Weinstein responds.

• Author: Weinstein, Jim
• Position: Letters to the Editor - Letter to the Editor

After a few perfunctory kind words about me, Matthew Rothschild proceeds to review The Long Detour: The History and Future of the American Left with breathtaking disregard for what I actually wrote ("An Unheroic Left," October issue).

In the book, I argue that a coherent left in the United States has not existed since about 1920, when the loosely decentralized Socialist Party provided the basis for shared universal principles that gave a common bond to a wide range of reform programs--movements for such things as Social Security, unemployment insurance, the eight-hour workday, civil rights, protected free speech, and even "free love" and birth control.

I assert that Socialist education and agitation succeeded in bringing these ideas and programs into the mainstream of American life during the Progressive Era, and thereby helped to humanize a brutally corrupt American capitalism as it emerged into the era of giant corporations that we know today. Success, I write, was possible because the Socialist Party's ideas were in tune with American capitalism's developmental path as it emerged from the fiercely competitive years of the late nineteenth century to one of corporate bureaucracy. But even as it entered the mainstream of American politics, the party's limitations became apparent. And after World War I, the Soviet experience disrupted the left, stood the public meaning of socialism on its head, and made the party unable to focus on the changes of this new era.

By the New Deal years of the 1930s, when the labor movement and other radical movements developed independently, both the Socialist and Communist parties were relegated to the sidelines. In other words, while traditional Socialist ideas had entered the mainstream of American political discourse by the '30s, the idea of socialism was increasingly identified with the...