Socialism?

A missing part of the American political system?

The Democratic Party of the United States is not a Socialist Party ---and never has been. 

There are Socialist Parties—in Europe.  Parties that have represented the interests of tens of million citizens, who have elected legislators, formed governments, and participated in politics as part of healthy democratic political systems.  But not here in the United States. 

The question should be why DOESN’T the United States have a Socialist party, not why does it. 

As Louis Hartz said many years ago, America developed its intellectual life (it’s outlook on the personal, social, economic and political world) as a fragment of a much larger and broader Western intellectual culture.  The US largely ignored or rejected large parts of European political/economic thought.  We developed no aristocratic conservative ideologies (with the exceptions of people like Russell Kirk who channeled Edmond Burke for a small but faithful crowd) and no clear cut “party of the worker,” the “proletariat” in socialist-speak. 

We in the United States have just been plain “Lockean Liberals,” bourgeois individualists (the philosophy of John Locke among others).  Our political parties have represented sections of the country.  They have managed ethnic and racial conflicts.  They have debated how to better support the growth of industry and the development of the Western prairies, but they have always shared a narrow “American way” of thinking about economics, politics and government—no matter whether they called themselves Whigs, Jacksonian Democrats, Eisenhower Republicans, Reagan Republicans or FDR Democrats.    

Consequently, we in the US have been virtually immune to the political struggles that in Europe have ranged over a large universe of deeply felt, fundamentally different, understandings of society and the individual. 

What is this American consensus?  I could provide my own description, but I really do enjoy quoting my mentor, Walter Dean Burnham:

This “fragment culture” has enjoyed a consensus over the nature of the political economy, the organization of the political system, and the place of religion in public life, which was and is quite absent in any European context…. Put another way, the United States is the most conspicuous example of uncontested hegemony. If one were to find a single term which might describe this hegemony most concisely, it would be liberal capitalism: a consensual value system based on support for private property and its accumulation on one hand, and an appropriate form political democracy on the other.  The primordial value which this consensus enshrines is that of self-regulation extended right down to the individual level; hence for example, the enduring vitality of Western movies in the popular culture. 

All I need to add, is that this describes both the Democratic and Republican Parties today, and shows how un-socialist they are. 

That is not, of course, to say that we might well in these new times benefit from the existence of a political party that supports the economic interests of wage earners.  There is a void, a hole, in the heart of the American political system. For more than a century, turnout has been substantially lower in national elections in the United States than in Europe or Canada.  High numbers of working-class Americans do not vote and do not see their government as representing their interests, or either political party as understanding their reality.   Even with the absorption of many new voters in the last election, many eligible voters are still standing on the sidelines. 

Is this “hole” in our political universe explained by the absence of an American Socialist Party?