Filuwaúrdjan
Realpolitik
Atlas Institution
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« on: July 21, 2011, 11:57:51 AM » |
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« edited: July 21, 2011, 11:59:36 AM by Sibboleth »
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You have to be careful about going too far down this particular road (there is, for example a very old radical democratic - for want of a better term - tradition in the U.S, and it's not a co-incidence or an 'accident' that Syndicalism was as strong in the mining camps of the American West as it was anywhere else in the world. You then have the American Jewish Marxist tradition and so on. More recently various forms of 'Alternative' politics (especially with a small p) have been stronger in certain parts of the U.S than in most other places. And, hey, even some powerful Democratic politicians in the fast-receding past were relatively radical in their own way) but there's obviously a degree of truth to the question/observation, especially as far as formal politics is concerned. So acknowledging the dangers of making sweeping statements, I'd offer the following factors:
1. A unique political system which is geared towards protecting established interests to a degree that is occasionally quite remarkable. This includes the structure of government itself (everything from the particular division of political power and the operation of Congress to the weakness of local government in most of the country; the latter is important because it prevented/prevents the development of radical bridgeheads like Poplar, County Durham or the Rhondda), but also the structure of the two political parties, which, as I keep going on and on about, aren't really political parties in a conventional sense.
2. An extremely conservative political discourse, with roots in America's only slightly odd take on liberalism. Now that liberalism is dead as a political project* (we're now quite close to the 100th anniversary of that, by the way) all political discourses that are rooted in it will inevitably be highly conservative in practice because alternatives to the language of individual rights will not be tolerated. The worship of the Constitution and so on is a big part of this.
3. America's unique social structure and perceptions of class. Which, in turn, is linked into a whole host of other factors; the legacy of slavery, centuries of mass immigration from a huge range of other countries (and the way that different groups of immigrants turned - and turn - to different types of work), the extraordinary power of American employers over their workers (including their willingness to turn to violence; interesting that this was also true of France, another country with politics that can take a while to explain satisfactorily), and the fact that, almost uniquely, capitalism actually delivered (note past tense) for most working class Americans more-or-less on its own. Always several generations down the line, mind, but that may actually have encouraged conservative sentiment.
Plenty of other things as well, I suppose. And all that I've written can be neatly filed under 'gross generalisation'. I've just realised that I used the word 'unique' a lot. I must stress that this isn't because I believe in American Exceptionalism (or any such other nonsense), but because I tend to think that everywhere is unique, even if there are always similarities with other places. It's the similarities that are usually the interesting things.
One final thing though. It's interesting to note that many of the great centres of American radical sentiment are now noted for their conservatism; Northern Louisiana for example. I mean, there you have an area that gave remarkably strong support for the Socialist Party of America and later (and this time overwhelmingly) for Huey Long, but which by the 1990s was the great stronghold of, well, David Duke.
*If not in other respects.
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