The road not (to be) taken--why there is no Linkspartei in the USA: The American Sonderweg and the structural barriers to popular third parties in the US political system.

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The road not (to be) taken--why there is no Linkspartei in the USA: The American Sonderweg and the structural barriers to popular third parties in the US political system.

I. Introduction

The history of the USA is the history of a Sonderweg--a unique path. The fact that the USA is the only advanced capitalist country within Western civilisation that did not produce an institutionalised labour movement comparable to the social-democratic and communist traditions of Europe is evidence of this. (1) This American Sonderweg, which is the result of the singular constitution of us capitalist development (Sombart, 1969; Lipset, 1970; Laslett & Lipset, 1974; Debouzy, 1984; Lipset & Marks, 2000), has corresponded in socioeconomic terms to a racialisation of class struggles (D'Eramo, 1998: 161-75), and to an extreme degree of class fragmentation. Ideologically, this development corresponded to a pronounced radical individualism which, as an ontological myth of the foundations of us national character, extends from de Crevecoeur to Frederick Jackson Turner, to the strange, simultaneously antimodern, conservative as well as markedly liberal us version of the Romantic movement--transcendentalism. It also left its traces on the strong liberal and anarchist tradition in the us left, which is partly derived from it. This individualism connects to a deeply ingrained ideology of private property that has prevailed to this day, despite the creation of a class of doppelt freie Lohnarbeiter (doubly free wage labourers) and the corresponding destruction of the us ideal of a levelling competitive-capitalist/agrarian society of artisans and small landowners. Politically, the early emergence of an urban-capitalist aristocracy, admonished at one time by the left and today by the right, led to a much more immediate form of class domination. The exiled German social-conservative Rudolf Meyer (1839-1899) summed this up in a letter to his longtime friend Friedrich Engels:

In America the social evils of Europe appear potentiated because the classe dirigeante in Europe groans under the same pressure from the state as the subjected class, whereas here it comprises and creates the state, which, as far as it exists, is naturally its unquestioning servant and murders without compassion or law at its command, as in Chicago [during the Haymarket incident]. (Meyer, 1889) It is no accident that the uniqueness of the us political system as described by Meyer led, in the USA, to a long and fertile tradition of sociological research into elites. Extending from Gustavus Myers and Thorstein Veblen to C...

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