ABSTRACT
Pension fund socialism has emerged just at the time when the traditional alignments of American politics seem to be in utter confusion and disarray. Predicting a new alignment for American politics is one of our oldest political sports. Since the earliest days of the Republic, every political alignment and every "majority" has appeared precarious, fragile, in disarray, on the point of unraveling. Yet such alignments, once established, have shown tremendous staying power in American politics. American political alignments change, as a rule, when new major institutions emerge as the result of fundamental shifts in the structure of ownership and in the control of major productive resources. The emergence of the pension funds, therefore, offers the possibility–for the first time perhaps since the 1930s –of a genuine realignment in American politics, a realignment based on the realization that America has achieved her own distinct brand of "socialism".
