It Didn't Happen Here sets out to examine why the United Stated is the only advanced industrial nation in the democratic world to have never developed a significant Socialist or Communist party. This is hardly a new topic, the authors themselves cite Werner Sombart's Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (1906) as the first major work on the subject, and also point out that the question has exercised the minds of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Wells, Weber and Gramsci, among others. Nor is it a subject of the lack of an organised political left in the States one which belongs solely to the past. At the time of writing trade union membership in North America is lower than that in most developed nations and public spending is exceptionally low.

The authors offer up a number of plausible explanations for this phenomenon: weak leadership, the American party system and winner-take-all presidential elections, state repression, ethnic, racial and religious diversity among the working class making it difficult for socialists to find a power base, particularly among Catholics and blacks, the relative ease of social mobility in US society and the incompatibility of socialism with America's "core values".

Uneasy as I am with the latter concept, the authors' choice of a comparative historical approach allows them to make a good case for American exceptionalism. Comparisons with Canada, which has a long and healthy history of democratic socialism, are particularly telling. It is argued that the constitutional blocks to any possibility of a strong central state have led to a nation with a collective belief in individualism and libertarianism in which radicals are more likely to be liberal and philanthropic than socialist and class-conscious.

There is a plethora of material on this area already available, and the authors cover so much ground in so little space that significant figures such as King and McCarthy are reduced to bit players and the reader will search in vain for any mention of fringe groups such as the Yippies. It cannot be denied, however, that Lipset and Marks have achieved their brief of providing a readable and well-informed overview of a complex question, and their book can be recommended as such.

Posted 13 February 2003

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