Why is the United States the only advanced capitalist country with no labor party This question is one of the great enduring puzzles of American political development and it lies at the heart of a fundamental debate about the nature of American society Tackling this debate head on Robin Archer puts forward a new explanation for why there is no American labor party an explanation that suggests that much of the conventional wisdom about American exceptionalism is untenable Conventional explanations rely on comparison with Europe Archer challenges these explanations by comparing the United States with its most similar New World counterpart Australia This comparison is particularly revealing not only because the United States and Australia share many fundamental historical political and social characteristics but also because Australian unions established a labor party in the late nineteenth century just when American unions against a common backdrop of industrial defeat and depression came closest to doing something similar Archer examines each of the factors that could help explain the American outcome and his systematic comparison yields unexpected conclusions He argues that prosperity democracy liberalism and racial hostility often promoted the very changes they are said to have obstructed And he shows that it was not these characteristics that left the United States without a labor party but rather the powerful impact of repression religion and political sectarianism

Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States? PDF

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