WORLD VIEW:JOHN McCAIN doesn't know whether Barack Obama is a socialist but says his programme of spreading wealth around more fairly sounds a lot like it. Other Republicans are more explicit. The election is a referendum on socialism, says one. "This is no time to experiment with socialism," says Sarah Palin, writes Paul Gillespie.
Suddenly the S-word has entered the mainstream of US political discourse in a way that hasn't been seen for decades - probably since Eugene Debs of the Socialist Party got a million votes in 1920 when he stood against Warren Harding, or during the major popular and working-class struggles of the 1930s which pushed Franklin D Roosevelt towards the New Deal.
That brilliantly emasculated American socialism. It was then effectively rubbed out during the cold war years and became taboo during the neoliberal revolution from the 1980s - doubly so after the collapse of communism in 1989 supposedly demonstrated its political bankruptcy as an ideology.
Unlike European states which reached historic compromises between capital and labour in the 1950s and 1960s, the US does not have a welfare state. It has relied on buoyant economic growth and innovation to fund social mobility and rising living standards for those on the median wage.
On any rational definition Obama is not a socialist, but a skilful and occasionally radical liberal from the US political mainstream. His programme would lift the top rate of income tax from 36 to 39.5 per cent, helping to fund tax breaks for the vast majority earning less than $250,000 a year. Nevertheless it is fascinating that the Republicans and the radical right are resurrecting this terminology.
It coincides with a parallel debate on the politics of class arising from widening income inequalities from the 1980s, surging under George Bush. Part of Obama's skill has been his ability to transform race into class questions in response to the developing financial crisis. If he wins he will face a great challenge to meet expectations by restoring stagnant living standards with resources heavily depleted by the state's rescue of Wall Street - socialism for the rich.
Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, in their 2001 book It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States, applied empirical comparative analysis to this question. They concluded that several deep cultural and historical factors explain why.
Influenced by de Tocqueville's Democracy in Americaand Werner Sombart's study of 1906, Why is There No Socialism in the US?,they concluded that the US's foundational individualism and anti-statism are central, since they militated against the collectivities underlying European socialism. That has made equality of opportunity rather than of outcomes a characteristic of US radicalism. It is more anarchist than socialist.
The US working class's deep heterogeneity, arising from immigration and racial division, is another central reality. A third is the incompetent leadership of the US Socialist Party in the crucial early decades of the last century, when the Democrats established primacy among those social groups who elsewhere would have supported more left-wing parties. Fourthly, the US federal, electoral and party systems systematically fragment socialist and radical movements, diverting them into regional populisms rather than national politics.
These are convincing arguments, but they have been criticised by other scholars and US socialists (they do exist) as too determinist in changing circumstances. It is almost as if the book should have been entitled It Couldn't Happen Here. The US has, after all, been the predominant world political, military and economic power since the 1940s, conferring unrivalled benefits on both its richer and poorer citizens.
What happens as this hegemony recedes? And what if its economic system proves incapable of restoring the popular living standards that have been stagnating since the 1980s?
This latter factor, described as "median wage stagnation" in the policy literature, is taken very seriously indeed by Obama's advisers such as Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin. They say it is necessary to reverse the Bush tax cuts, empower labour and invest in healthcare, education and infrastructure.
Research quoted in the Financial Timesshows the richest 1 per cent of US citizens increased their share of national income from 8 per cent in 1980 to 23 per cent today, whereas between 1940 and 1984 it never exceeded 15 per cent and was in single digits for most of the 1960s and 1970s. Between 2000 and 2006 the US economy expanded by 18 per cent, but median income dropped by 1.1 per cent in real terms; the top 1 per cent rose by 203 per cent and the top 0.1 by a whopping 425 per cent.
As Obama points out, this super-wealth has not trickled down and should be spread around. Throughout US history the population shared in productivity growth, but that stopped after the rich appropriated the increases since the 1980s. US social mobility is now less than in Europe.
There are uncanny parallels with the 1920s. Would Obama be an FDR, or is this a misleading analogy in changed times?
In 1935 Sinclair Lewis published his ironic novel entitled It Can't Happen Here, dealing with how a fascist movement could develop even in the US. This week Martin Wolf warned in the FT that everything must be done to stop this inescapable recession turning into a deep depression - which would be a recipe not for 19th-century laissez-faire but for xenophobia, nationalism and revolution. It is hard to watch the wilder wings of US conservatism this week and not be reminded of the 1930s.
pgillespie@irish-times.ie