Book Review

Canada and the United States

Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks provide a useful overview of the ideological, demographic, and structural factors that inhibited the development of a viable socialist movement in the United States. Unlike many Western European nations and Australia and New Zealand, the United States lacked any formal social-democratic participation in its national government during the second half of the twentieth century. (Not coincidentally, the U.S. also had the smallest percentage of workers—eighteen percent—covered by union contracts.) Using a comparative approach, the authors explore historical, regional (local, state, and federal), and social factors that shaped the American political-economic system and then suggest reasons for American "exceptionalism" in the context of other nations' systems.

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In a straightforward way, Lipset and Marks enumerate many of the factors that have discouraged the laboring classes from challenging the hegemony of the two procapitalist political parties, the Republican-Democratic "duopoly." The "winner-take-all" system of elections was not conducive to the kind of coalition building that might have allowed socialists to act as power brokers at the national level. The ethnic diversity of the workforce, pervasive liberal and antistatist ideologies, and the lack of working-class consciousness all doomed the efforts of socialists to challenge industrial capitalism at the ballot box.

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