Lipset's big question

Public Interest, Summer, 2002 by Nathan Glazer

SEYMOUR Martin Lipset and Gary Marks' It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States represents Lipset's most recent and most substantial entry in his 50-year effort to understand why socialism made no great impact in the United States, while it succeeded--in the sense of creating mass parties with opportunities to govern--in the other major industrial societies. (Since I will consider this book in the context of Professor Lipset's involvement with this problem through his entire professional life, I hope Gary Marks will forgive me for using the shorthand of referring to the book as Lipset's, with the understanding that Marks is a full co-author.)

In his very first book, Agrarian Socialism (1950), Lipset examined how a socialist party won an election and formed a government in a Canadian province--and by direct implication, why no socialist party has ever come close to winning an election in an American state. (Socialists did govern for a time in a few American cities.) His second book, Union Democracy (1956). with Martin Trow and James Coleman, took up a central theme in the study of this problem--the difficulty of maintaining democracy in socialist parties and unions against the power of bureaucracy. This issue, first raised by Robert Michels, troubled many young socialists of Lipset's generation. Lipset's third book, with Reinhard Bendix, Social Mobility in industrial Society (1959), considered another explanation for the failure of socialism in the United States--namely, that because of the greater opportunities for individual social mobility available in the United States, socialism, with its promise of raising the position of the entire working class, had less appeal here than in other industrial democracies. The comparison with Canada in his first book has been pursued in later works, most extensively in Continental Divide (1989). In these writings, Lipset has explored the differences that make Canada more friendly to social democracy and the welfare state, and the United States much more skeptical of them.

These questions are tangentially addressed in many of Lipset's other works. His books on the United States--from The First New Nation (1963) to American Exceptionalism (1996)--consider other factors in the failure of socialism in this country: the force and continuity of the distinctive American values of individualism, egalitarianism (of a special American cast), and antistatism. Of course, it would be foolish to say that the single motivation of Lipset's large and impressive body of work has been plumbing the problem of why the United States never developed a strong socialist party, for there have been other major themes in his scholarship--the politics of university faculties and students, the student revolt of the sixties, the sociology of American Jews, and the large sweep of issues raised by democracy and by challenges to democracy.

BUT I am particularly attuned to Lipset's central interest in socialism because I shared it for some years. We met as students at City College, both taking the same route from the East Bronx by elevated line and subway to 137th Street on the West Side of Manhattan. Lipset was a socialist and a member of a socialist youth group. I was also a socialist, though of a different group and somewhat different persuasion. It was not long before the failure of socialism to make headway in the United States engaged our interest, since that philosophy was so attractive to so many students of City College, and so powerful in the neighborhoods from which we came.

I will confess I lost interest in the question sooner than Lipset did. I was impressed by the arguments of others of our generation and acquaintance who stopped being socialists sometime in the 1950s or 1960s. It is true that there were people who stopped being socialists in any meaningful way but who were never able to give up the name. Sidney Hook called himself a socialist long past the time when other socialists would acknowledge him as one. I myself was influenced by the analyses of Philip Selznick and Irving Kristol, who had been members of a Trotskyist group. They moved from a position common to all of us young socialists--which recognized the Soviet Union as a monstrous abortion without any redeeming socialist or democratic attributes-to one which questioned some key assumptions of socialism.

I recall that I was particularly persuaded by another defector from socialism, Martin Diamond, who went from working for a socialist organization to studying political philosophy, and who wrote a thesis, unpublished but circulated in manuscript, on why socialism failed. Diamond had no interest in the sociological, political, or cultural arguments regarding socialism's absence in the United States, the kind of arguments to which Lipset has devoted lengthy research and sustained thought. Instead, Diamond presented the strong and stark position that socialism failed because it was simply wrong-wrong in its assumptions of what moved human beings, wrong in its assumptions of what made for a good society. This answers the question of how and why an idea that is wrong fails, but not that of why the socialist idea gained wide and fervent support, and still holds that support, long after theory and practice have shown that it is wrong.