I wonder why the US is the least socialist of the industrialized countries?

[Swede]

Every other Western country has three (or more) parties-right-center-and left party. They all have strong labor unions. They all have universal health care. Why is the US different from France,Germany,Canada,Italy etc.?

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

1. Here's why.

"America is the first country to have gone from barbarism to decadence without the usual intervening period of civilization." - Oscar Wilde

[Selatius]

2. We have an older system built on constituent representation instead of proportional representation.

Each congressional district is represented by one person. In the absence of a run-off vote mechanism, Duverger's Law comes into effect. The law basically says in those situations that only two parties will become viable. Third parties, thus, act as spoilers and disturb the power structure. The law is not rock-solid. There are counter-examples, but in general, the trend favors only two viable parties.

Also, we don't have publicly financed elections. This allows business interests an upper hand in the struggle between worker rights and corporate power. In most other countries in Western Europe, this would be considered nothing short of bribery of public officials, punishable by prison time and heavy fines.

[Swede]

5. You should see the federal ballot here in Canada.

There's a Marxist-Leninist candidate AND a communist candidate,right next to the big 3. Plus a marijuana party,and the Rhinos. Not sure what the Rhinos are. You get a pencil,you put an X in the space for the candidate you want.

[PinkTiger]

8. Wow.

That is one of the best-sounding explanations I have ever heard.
Why can't we fix it?
What would we need to do?

[Selatius]

9. Get one of the two entrenched parties to vote to give up power.

In essence, get one of the parties to commit electoral suicide by adopting constitutional reforms that would break the two-party monopoly. It is a paradox. Political parties, historically, never give up power willingly. There must be a struggle between the people and the political leadership to wrest that power away from the leadership.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

3. The closest we came was during the Depression

and FDR himself admitted that he was "saving capitalism."

After World War II, McCarthyism came along, and by the time that was wearing off, we were well into the Reagan administration.

[liberalpragmatist]

4. Institutional barriers, different political cultures

I know it's not necessarily a popular answer on DU, but the U.S. has never been a very collectivist society and most Socialist intellectual movements were centered in and around Europe. North America was more detached from them, as were most countries of the Anglosphere. The British Labour Party was socialist back in the day, but it never went through a Marxist phase like most continental socialist parties. And though Canada has a quasi-Socialist party, the New Democrats, they've never really had a strong Socialist party either.

Of course, there are also institutional factors. We have a winner-take-all system and a 2-party duopoly which limits the ability for third parties to prosper. And our system of checks and balances has pretty much killed most previous attempts at universal health care.

Another factor to consider is that European politics historically was more extreme. Conservatives in Europe were far more hard-right than American conservatives and Socialists were sort of a reaction to that. What happened was that after WWII, all of what had been mainstream conservative movements were thoroughly discredited because ALL of them on mainland Europe allied or cooperated with the Nazis. With the right completely destroyed, the whole spectrum shifted left, so that in most European countries the new "right-wing" parties were what had long been the centrist parties of the late 19th/early 20th century - the Christian Democrats (basically, quasi-Socialist but more traditional and affiliated with the Church).

[Selatius]

7. I think the trend is changing with respect to right wing parties in the US

I think the US Republican Party has grown tremendously extreme. Goldwater would not recognize the party today, neither would Eisenhower.

[w8liftinglady]

6. there used to be a time when lower income people could afford basic health care.

I remember as a kid having to have a lot of dental work.The dentist allowed my parents to pay him $25 a week until the bill was paid.We were a military family with no money.Times have changed.

[Kutjara]

10. Part of the blame has to lie...

...with the persistent "frontier" myth of rugged individualism and self-reliance that's deeply ingrained in the national psyche. To a greater or lesser degree, most of us have a little Davey Crockett or Daniel Boone running around in the backs of our heads, telling us that cooperation, collective effort and looking after the less advantaged is weak and unAmerican.

[DutchLiberal]

11. Because of the 'American Dream' and Horatio Alger

Michael Moore devoted a chapter of his book 'Dude, where's my country?' to this problem. Basically he's saying, and I agree, that Americans are being taught from when they're little that they will make it in life, they will get rich, they will fulfill their dream and they will do it on their own. And if you can become rich on your own, why should you look at for your fellow man? Let him look at for himself. If he's poor, it's his own fault, because everybody can get rich with 'the American dream'...

