America Left Behind

Have you ever wondered why the United States has no Left worth speaking of, at least as people from Europe or the Old Commonwealth would understand the term? One of the most significant contributing factors was the entry of the United States into the Second World War.

The United States could have had an utterly non-Marxist, and indeed anti-Marxist, Left, initially related to Roosevelt and the New Deal as the early Labour Party was related to the old Liberal Party. Drawing on Southern Agrarianism and the Share Our Wealth movement, on the Farm-Labor Party, on the Catholic Social Teaching popularised by Father Coughlin and others, on Francis Townsend’s campaign for old age pensions, and on so much else, it would have been rural and urban; Protestant and Catholic; WASP/Scots-Irish, German/Scandinavian and Irish/Italian/Polish; Southern, Western and North-Eastern.

Based on the demand for jobs, health care, education, decent wages and working conditions, proper housing, transport infrastructure, and so forth, that movement would, as much as anything else, have not only incorporated, but actually called into being, the black Civil Rights Movement. Both the problems and the solutions would have been (and are) colour-blind.

Yes, many, even most, Southern Agrarians were white supremacists (as with being anti-Semitic, who wasn’t in the Thirties?), almost always without ever having thought about it. And there was a subtler but no less virulent racism in the West, especially. But these things would not have survived as mainstream opinion once the movement had begun to grow and develop. A hint of what might have been can be seen in the support of President Johnson, an old Southern Democrat, for Civil Rights. Imagine if, by that stage, this had not been a party-splitting issue.

But Roosevelt moved towards, and eventually formed, a military alliance with Stalin in Europe (America, like Britain, was always going to have to fight a war against Japan, but that is a whole other story). The emerging American democratic (whether or not Democratic) Left was horrified. It suddenly found itself sympathetic towards the enemy of that alliance, and began to adopt, among other things, that enemy’s crude and violent anti-Semitism.

The Midwestern farmers were always Republicans, while their farm hands and their industrial labouring co-regionalists became suspicious of the Democrats as Communist fellow-travellers. The same happened to the traditional Catholics and to the Southern whites. The Democratic coalition that had delivered phenomenal socio-economic progress, and which promised so much more, began to fall apart, and finally did so in the Sixties and Seventies, when the Democratic Party had become completely disconnected from both Catholic and classically Protestant thought. Ahead lay Ronald Reagan and George Waterboarding Bush.

In the meantime, such Left as there was in the United States became confined to the Communist Party (leading to McCarthyism, which was able to brand even the most mildly social-democratic views as “Communist”) or to various Trotskyist factions, with their warring Stalinist and Trotskyist alcoves at City College of New York. And out of the Trotskyist alcove eventually emerged the neoconservative movement.