In recent years, Daniel Lazare has emerged as one of the most provocative and insightful critics of the U.S. federal constitution and the superstitious reverence for it which is cultivated by the American political establishment. In his brilliant polemic The Frozen Republic (1996), Lazare subjected American political arrangements to the kind of analysis from which they are usually exempt.¹

Many of Lazare's criticisms of particular features of the U.S. constitutional order -- the grotesquely malapportioned Senate, for example, or the crazy quilt of local jurisdictions-are justified. So is the iconoclastic ridicule he heaps upon the cult of the Founding Fathers. Unfortunately, Lazare's case against the American constitutional tradition is seriously weakened by his socialist ideology and his majoritarian theory of democracy. The American tradition of constitutionalism deserve to be criticized -- but not because it has proven to be an impediment to socialism or simple majority rule.

Marc Versus Madison

Lazare shows the extent of his divergence from the mainstream American center-left when he cites "Marx and Trotsky" as preceptors and looks to "Russian social democrats" in the "polyglot Czarist empire" as models for American reformers. (p.21). Writing in the tradition of the European radical left, Lazare associates "modern" and "democratic" politics with a secular society, economic socialism or comprehensive social democracy, and centralized government, preferably under the control of a working-class-based socialist or social democratic party. For thinkers in this tradition, societies like the United States that have not evolved in these directions are aberrations that must be explained.

Needless to say, if one does not believe that all societies are evolving in the direction of what the economist Robert Heilbroner has called "a slightly imaginary Sweden," one will be inclined to conclude that there may be multiple and equally legitimate paths to "modernity" and "democracy." There is no Sonderweg because there is no single way. To American liberals in the tradition of Herbert Croly and the two Roosevelts, the question "Why no Marxism in America?" is about as interesting as the question, "Why no Positivism in America?" Both Marxist socialism, in its several denominations, and Comtean Positivism were pseudoscientific nineteenth-century secular religions. Versions of each were adopted by modernizing elites in peripheral countries, like Russia, China, Brazil and Mexico (whose leadership put the Comtean motto "Order and Progress" on the flag). Just as Comte's "science of society" never had much influence in the United States, so Marxist socialism never gained much of a foothold beyond the beach-heads established by European immigrant minorities like the German, Scandinavian and Russian/Eastern European Jewish diasporas in the Northeast and the prairie states.

The Non-Saliency of Class

Perhaps the favorite topic of the marginal American radical left has been the absence of class-based parties in the United States. Lazare's contribution to this debate is to assert that the adoption of proportional representation in the U.S. after the Civil War (a reform that was actually proposed by one Reconstruction Republican congressman) "might have provided the opening wage for a genuinely interracial socialism -- not just a socialist movement, one might add, but a disciplined, unified socialist party" uniting "educated Northern workers, immigrants, and barely literate Southern blacks." (p.21).

Perhaps, but almost certainly not. The replacement of plurality voting by PR in the 1860s or 1870s would not have reduced the hostility between largely Catholic immigrants workers and their black competitors in northern cities; at best it would have strengthened the anti-Southern Bourbon alliance of Northern Protestant elites, Southern blacks and some white Southern Populist. The enduring cross-class alliances between the elite in one section and non-elites in the rival section are the result of deeply rooted conflicts of interest and identity among American groups, not artifacts of either the constitutional structure or the electoral system.

At the end of the twentieth century, we now have enough examples of democratic regimes to know that parties based on class affiliation rather than other aspects of identify -- regional, ethnic, linguistic, religious -- are the exception, rather than the rule. American politics has often revolved around "culture war" issues like abortion or prohibition, which have symbolized clashes between ethnic groups, races or subcultures -- Protestant "drys" versus Catholic "wets," evangelical conservatives versus secular feminists. Similar patterns are familiar in other democracies. In parliamentary Canada, the party system is Balkanized along regional and linguistic lines, not class lines. Regional partisanship is important in European democracies like Italy and Germany and Asian democracies like South Korea. Even in Britain, with its Labour and Conservative parties, the pattern of partisan alignment has as much to do with region and ethnicity -- the Celtic periphery versus the English ethnic core -- as with socio-economic class. Since most democracies are parliamentary regimes with PR voting, and since few democracies have consistent and competitive "labor parties," the reason for the absence of one in the U.S. cannot be that the federal constitution or the plurality voting system is an impediment.

Primordial Ties and Wishful Thinking

In many democracies, then, class alignments are fairly weak, compared to "primordial" ties, particularly where there are deep and enduring cleavages among sub-national communities defined by race, religion, region or other non-economic factors. Marxists may wish that most democratic party systems were organized around debates over the means of production, but they are not, and it simply will not do to dismiss all of the non-economic concerns of real voters in real democracies as trivial diversions by "bourgeois" parties-particularly given the fact that many of the intellectuals and activists of "proletarian" leftist parties are so seldom proletarians themselves. Confronted with the fact that the majority in most democracies, including a majority of the working class, rejects radical leftism, middle-class leftists often console themselves with the thought that the "people" have been brainwashed by "the capitalists" or "the interests." Of course, if the people are really so stupid and vulnerable to propaganda, one must wonder whether they are capable of self-government at all.

Indeed, it can be argued that there is a method in the madness of communal politics. After all, one's class membership is more easily shed than one's ancestry or one's accent. An upwardly mobile Scot may no longer belong to the working class -- but he is still a Scot. It is not unreasonable, then, to base one's political affiliation on identities more stable and clear than class or vocation, particularly in modern societies, in which class identification is so baffling (is a salaried middle manager with little personal wealth a member of the "bourgeoisie" or a white-collar "proletarian"?)²

Determined to attribute most of what the radical left dislike about American society and American culture to the federal constitution, Lazare makes some implausible, if ingenious, arguments:

"Popular sovereignty was stillborn as a result [of the federal constitution], and the U.S. was prevented from modernizing itself constitutionally or politically. Or, to put it more precisely, it was encouraged to seek out economic and geographical expansion as a substitute for political modernization. This explains why, two centuries later, amid all the subdivisions and shopping malls, America is home to so many Christian fundamentalists, heavily-armed militia members, creationists, and other rebels against modernity."(p.27).

Scots-Irish Immigrants and Militia Movements

This account of U.S. history is puzzling. In exactly what way was "geographic expansion" into Florida, the Louisiana Territory, Texas and California and the Southwest a "substitute for modernization"? In what way were plantations and ranches in former French, Spanish, Mexican or American Indian territory "substitutes" for, say, the adoption of improved voting techniques in seaboard cities? Alexander Hamilton, who was nothing if not a modernizer, favored U.S. territorial expansion into French and Spanish territory to the South and West -- by force, if necessary. Another modernizer, Lincoln's Secretary of State William Seward, favored American expansion and speculated that ultimately the capital of the enlarged United States would be Mexico City! The fact that the North was the home both of American industry and of American anti-expansionism was a coincidence. The chief influences on nineteenth century Northern opposition to expansionism were political (fear that enlargement would augment the power of the South) and moral (thanks to the cultural legacies of Puritans, Quakers and Teutonic Pietists, the American North has consistently been more hostile to military establishments and foreign wars than the American South).

Nor can the U.S. constitution be invoked to explain why "America is home to so many Christian fundamentalist, heavily-armed militia members, creationists, and other rebels against modernity." The actual reason is the fact that the Highland South was settled in the eighteenth century by Scots-Irish immigrants from Ulster, many of whose distant cousins in contemporary Northern Ireland are "heavily-armed