldn’t unify enough of the Americanpublic under the same banner, couldn’t fightthe cultural battles they were the targetof by the state, couldn’t get the legitimacytheir European siblings did.Ultimately, they didn’t last in such a hostileenvironment because of both their choicesand their constraints.This is just another piece to the puzzle andFoner’s work is quick to point out thatit isn’t any more satisfying of an answerthan the other two.And this lack of a satisfying answer sadlytestifies to the strength of the capitalisteconomy and its ability to adapt to the socialistchallenge, constantly evolving in its operationto make its exploitative nature survive ina new way, from factory floors, to white collarcorporatism, to the new gig economy, and toits future incarnation in whatever consumeristhell the metaverse will be.Its political and economic arms have alwaysfound new ways to respond to its challengers.Even if the left is more developed in othercapitalist countries, it isn’t really socialismeither.Even if other places have socialist and communistparties at their helm, they are forced tocompromise with a capitalist global economyand the military power of its greatest supporterat some point.The question “why doesn’t the US havea socialist party?”ultimately has the same answer as “Why hasn’tsocialism replaced capitalism?”– capitalism has created an environmentin which socialism is both more likely toarise and simultaneously more difficult toachieve.Few are those who have been able to make someversion of it work.But enough of this doom and gloom.All socialists should be optimistic.Not blindly optimistic, not ignorant of thevery real challenges our movement faces, butoptimistic based on the belief that humanityhas always been able to overcome roadblockslike capitalism.Massive structural problems always seem insurmountableuntil suddenly they’re not.There will come a time when capitalism stumblesa little too severely, when the weight ofall its past failures provide an opening forthe people to take charge and say, “we’retrying something new.”I believe that time is coming, and it’scloser than most of us think.You probably weren’t taught about it inhistory class, but Lenin himself thought hewould never see revolution in his lifetime.Two years later, he was helping to guide oneof the most significant events in modern history.If we want to make sure that our eventualrevolution is successful, that socialism canflourish in the United States, we need toplant the seed in fertile ground - educateourselves and our peers, push back againstcapitalist propaganda, help those who arestruggling under the current system, and looktowards the future with optimism.The American Left may be lacking today, butwe’ll make sure it’s stronger tomorrow.\n"
