Читать книгу American Democracy in Context - Joseph A. Pika - Страница 42

Libertarianism opposes government intervention of any sort, favoring maximum individual freedom for people to make their own decisions, and so it falls in the lower-left part of the grid. It is a minor ideology in terms of its numbers of supporters (the Libertarian Party received only 3 percent of the votes in the 2016 presidential election), but it has played a more significant role in our political discourse than those numbers suggest. Ron Paul, a libertarian, ran fairly strongly in the Republican presidential primary elections in 2012, getting as much as 30 percent of the vote in some states; his appearances on college campuses, especially, drew large and lively crowds. His son, Rand Paul, also a libertarian, has served in the United States Senate since 2010 as a Republican.

The libertarian ideology is simple: On the economic issues dimension, libertarianism coincides with conservatism, opposing the use of government programs to promote economic equality, but on the social issues dimension, it coincides with liberalism, opposing government restrictions on personal behaviors. Libertarianism is in fact the survival of classical liberalism, discussed on page 14, and as such, is deeply rooted in the history of American thought.

conservatism In the United States, the ideology that supports government intervention on behalf of religious values but opposes intervention in the economic sphere.

liberalism In the United States, the ideology that opposes government intervention on behalf of religious values but supports intervention in the economic sphere to reduce inequality.

libertarianism In the United States, the ideology that opposes government intervention in any area of people’s lives.

The upper-right part of the grid, characterized by support for government intervention in both dimensions, is unlabeled because there is no well-organized American ideology that falls in that part of the grid. In many European and Latin American countries, this part of the grid is filled by Christian–Democratic ideology; for instance, Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, heads a Christian–Democratic party (see this chapter’s “Picture Yourself” feature for more on values and ideology in Germany). Christian Democrats favor government intervention in support of religious values and also favor governmental economic and regulatory intervention to ensure fairness.

This combination of positions has never caught on strongly in the United States. There are, of course, some Americans who fall into this part of the grid; they often describe themselves ideologically as economically liberal but culturally conservative. However, no single term captures this combination of positions, and no structured organizations, think tanks, or political parties represent it. It may be that such an ideology has had difficulty taking full hold in the United States because of Americans’ strong predisposition to individualism.

Two ideologies that originated in Europe but never took a strong enough hold in the United States to become significant are socialism and fascism. Because some American political figures are occasionally mislabeled as socialist or fascist, we will briefly introduce these ideologies here for the sake of clarification and to help you better understand how they are used in American political rhetoric.

Socialism developed out of conflicts between workers and employers in Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—conflicts that were much more intense than similar conflicts in the United States. The socialist ideology at that time called for workers to take over the power of the state (either through elections or by revolution) and then use the state to control the economy by taking over and running all major industries. The end result was intended to be a society of equal citizens, with no economic or social distinctions among them. Socialism was a minor political force in the United States in the early twentieth century, reaching its high point in 1912 when its presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs, received 6 percent of the vote nationally. Today, “socialist” parties in Europe have largely abandoned the goal of having governments take over industry but rather are democratic, free-market parties that favor policies to reduce economic inequalities. In the United States today, some politicians on the left, such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, use the term democratic socialist in this sense to describe themselves.

Particularly since the 2016 election, some Americans on the left are identifying themselves as democratic socialists, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was elected to the House in 2018.

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socialism An ideology that favors having the government take over most businesses and run them in the interest of social and economic equality.

fascism A nationalist, racist ideology of the 1930s that centered power on a single charismatic leader.

comparison Comparing aspects of a country’s government and politics to those aspects in other countries to better understand their causes.

historical analysis Examining the way politics has developed over time in a country in order to understand how its development has helped to shape its current form.

It has always been puzzling why there never was a large socialist party in the United States, given that throughout much of the twentieth century, socialism was a major political force in many other parts of the world. Perhaps the most succinct analysis was offered by Friedrich Engels, one of the founders of the international socialist movement, in a letter to an American friend. Engels attributed socialism’s weakness in the United States to (1) the system of elections, which makes it harder to succeed with a new party than in most countries (we will look at this topic in detail in Chapter 8); (2) immigration and slavery, which had established a patchwork quilt of Irish, Germans, Czechs, African Americans, and others in which politics was dominated by disputes between ethnic groups rather than between workers and capitalists; and (3) the prosperity of the country, which gave workers a living standard better than anywhere else.¹⁹

Fascism was a nationalist, often racist ideology that flourished in Europe in the 1930s in the midst of the Great Depression and the devastation of World War I. Leaders such as Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy adopted a showy, militaristic style of politics centered on a single, charismatic leader (themselves). A credible fascist movement in the United States has never come about, although some white power movements have adopted many of the symbols of fascism, such as the lightning bolt or the Nazi swastika.