REDS AND RHETORIC: A while back, a historian family member mused aloud about why socialism never caught on big in America. This historian has a nose-to-the-ground, materialist bent or preference; I don’t. My tendency is to swing too hard the other way. Most historical situations are overdetermined, with any number of valid explanations, and when in doubt I tend to reach for the more philosophical/literary explanation. (I’m sure you’re shocked.) So I suggested (at least I think I suggested; if I didn’t then, I do now, anyway) that socialism had a harder time in the US than in Europe not primarily because of the obvious economic opportunities of the New World, but much more because of the importance of American political rhetoric.

Sure, many of the Founders worried about unequal distribution of property (in ways that sound more distributist than socialist, but in my view the line between the two pretty much disappears out here in real reality). But the motif, the constant undercurrent in American political rhetoric has been the rhetoric of liberty, opportunity, and lack of constraint by material forces. The ideological state has been much more an object of fear than of hope for us. Thus neither socialists’ depiction of the plight of the proletariat, nor their proposed solutions, resonated with Americans in the way that they did with Europeans. The US came through the tempests of the twentieth century with a bloated government, but with startlingly less socialism than most comparable countries. (In England last August, at a random Borders-type bookstore, I found something like four or five explicitly socialist magazines–I mean, with “SOCIALIST” right there on the cover in big honking tabloid font. You, uh, don’t get so much of that here.)

So I think a large part of the answer to the family historian’s question is that Americans tend and tended to think of ourselves as the creatures Edmund Burke described, whose “love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole,” and who “snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.”

Prove me wrong. Extra points if you say something about American religion, but I accept that that is a huge and hairy behemoth of a subject.