The battle between individual and state – private property vs. the government that would distribute wealth more ‘fairly’ – is never really over. It just hibernates in good times. But is the stock market trying to tell us something about the day after tomorrow• The U.S. economy, recently so well behaved, suddenly skids toward recession. A big ‘what if’ casts a shadow on the near future. ‘The struggle between the left and the right is not over,’ warn economic historians Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks. Yes, they say, old-style socialism – ripping all basic industries, the ‘means of production,’ right out of the hands of private capitalists – has lost punch in all advanced countries. The Left everywhere has moved Right. ‘The revolution’ doesn’t inspire anymore. Even the British Labour Party dare not speak of nationalizing. What for• To make its industries and jobs less competitive• ‘The era of big government is over,’ Labour’s Tony Blair famously declared before sweeping in as prime minister in 1997. Americans have always resisted socialism as an ism, with its central government planning and its dull, dull leveling tendencies. This has mystified collectivists all the way back to, well, Karl Marx. The patron saint of communism, who died in 1883, felt sure the New World would lead the way to the proletarian paradise he saw at the end of history. He over estimated the radicalism of Workingmen’s parties that briefly flourished in some towns in the 1820s and 1830s. What happened to them• President Andrew Jackson tilted national policy toward ‘common man’ interests versus bankers and landholders. That’s been an American pattern. Socialism’s greatest hits – notably, old age pensions – have been co-opted over the decades by one of the two dominant parties. This has meant ‘creeping socialism’ to some, practical politics to pols who want to get elected. No third party has ever made it nationally in America. The two big tents just move the poles a bit to take in more people and their passions if they can.

Why socialism failed in the United States is the theme of a new book by Lipset and Marks, titled ‘It Didn’t Happen Here’ (W.W. Norton, New York, 379 pages). Related in a dry academic style is the paradox of a nation that budgets relatively little for public welfare (compared to gross domestic product) but gives prodigiously to charities, and lets its rich get, yes – richer! Theorists of the downtrodden little guy can’t dig it. Marx’s own German collaborator, Friedrich Engels, who lived into the 1890s, judged American workers to be ‘born conservatives.’ They got the vote before socialism came along. And no history of feudalism tied them to the land as a social caste. So they picked up middle-class, go-getting attitudes. Meanwhile, America’s socialists were so purist. Lipset and Marks believe this was an ironic reflection of U.S. religious piety. The believers believed so hard in overturning the system altogether that they declined to help early labor unions win improved conditions for real-life people little by little. It created a lot of hard feelings. The 1930s Depression increased socialist (and communist) influence in U.S. politics, mainly via President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. But as office-seekers, socialists never won more than a handful of mayor and lawmaker elections around the country. The party itself is long gone, many of its social aims co-opted by the Democrats. One irony is that when Americans go radical, as in the 1960s, it tends to be an individualist striving for rights or freedoms. ‘Antistatism’ seems rooted in the culture, Lipset and Marks say. Even when passionate on some issue, U.S. voters hate to ‘waste’ their ballots on a third party. Hence the most recent third parties on the left and right, headed by Ralph Nader and Patrick Buchanan respectively, played no better than spoiler roles in the 2000 election. Which doesn’t necessarily mean capitalism will be triumphant forever. As Lipset and Marks remind us, Aristotle pointed out 2,500 years ago that young people in particular ‘look for inspiring solutions.’ And the profit motive, whatever its potency, just doesn’t promise to eliminate poverty, racism, sexism, pollution or war. ‘New movements that hold reformist or utopian promises will appear and reappear.’ Jack Markowitz is a columnist and retired business editor of the Tribune-Review.

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