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Home -> Community -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> RE: DBA - Job boundaries & perks [history of unions & american exceptionalism]
Well, if you want to refer our esteemed peers in the UK/EU to social
science explanations of why socialism never took deep root in the
USA, Seymour Martin Lipset's work is an excellent source.
Lipset explains, with stunning insight, how the underlying value systems of anglo-imperialism (libertarianism, or "moral individualism") interplay/compete with the value systems of "collectivist" (socialist) politics *as cultural systems*.
The main theme that Lipset has been concerned with is "american exceptionalism".
(Similar work has been done by another outstanding historian of "conservative" anglo-imperialist culture, Kevin Phillips in _The Cousin's Wars_, _The Politics of Rich and Poor_ etc.)
(SIDE NOTE: Phillips explains Greenspan's attempts to control wild asset inflation (stock market) such as led to the "Great Depression" in the 1930s:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/economy/july-dec99/wages_9-3.html )
Review:
http://www.thehistorynet.com/reviews/bk_cousinswars.htm
Back to Lipset, here is some analysis that references Lipset's critical early work on socialist politics in Canada vs. the USA:
http://www.ou.edu/special/albertctr/extensions/sp98/schwartz.html
"In 1950, Lipset saw in the experiences of the Saskatchewan CCF the ways that democratic socialism could make for a more democratic society. Now Lipset no longer equates democratic socialism with an idealized form of democracy. His present position is that democracy thrives where there is a free market. ... Lipset's current take on U.S. exceptionalism continues to elaborate on his earlier observations about the absence of a working class socialist party. He has gone on to emphasize the value dimensions of exceptionalism--'personal responsibility, individual initiative, and voluntarism.' But he also looks at the dark side of that exceptionalism-- 'selfserving behavior, atomism, and a disregard for the common good.' ... In light of this new awareness of how the United States has generated negative and costly values and behavior, it is interesting to reread Lipset's initial assessment of socialism. There we hear a youthful optimism tempered by the growing realism of a social scientist.
It is my own belief, that in general, the democratic movements of the left since the American Revolution were and are historically justifiable and necessary to attain the values of an economic and political and social democracy. In spite of their many and obvious failings in terms of democratic values, the alternative to them was a more rigidly stratified and sometimes a dictatorial society. ..."
-----end excerpt-----
and
"...Throughout this century, and especially since World War II, no
theme has more preoccupied the fields of comparative politics and
political sociology than the nature, conditions and possibilities
of democracy. And no political scientist or sociologist has
contributed more to advancing our thinking about democracy--in
all its dimensions, both comparatively and in the United States-
-than Seymour Martin Lipset.
...
Of course, no article could do justice to the wide-ranging intellectual contributions of Seymour Martin Lipset. His books and articles have sought to elucidate such diverse phenomena as the political and social origins of socialism (or the absence of socialism), fascism, revolution, protest, ethnic prejudice, anti-Semitism, and political extremism; the sources and consequences of class structure, class consciousness, class conflict, and social mobility; the links between historical and social cleavages, party systems, and voter alignments; voter preferences and electoral outcomes; the dense reciprocal relations between values and institutions; the changing character of such diverse and specific institutions as [***]trade unions[***] and higher education (and even unions in higher education!); the determinants and dynamics of public opinion and public confidence in institutions; the role of religion in American life; the political behavior of American Jews; the conditions of the democratic order; and the differences between cultures, especially the contrast (which has fascinated him throughout his scholarly life) between Canada and the United States. Across this sweeping landscape of classical and pioneering issues in the social sciences, Lipset has brought a consistently lucid and striking accessible analytical style, and a breathtaking array of sources and evidence, that have made his works among the most popular and widely used, both by teachers and by researchers. More striking still, virtually every one of these issues he has explored authoritatively, both across nations and with a specific focus on the United States. And he has published with equal distinction as a social historian and as an astute commentator on the politics, culture, and conflicts of our time. Can any living social scientist lay claim to such a broad and broadly honored set of works? ...
Of course, as with any great social scientist, Lipset's thinking has been strongly influenced by preceding theorists, including Robert Michels, Talcott Parsons, Karl Marx and, perhaps most of all, Max Weber. But with reference to the conditions of democracy, Lipset's intellectual affinity with Alexis de Tocqueville is also noteworthy. As Lipset observes in his introduction to Political Man, Tocqueville, struggling with the same momentous, nineteenth-century issues and conflicts as Karl Marx, came to very different conclusions. Rejecting the desirability or inevitability of conflict polarization and revolution, Tocqueville 'deliberately chose to emphasize those aspects of social units which could maintain political cleavage and political consensus at the same time' (Lipset 1981/1959, 7). This concern for the factors that contain political conflict within a framework of consensus, and so neutralize the demand for violent and revolutionary change, has been an enduring theme in Lipset's writings on democracy and society. Following Tocqueville, it has led him to an intellectual and normative interest in gradual change, political accommodation, and the sources of political legitimacy; in limiting the power of the state; and in independent, voluntary associations as one important means for controlling the state and otherwise developing the social infrastructure of a free society.
An abiding concern for avoiding the polarization of conflict, the formation of extremist political movements and preferences, or the elimination of all conflict in a state-dominated 'mass society,' runs through Lipset's writing on the conditions of the democratic order. In Political Man he demonstrates the importance, for these democratic ends, of historical legitimacy, effective performance, social mobility, cross-cutting cleavages, as well as the gradual incorporation into the polity of newly mobilizing social groups. His analyses there of the dynamics of legitimacy and the effects of cleavage structure are among the clearest and most compelling in political sociology. These and related issues of democratic development are further advanced in The First New Nation, which highlights the importance of political leadership and political values, and the determinants and consequences of party systems. ..."
