As someone who studies history, one of the persistent historical puzzles is why America never developed a sizeable left. By “left” I don’t mean the Democratic Party, but rather the center-left parties that have tended to dominate politics in the large, First-World nations since the end of WWII. No one’s quite sure, and the difficulty of attributing causation means no one will ever be quite sure. Though to toss my own two bits in there, I’d suggest that perhaps the high rates of landholding result in a more ambiguous class structure than the Old World and result in conflicting class imperatives for lower-income groups. But that doesn’t explain why the US is so different than, say, Canada and is at best a seriously partial expanation. Anyway, digression.
My real question here is what would it take to encourage the development of an actually socialistic left-wing. Not in any way because that’s necessarily the path to solving America’s problems, merely as an analytical stress test of a nation’s politics. And it seems as though reallocating trillions to America’s bankers is not causing any radical political realignment (yet, anyway). While this might not strike us as surprising, one would be extremely surprised to see this happen in another country and just vanish with scarcely a ripple. If the seismic events of the past year don’t prompt a serious leftward shift in American politics, it’ll show an astounding lack of responsiveness to events. Which probably is not a sign of a healthy political system.
