The United States has a long and proud revolutionary tradition starting with the revolt against the British, continuing with the abolitionist movement, the workers' struggles in the 1930s and the civil rights movement.
I get the feeling that because the United States has a revolutionary tradition, that it means that they're ripe for socialism. However, you need to take a look at what ideologies fueled those movements. For example, the Russian Revolution was fueled by Communism molded by Karl Marx/Friedrich Engles and Vladimir Lenin. The French Revolution was fueled by republicanism molded by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire.
The American Revolution on the other hand was fueled by liberalism molded by John Locke, Adam Smith, and Thomas Paine. The incredibly individualistic ideals of classical liberalism was a cornerstone in the founding ideologies of the United States with Jeffersonian Republicanism and Hamiltonian Liberalism. And the
Declaration of Independence is a very liberal document originally stating "life, liberty, and the pursuit of property." Hell, there is actually strong arguments that the American Revolution was more of a conservative revolution that was fighting for a return to the status-quo before the Seven Years War. The founding principles of the United States just really aren't compatible with that of what Marx envisioned in the
Communist Manifesto and
Das Kapital.
Or lets move onto the Abolitionist Movement, which was also fueled by liberalism. Many abolitionists, particularly in New England and New York, believed that the liberal ideals expressed within the
Declaration of Independence should be extended to blacks as well and that slavery was incompatible with the ideals of our Founding Fathers. Some such as Henry David Thoreau and William Lloyd Garrison took it a step even further by rejecting the
U.S. Constitution saying that by allowing slavery, it was an illegitimate document because it contradicted the
Declaration of Independence.
The labor movement made major gains in the 1930's simply because capitalism was on its knees during the Great Depression. If the Great Depression didn't happen, it would have been a very different scenario.
And the Civil Rights Movement, while many of its leaders strayed away from liberalism, still wasn't completely incompatible with it. What the demonstrators were wanting, were the rights that were already guaranteed to them by the
Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Amendments.
Much of this, of course, is not taught in American schools, where instead of looking at the role played (for example) by trade unions, the Communist Party and radical agitators in pressuring reforms, as well as the ruling class' fear of the Soviet alternative, children are taught to view policies such as the New Deal as something that presidents (in this case, Roosevelt) gave to the people out of the sheer goodness of their hearts.
As someone who goes to American schools, I can personally tell you that this is not at all the case. Now I'm not a person who is going to say that teachers are a bunch of radical lefties like my fellow right-wingers like to profess (they really aren't). But they certainly don't teach the way you portray it as.
I'd say there are two main reasons for the negative perception of socialism in the United States today. One is simply the cumulative effect of a century of anti-communist propaganda that utterly demonizes any alternative to capitalism.
I have to completely disagree with you there. To be as blunt as possible, you're just dead wronge. Socialism in the United States has a negative connotation for many reasons, not for the reason you mention though.
First of all, the United States is one of the most liberal nation-states in the world. Both the Democratic and Republican Parties adhere to some form of liberal ideology. The United States was founded upon liberalism. To sum it up, to tell one of the most liberal societies in the world to convert to socialism, would be like telling an extremist Islamic society that they should convert to Christianity. It just isn't going to work very well.
Second, unlike what happened in Europe, the extreme left never really integrated itself into political society of the United States. By the time the Socialist Schism happened and the Socialist faction opted to gain power through elections as opposed to elections, it was too little, too late. Americans were really put off by the actions of the extreme left. The assassination of President William McKinley by anarchist Leon Czolgosz, an unknown person bombing Haymarket Square in Chicago gave the Knights of Labor a terrible reputation and was replaced by the more conservative union American Federation of Labor, the extremist rhetoric of Emma Goldman and others, etc. gave the extreme left a very bad reputation in the United States.
Third, when people think of Communism, they tend to think of Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia, and the Kim Dynasty of North Korea. Say what you may about them and how they don't genuinely reflect what Marx intended with Communism, it still doesn't change the fact that these very brutal dictators gave Communism a bad reputation.
Fourth, just like how capitalism was severely discredited in the 1930's, socialism was discredited in the 1980's with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc. However, unlike capitalism which recovered by the 1940's, socialism has not recovered and is still largely discredited as a feasible economic model. It's why the Socialist International turned away from actual socialism in favor of social democracy.