-----end excerpt-----
and
"...what, in the view of Lipset and Marks, have been the real underlying inhibitions on the progress of socialism in the United States: namely, the absence, on the one hand, of rigid class distinctions or of a popular resentment of capitalism and the presence, on the other hand, of a highly individualistic ethos. These signal attributes of American culture have created inhospitable soil for any movement founded on both class conflict and a collectivist vision.
This same infertile soil may indeed be responsible dialectically, as it were) for a unique characteristic of American socialism that is stressed by Lipset and Marks: its rigidity and dogmatism. Whereas, for example, both the British Labor party and the German Social Democrats have repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to jettison unpopular positions and abandon Marxist principles to expand their political base, socialists in the United States have repeatedly held to a pattern of unbending ideological rigor. Thus, during and after World War I, the party not only trespassed on the patriotic sentiments of American workers by opposing U.S. intervention in Europe, but compounded its difficulties by adopting a stridently [*****]anticlerical line[*****] that held little attraction for the movement's natural constituency.
A similar lack of pragmatism was on display with respect to immigration. Instead of appealing to the thousands upon thousands of newcomers making their way to this land in the early decades of the century, many socialist leaders embraced a nativist position. This posture was made all the more absurd by the fact that the Socialist party was itself thoroughly dominated by recent immigrants, a circumstance that repelled native workers already prone to regard socialism as an un-American creed. ..."
-----end excerpt-----
and
"The big picture is that, from the get-go, our 'core values' glowed in the dark like Three Mile Island: an ethos of individualism, a Weltanschauung of anti-statism and a blank check from God. We sprang full-blown from John Locke's higher brow, a natural-born hegemony of the bourgeois money-grubbers -- unscathed by medieval feudalism (with its fixed classes of aristocracy and forelock-tugging peasants); exempt from 19th century Europe's ideological power-sharing fratricides (by virtue of early white male suffrage, lots of land, waves of immigrants to assume the lousiest jobs while the native-born upwardly mobilized themselves and a ragtag diversity that undermined nascent class consciousness while permitting the merchant princelings to play workers of different racial and ethnic backgrounds against one another in a status scramble); and insulated from revolting developments -- insurgencies, mutinies, Jacqueries, even mugwumps and goo-goos -- by a political system so partial to the status quo that it's almost arteriosclerotic (a winner-take-all presidency, a fragmenting federalism, a bought judiciary and a two-party Incumbent Protection Society). ..."
...
http://www.salonmag.com/books/feature/2000/08/17/socialism/index1.html
"Thus the whole idea of a labor party here, anything like those that developed in European nations, Canada and Australia, seems chimerical when we read how radicals such as the Knights of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World -- more anarcho-syndicalist than socialist or Marxist -- disdained reform politics every bit as much as conservative craft unionists in the American Federation of Labor. The AFL in its turn worked just as hard to protect the skilled jobs of its white native-born membership from a lumpenproletariat of African-Americans and immigrants as it did to wring concessions from rapacious employers. (Until the Great Depression, the AFL actually opposed minimum-wage legislation, state provision of old-age pensions, compulsory health insurance and limitations on the manly workweek. Nor should we ever forget a 1902 pamphlet that Samuel Gompers wrote himself: 'Meat vs. Rice: American Manhood vs. Asiatic Coolieism: Which Shall Survive?')
[ep, note: see recent anti-immigration policy statements of the Sierra Club, ultimate example of environmentalist elitism.]
Or when we read how the Socialist Party, as fetishistic about doctrine as any Protestant sect, refused to join in coalitions with allies like the North Dakota Non-Partisan League, the Minneosta Farmer-Labor Party, the Commonwealth Federations of Washington and Oregon, the Working Class Union in Oklahoma or Upton Sinclair's Campaign to End Poverty in California -- and in many localities went so far as to expel, for 'opportunism,' members who joined a union or, even worse, ran for office on a coalition ticket and won a municipal election. ..."
-----end excerpts-----
Chapter from Lipset's book:
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/americanexceptionalism.htm
---
excerpt:
"It is not difficult to show for example, that the two great
political parties in America represent only one English party,
the middle-class Liberal party. . . . There are no Tories . . .
and no Labor Party. . . . [T]he new world [was left] to the Whigs
and Nonconformists and to those less constructive, less logical,
more popular and liberating thinkers who became Radicals in
England, and Jeffersonians and then Democrats in America. All
Americans are, from the English point of view, Liberals of one
sort or another. . . . The liberalism of the eighteenth century
was essentially the rebellion . . . against the monarchical and
aristocratic state--against hereditary privilege, against
restrictions on bargains. Its spirit was essentially anarchistic-
-the antithesis of Socialism. It was anti-State. ..."
---end excerpt---
(and much more found via:
http://www.google.com/search?q=lipset+socialism&hl=en&lr=&safe=off )
-
Lipset's home page (Hoover Institution at Stanford Univ.):
http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/BIOS/lipset.html
-
http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/BIOS/scollist.html
-
http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/
regards,
ep
> -----Original Message-----
> Cherie_Machler_at_gelco.com
> Sent: Thursday, December 21, 2000 8:10 AM
> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
...
> We had a client from the U.K. who had
> their people on-site here in the U.S. One
> of their software guys was surprised to
Received on Thu Dec 21 2000 - 12:39:22 CST
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