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?