Why has a successful and sustainable socialist party never developed here?
HM: The American working-class was always ethnically, religiously, and racially divided against itself in the decades when socialism rose in Europe. In Europe the working-classes were quite ethnically uniform, unlike the Europe of today, and so they couldn’t be divided by the kinds of things that have traditionally divided Americans. [The effects of] these differences persist even given the weakness of socialism in Europe. For instance, you won’t find any place in Europe where the business community is as rabidly anti-union as it is here. That reflects the absence of socialism as a tradition here versus Europe. When [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt came along there were decently sized socialist and communist parties in the United States, but many of the smartest people in both movements saw that the way to advance their goals was to go into the world of the New Deal rather than stay in a pure partisan mode. A lot of historically socialist institutions, the garment workers union [and] the cl
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