Is There No Democratic Left in America? Reflections on the Transformation of an Ideology

Historians historicize. They attempt to understand the present and make educated guesses about the future by looking to the past. This attempt at prognosticating "the future of the democratic left" primarily in the United States begins with a broad-brush history of "the left" as equalitarian idea and political movement in the modern world, examines its development in the United States within a context of "American exceptionalism," discusses its transformation in the 1960s, and assays its struggles in the "present day" of the last three decades. A once-revolutionary impulse, it suggests, has surrendered to the necessity of incremental entitlement politics. As a result, it has subjected itself to the hazards of the pragmatic test, the awkwardness of interest-group politics, and the distinct possibility that even success in the quest for universal social provision would fail to alter existing patterns of inequality.

The concept of "the left" is a European import that always has existed uneasily in the United States. Originating in revolution and placing its primary emphasis on the establishment of an equalitarian society, from the beginning it demonstrated the way in which the rationalism of the eighteenth-century continental Enlightenment was at odds with deeply rooted aspects of human nature. From the beginning also, the left has had to fight not simply oppressive reaction but another liberating ideology, a primarily Anglo-American liberalism that promoted liberty—defined as individual autonomy, inherent individual rights, and opportunity. It has especially struggled for existence in that most liberal of societies, the United States.

That we discuss the left at all in an American context at the beginning of the twenty-first century may be a tribute to its capabilities of survival and adaptation—as well as a certain talent for infiltration and disguise. The left, to the extent one exists in America, has appropriated the vocabulary of liberalism, and when all is said and done abandoned much of its original content and tone while clinging to remnants of its social objectives. Its history and persistence also say much about the aspirations and priorities of a politically minded intelligentsia with slender connections to the experience or outlook of the masses in contemporary middle-class democracies.

European Origins:
The Age of Reason and the French Revolution: Marx and Modern Socialism

At the beginning of the French Revolution, the radical equalitarians clustered together on the left side of the seating in the National Assembly. Seeking to destroy a rigid, oppressive class system, the left promised the French a new utopian society of liberty, equality, fraternity. It delivered dictatorship, the rule of a new class, and terror.

Marx and Marxism followed in short order.

Marxism was in many respects a child of the Enlightenment. Based on materialist assumptions, it asserted a theory of inexorable historical progression from one stage of economic development to another toward a final socialist equalitarianism. It posited as its revolutionary force a new urban working class, nudged along to be sure by a vanguard of radical intellectuals.

In the world of reason defined by materialist assumptions, only economically determined social class mattered—not race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, or numerous other indicators by which people identified themselves.

The task of overthrowing social institutions wholesale might seem to require violence of the sort employed throughout much of Europe by revolutionary anarchists. Yet by the last third of the century, the working class was effectively enfranchised in the Continent's most industrially developed countries, thereby raising the possibility of democratic political action. Facing a fork in the road, Marxian socialism took it. Depending on the locale, it could be either clandestine and violent or open and gradualist.

Why Was There No Socialism Anywhere?

"Warum gibt es in dem Vereinigten Staaten keinen Sozialismus?" Werner Sombart asked in1906, referring to the absence of a strong socialist political movement in the United States. Had he been...