Why There Is No Socialism in the USA

Abstract

Why there is no socialism in the USA? The author tries to answer this question and identifies two main reasons of that. The first lies in the nature of American civilization. The second is in the politics of the ruling class. Violence was used. But there was also what modern political scientists call “soft power”. The first one, as a rule, was used by conservatism, and the second one by liberalism. At the present stage, these are, respectively, the Republican and the Democratic Parties. In the USA itself, the classic explanation is the work of L. Hartz, who explained the absence of socialism by the absence of feudalism. But is the rooting of socialism due to capitalism not to feudalism? The colonists attributed their departure from England either to the desire for enrichment, or to a religious reason. Protestant ethics, most fully embodied in Puritanism and placing on the individual all responsibility for his successes and failures, initially became the civilizational basis of North America, and then the United States. Another civilizational factor that pushed Puritanism was national consumerism, which has been forming since the 1920s. Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump are examples of Republican presidents. Presidents from the Democratic Party who relied on “soft power” (social reforms) in the fight against socialism in the article are Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Barack Obama.