Americans Aren't Commies

The Socialists never secured more than 6 percent, and they did that only once, in 1912, and they got 2 percent or less in all other contests.

Thus writes Seymour Martin Lipset, Jewish Trotskyite turned neoconservative, in summarizing his book It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States. He goes on to list a number of reasons why formal Communist, Socialist or Labor parties never had the kind of success they had in many European countries.

“The American Socialist party was antireligious.” This eliminated the possibility of alliances with the Catholic Church, in contrast to Britain and Australia where Catholics worked with Labor parties.

Though Americans often feared immigrants bringing socialism in, what in fact happened is that “the large majority of immigrants opposed the socialists and were positively impressed by America… Workers simply did better here than in Europe.“

Trotsky himself, "described, almost in awe, his experience of ‘an apartment in a workers’ district’ in New York, in the East Bronx, where he and his family lived for two months in 1917. ‘That apartment, at eighteen dollars a month, was equipped with all sorts of conveniences that we Europeans were quite unused to: electric lights, gas cooking-range, bath, telephone, automatic service elevator, and even a chute for the garbage. These things completely won the boys [his children] over to New York.’”

Even American trade unions were anti-statist. “The AFL’s 40-year-long president, Samuel Gompers, once when asked about his politics, replied ‘three-quarters an anarchist.’”

Lipset concludes, “Although it is accurate to say that the United States has moved in a social democratic direction, the state still does much less here than elsewhere, and the American public does not want the gap closed.”

Kimble Fletcher Ainslie, in reviewing Lipset's book, objects that Lipset missed the glaring fact that the United States did in fact move in a socialist direction over time especially with the New Deal, Keynesianism and the Great Society programs.

But note that these "socialist victories” never came from a popular mandate. The very opposite in fact. FDR, for example, won on a small government platform and gained instant popularity by ending Prohibition. His New Deal programs were simply a betrayal of what Americans had voted for and these programs were often ferociously opposed.

With all institutions aligned to usher us into a globalist socialist order, it is encouraging to remember that socialism never was able to come in through the front door in these United States.

Americans aren’t commies.