In The Netherlands, the 'House of representatives' has 150 seats. We've got three left-wing parties: the Socialist Party (26 seats), the Green Party (7 seats)and the Labor Party (33 seats). There are three center parties: the 'Democratic Party' (3 seats), the Christian Democratic Party (41 seats) and the Christian Union (6 seats). There are three right-wing parties: the Christian Reformed Party (2 seats), the People's Party (22 seats) and the Freedom Party (9 seats).

[mnhtnbb]

12. Military industrial complex. Eisenhower warned us.

[iverglas]

13. entrenched patriarchal values

and increasing retrenching behind those values.

http://www.theglobalist.com/DBWeb/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=3501

U.S.-Canada: Just Who's the Docile One?

By Michael Adams | Tuesday, November 30, 2004

Canadians have long been considered more docile than Americans. But as President Bush visits Canada on November 30, 2004, does this stereotype still hold true? Michael Adams — author of "Fire and Ice" — argues that Canadians are emerging as the more liberal and pluralist people. In contrast, Americans are increasingly becoming deferent to authority.

... Group rights, public institutions and deference to authority have abided north of the border — while individualism, private interests and mistrust of authority have remained strong to the south. So much for the officially sanctioned saga. In the last quarter century, some counterintuitive developments have occurred on both sides of the 49th parallel.

Canadians have distanced themselves from traditional authority — organized religion, the patriarchal family and political elites. Peter C. Newman has characterized recent social change in Canada as the movement from deference to defiance.

Worth reading the whole article -- and the book (I'll get around to that some day ...)

http://erg.environics.net/media_room/default.asp?aID=456

... Nearly 20 years ago, my colleagues at Environics in Toronto and CROP in Montreal began a study of Canadian social values. In our first survey of Canadian values in 1983, we asked Canadians if they strongly or somewhat agreed or disagreed that: "The father of the family must be the master in his own house." We posed more than 100 such questions to respondents that year. Our intention was to track these 100 items over time, dropping some, adding others; we hoped we'd measure what was important to Canadians or what was changing in our values and perspectives on life.

... Nineteen ninety-two was the first year we began conducting social-values research in the United States, the world capital of individualism and egalitarianism, of civil rights movements and affirmative action (remember, an American was the first to deflower the feminine mystique). We speculated that the United States would be ahead of Canada and France on this trend.

We found to our surprise that 42 per cent of Americans told us the father should be master, while 57 per cent disagreed and 1 per cent had no opinion. The gap between the two countries was a substantial 16 per cent.

... In Canada, almost everyone was part of this revolution, even men, who by 2000 had only 23 per cent of their numbers in support of dad being boss at home. ...

Meanwhile, we found that where 42 per cent of Americans believed the father should be master in 1992, the number increased to 44 per cent in 1996. ...

This time {2002}, 48 per cent of Americans said the father of the family must be master in his own home; 51 per cent disagreed and 1 per cent had no opinion. We were stunned.

I think Michael Adams has hit the nail on the head.

What he says integrates well with what this writer says, which was re-drawn to my attention here at DU a few days ago:

http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/projects/strategic/nationasfamily/nationasfamily

In American culture there are two opposed and idealized models of the family, the Nurturant Parent model and the Strict Father model. The metaphor of the Nation as a Family maps the values and relationships from those family models onto our politics, creating "liberal" and "conservative" political positions that we understand through our models of family structure.

The progressive worldview represents, metaphorically, the Nurturant Parent family model, and the conservative worldview represents the Strict Father model. The two models come with distinct moral systems that are founded on different assumptions about the world, interpret shared values such as responsibility or fairness differently, and center around different moral priorities.

In other words, our beliefs about what a family should be exert a powerful influence over our beliefs about what kind of society we should build. For instance, those with a strong Strict Father model are likely to support a more punitive welfare or foreign policy than someone with a strong Nurturant Parent model, who are likely to favor more cooperative approaches. Those with a strong Nurturant Parent model are more likely to favor social policies that ensure the well-being of people such as health care and education, whereas someone with a strong Strict Father model would object to social programs in favor of promoting self-reliance.

[mmonk]

14. We narrowed our system down to a two party system

with limited ballot access which limits ideas to some extent. Then we made corporations citizens.