ABSTRACT
In the United States the weakness of socialism as an ideology has frequently been noted. Numerous reasons have been advanced, including the absence of feudalism, the influence of the frontier, the relative affluence of the American working class, federalism, and the extensive ethnic and racial diversity. Arguably the emphasis of American dominant ideology on political equality has also hampered efforts to organise Americans along class lines. Jerome Karabel has pointed to what he sees as the extraordinary power of the doctrine of ‘popular sovereignty’ in American political development, while others have stressed the importance of notions of political equality and democracy to American national identity. Leon Samson, writing in the mid-thirties, saw the ‘pseudo-socialistic’ idea of American democracy, and the belief in individual upward mobility, as overriding and concealing the reality of class in America, and he also cited Walt Whitman’s poetic vision, his song of America, as representative of the culture’s relative class unconsciousness. 1
