What if Americans had a class conciousness?

Titus_Pullo

Banned
What would it take for Americans to develop a class consciousness simillar to Europe in the 19th century or even the 18th century? I know this may seem post 1900, its really pre 1900 as I am looking for possible alternate scenarios to develop immediately after the American Revolution or even after the Civil War for a solid class consciousness to exist within the American social fabric and collective psyche.

Unlike Europeans, Americans seem to lack a class consciousness. Rarely do American politicians pander to a "working class," and rarely do they even use the term, they instead use "middle class". (Europeans seem to have an entirely different concept of "middle class.") Perhaps that's why Socialist political parties and the "welfare state", universal healthcare etc. never really took off in this country and any attempts to formulate it, is immediately shot down with the solid support of even those people that stand to benefit the most from it. A broad-based socialist movement did briefly flourished in the 1900s, attracting support from Oklahoma tenant farmers and miners, lumberjacks from the Pacific North West, Texas populists, Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants in New York, radical members of the International Workers of the World, and many German Americans living in Wisconsin. But by 1921 the American Socialist movement had virtually dissapeared Why?

In Germany, the notion of the welfare state along with the beginnings of universal healthcare were first introduced in the Bismarck period. The English likewise, have a sense of class and belonging to one class or the other. There is a notion of an "English working class" and class loyalty and they consistently vote for political parties conducive to their class interest. Not so in America and there have been lots of arguments why socialism and radicalism never had a solid following in the United States beyond the 1900s. One reason being that Americans have no sense of class consciousness. So what would it take for Americans to develop an English style class consciousness to develop well before the 20th century, and a wholehearted acceptance of the type of welfare state that developed in Germany, England and France? What period of American history would this more likely to happen?
 
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You'd have to fundamentally change American history and society.

The single largest reason we (rightly so) place no importance on class is because the very large majority of Americans are descended from immigrants who were for the most part all the same class, which, added to our Constitutional structure and socioeconomic ideals of anyone being able to be well off if they worked hard, lead to a situation where not only did a class-structure not develop, but was/is to some degree antithesis to American culture and society.
 
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Titus_Pullo

Banned
You'd have to fundamentally change American history and society.

The single largest reason we (rightly so) place no importance on class is because the very large majority of Americans are descended from immigrants who were for the most part all the same class, which added to our Constitutional structure and socioeconomic ideals of anyone being able to be well off if they worked hard lead to a situation where not only did a class-structure not develop, but was/is to some degree antithesis to American culture and society.

That's true to a point, but still doesn't explain why socialism and class consciousness never developed when it became apparent that class indeed did and does exist in the United States, especially during the Industrial Revolution when the wealth gap between rich and poor became increasingly obvious, and the arrival of German and Jewish immigrants with radical ideas int the mid 19th century. German immigrants as well as Jews were especially prominent in leading and instigating labor strikes in the 19th century.
 
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Socialism collapsed in popularity for four reasons;

1. Active opposition to it by the government and elite.
2. The Socialist party made several very bad decisions, including remaining anti-war after we'd entered WWI and public sentiment had shifted to supporting it.
3. The decent into, and support of, more radical forms by a good portion after the above two.
4. Complete collapse into factionalization of which it has never recovered.

Now, after this many of the basic ideas of Socialism (Social security, workers protections, etc.) were passed into law in the 1930's to solve the problems their non-existance was causing and to co-opt the popularity of Socialism and basically take away any of its arguments thus leading to it remaining unpopular.
 
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The CSA breaks away and rots under its own self-imposed impossible situation for a couple of generations, leaving the USA with a much larger immigrant population and a much cleaner and smoother evolution into capitalism.
 
You'd have to fundamentally change American history and society.

The single largest reason we (rightly so) place no importance on class is because the very large majority of Americans are descended from immigrants who were for the most part all the same class, which, added to our Constitutional structure and socioeconomic ideals of anyone being able to be well off if they worked hard, lead to a situation where not only did a class-structure not develop, but was/is to some degree antithesis to American culture and society.

That's the ideological reason. The practical reason is that so long as the Solid South and its quasi-feudal agricultural economy co-existed with the North the USA had a New World system more than a European one of a huge illiterate farming mass coupled with individual rich sectors of industrialism. The existence of the Jim Crow South meant the US class system always had complexities that never existed in any European model.
 
The Working Class in America have a consciousness, and had a one, capitalism is just the only system the American workers ever knew. Find a way to either take away the Robber Barons, or make them far worse.
 

scholar

Banned
That's true to a point, but still doesn't explain why socialism and class consciousness never developed when it became apparent that class indeed did and does exist in the United States, especially during the Industrial Revolution when the wealth gap between rich and poor became increasingly obvious, and the arrival of German and Jewish immigrants with radical ideas int the mid 19th century. German immigrants as well as Jews were especially prominent in leading and instigating labor strikes in the 19th century.
There was still social mobility, and race and ethnicity was more important than class at the time as well.
 

MAlexMatt

Banned
Do you lot know absolutely nothing about the 19th century labor movement in America?

Discussions about this kind of thing always seem to be through an ahistorical, modern lens based around contemporary politics, rather than the society and politics of the actual age being discussed.
 
What could be interesting is the first division between the states back in 1812. The North was relatively European, ruled by a mercantile class unconcerned by expansion that wouldn't facilitate trade and was coming to detest slavery.
The South on the other hand, was more 'American' in that they favoured rampant expansion to feed their plantation economy, which relied on slavery. Now IOTL the two exchanged ideas and evolved a new American identity. Much of the modern identity is partly from the early South
 
Now if the ideas of the two halves had been traded in different ways, then the Northern ideals may have won out more over the South. A European style mercantile aristocracy, coupled with Southern agrarian gentry. It is important that the upper class have a class consciousness for the middle and working class consciousnesses to form in opposition to that of the upper crust. Of course this has a number of butterflies. Commercial interests trump expansionist interests, and slavery may die earlier.
 
I see I must do battle with Louis Hartz's ghost once more.

Americans, arguably, have been more prone to intense class conflict historically than many of the so-called bastions of social democracy. The narrative of Americans as all one big happy family of middle class, socially mobile rugged individualists only came into existence after the Second World War. It was a reaction to the power and success of the New Deal coalition, which had created an ambivalence towards whether capitalism or socialism would be the economic future of America.

This was fought with propaganda even before the Cold War began in earnest. The Cold War only gave another tool to a plan that was already in motion. The simple fact of the matter is that the American business class have always been the most class-conscious in the United State: conscious of their own class interests and the danger that organized action from other classes posed to them.

But before that, the left-wing of the Democratic Party were all farmer-labor socialists. Some were so successful as to change the name of their state democratic parties, as was the case for the North Dakota Democratic-Non-Partisan League, and the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

The trade unions were no strangers to ideological discussion either, and many of the most dedicated and effective organizers in the CIO were socialists or communists. And they were largely respected by the rank-and-file.

And in the Progressive Era, it was the "rugged individualists" on the plains and in the Wild West that were most likely to join socialist parties or syndicalist trade unions.

The real defining difference between the American experience with socialism, and those of Europe or Australia is the level of violence employed against workers' movements. See Robin Archer's Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States? (Princeton University Press, 2008), for example.
 
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