And finally, the Cold War in which the Communists were the enemies of the United States for about fifty years and the United States emerged triumphant.
Even though societies like the USSR and the People's Republic of China achieved massive economic growth, industrialized backward countries,
The Soviet Union and PRC achieved massive
short-term economic growth at the expense of the long term. Mao's economic policies in his Five Year Plans resulted in terrible famines and the Soviet Union completely ignored basic consumer needs. And there's a reason why China has also abandoned Communism in favor of state-run capitalism.
virtually eliminated illiteracy and drastically reduced inequality while improving the status of women and offering full employment and a range of social services such as free health care and education, we are trained from childhood to focus only on the negative aspects of those societies.
The West has done those things too.
It's important to note that anti-communist orthodoxy generally treats the more repressive elements of those societies as something inherent in communism itself as an ideology.
The problem is that Marx's ideology is so flawed that it results in authoritarian governments pretty much 100% of the time. It failed to take into account basic human nature which is overall pretty self-interested.
The elephant in the room that nobody ever talks about is the role of imperialism, particularly U.S. imperialism, which wages non-stop campaigns of destabilization against any country perceived to threaten its interests (particularly one touting an alternative economic model).
There are countries that are worse than the United States in terms of imperialism. The United Kingdom and France are far more guilty than the United States. The Soviet Union and PRC are just as guilty as the United States in terms of imperialism.
For example, immediately after the USSR was formed in 1917 -- at which time it was already in a poor state due to the effects of the First World War -- it was immediately invaded by more than 20 foreign armies in addition to the opposing Russian White armies. When you've fought a world war and a civil war that devastated your country and left millions impoverished and hungry, these are hardly the ideal conditions to start constructing socialism, which by definition implies the existence of plenty rather than scarcity. If you're trying to distribute items in a society dominated by scarcity, the role of the state will inevitably increase.
Don't act as if the Bolsheviks are innocent victims because they're not.
First of all, the Allies that entered into Russia following the Russian Revolution did so because Lenin and the Bolshevik government asked them to. Even though Russia signaled its intentions to surrender, Germany continued to press on by moving into Finland (then Russian territory) and were advancing into Petrograd. Knowing that they had no ability to keep fighting the Germans should they enter Russia proper, they asked the Allies to come in so they could defend areas surrounding Petrograd while the Bolsheviks transitioned to Moscow and they wanted a stronger hand in the negotiations surrounding the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The motivations of the Allies were that they wanted to protect the supplies that were stationed in the port city of Murmansk (they didn't want neither the Germans or Bolsheviks to get their hands on them) and hoped to restore the Eastern Front. The Allies had no desire to overthrow Lenin at first because they were concerned with more pressing matters at the time.
Lenin's government also did a lot of things to antagonize the Allies. They weren't very happy that Lenin's government was not willing to continue fighting the Germans. The German victory on the Eastern Front made things very difficult for the Allies. They also didn't like how Lenin was advocating socialist revolutions throughout the world, particularly in industrialized nations (United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan). And when the Allies were stationed in Russia (at Lenin's request), the Russians weren't very cooperative hosts. The final straws that broke the camels back though were how the Bolshevik government screwed over the Czech Legion and betrayed their words and treated the Allies in Murmansk as invaders. And from what I recall, the Russians fired first against the Allies (again how I stress how they were invited there)
From the Trotskyist point of view, as well, it's impossible to construct "socialism in one country" (as Stalin argued) because every country is connected to the world economy. The Russian Bolsheviks after the October Revolution were depending on assistance from an advanced capitalist country that would have its own revolution -- in this case, Germany. When the German Revolution failed in 1918, the USSR was left to its own devices.
Still doesn't excuse how Lenin ignored democratic elections that did not go his way, or the Red Terror that Lenin's regime in 1918 which resulted in the deaths of somewhere between 50,000 to 1 million Russians murdered by the Cheka, or the concentration camps his regime built.
Anti-communist propaganda, of course, deliberately ignores all this context. Instead, communism is portrayed as inherently gray, dreary and oppressive, with leaders who apparently sit around plotting how to starve as many of their citizens as possible. I should just add that if one were to treat "capitalism" as an ideology in the same way that we treat "communism" you would be laughed out of the room. When we talk about famines in China, people will say "Mao killed 30 million people!" (the professional anti-communist can make up any ridiculous number they want with the assurance they they will rarely be asked to justify them). The equivalent would be saying that the tens of thousands of people who die in the United States every year because they can't afford health care were personally murdered by the president.
I can't even take this part seriously.
(If we were to tally the deaths that one could attribute to "capitalism", of course, the numbers would absolutely dwarf numbers caused by "communism".
Just no. When you take into account Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, the Kim Dynasty, and Mao Zedong, not even the atrocities of right winged regimes such as Nazi Germany or Western imperialism can compare to what the brutal Communist regimes did.
Also, capitalist societies did not directly contribute to the policies that created the problems you mention, unlike the War Communism Policies of Lenin or the Five Year Plans of Stalin and Mao.
How many people died due to slavery, colonialism, or in the two world wars that were caused by the desire of rival powers to divide the globe in their efforts to control markets and resources? How many children even now die of starvation or from easily preventable diseases every day? You get my drift.)
You really cannot blame starvation and "preventable" diseases on capitalism. The death tolls would have most likely been far worse if such things happened under the Communist regimes (particularly those of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and the Kims).
The other major factor in negative connotations of socialism in the United States -- and intertwined with years of anti-communist propaganda
Basic facts and conceptions are not "propaganda," a lot of the negative conceptions that Communism has, is Communism's own fault.
-- is the fact that the United States for much of the 20th century was the world's richest nation, particularly during the boom that resulted from the opening of new markets after its victory in World War II. Like other Western nations (which were richer to start with because of their imperialist exploitation of the rest of the world), workers in the United States had agitated for better conditions and wages in the previous few decades, and after the war the ruling classes in those countries were even more likely to accommodate those demands for fear of the Soviet counterexample. So it was in that period that you saw many progressive developments such as public pensions (Social Security), public health care (Medicare and Medicaid in the U.S.) and poverty reduction programs.
Actually Lyndon Johnson can be attributed far more to advancing those causes than workers.
In such conditions, with the average family able to afford a car, a house and a vacation once a year, it was easy to think that this was the new normal, that things would always be this way. At the same time, any threat to the existing order could always be countermanded by pointing to the more unsavoury aspects of Stalinist governments and saying, "You want socialism? There's socialism for you!" Better the devil you know, the thinking went, to the point where even much of the "left" ended up buying into the anti-communist orthodoxy. Today, of course, with capitalism in crisis all those hard-won gains from the past are being clawed back in the name of "austerity".
Except capitalism really isn't in crisis.
There's one other factor I forgot to mention. Whenever radical left movements have cropped up throughout the history of the United States, more often than not they have been greeted with savage violence in partnership with the state. In the South under segregation, for example, the Communist Party attracted huge numbers of black supporters, which led to the state partnering with the Ku Klux Klan to brutally repress these movements.
Similarly, the rise of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s was seen as a radical threat by the state and its repressive arms such as the FBI. While often mischaracterized as "black nationalists", the Panthers were in fact revolutionary internationalists heavily influenced by Mao. One of the ways that the state dealt with the threat of the Panthers was through harassment, intimidation and the physical extermination of its leadership (look up the tragic fate of Fred Hampton), which helped weaken such radical organizations over time.
You can blame the Cold War for that where the United States assumed that EVERYTHING related to Communism was automatically evil. Joseph Stalin did everything he could to reinforce the negative connotations associated with Communism during that timeframe.
Even today, the state is remarkably quick to target and destroy movements it perceives as a threat. Just look at how quickly the Obama administration co-ordinated law enforcement agencies across the country to destroy the Occupy movement.
The Occupy movement destroyed themselves the same way the Tea Party Movement is now. The "99%" talking point was a terrible one, many of the "protesters" lacked genuine convictions (my sister took part in the Occupy Wall Street protest just for the experience, she had no idea what they were protesting about), they were being a massive inconvenience for the people that lived in the areas, and the protests in New York were littered with sexual assault problems.
So I guess that's how I would summarize the three most important factors in the negative perception of socialism in the United States -- the ideological, the economic and the coercive. That said, the onset of the economic crisis in 2008 has dramatically shaken many people's previous assumptions and you never know what the future may hold...
People have moved on from 2008 dude. Americans are also notoriously short minded
