If I were socialism, I'd have skipped this country entirely. Imagine an eye in the sky -- a phoenix, a dove, a stormy petrel or a sputnik -- on a scouting mission from the failed revolutions of 1848, or maybe the Paris Commune. Looking down, canting counterclockwise on its powerful left wing, what would it see? From sea to shining sea: long-distance loneliness ... Deer slayers, cowpunchers, whaling captains and raft river rats ... Greed-heads, gun nuts and religious crazies ... Carpetbaggers, claim jumpers, con men, dead redskins, despised coolies, fugitive slaves and No Irish Need Apply ... Land grabs, lynching bees and Love Canals ... Lone Rangers, private eyes, serial killers and cyberpunks ... Silicon Valley and the Big Casino ... IPOs and Regis.

Not exactly the ideal social space for a radical Johnny Appleseed to plant his dream beans. Early on in "It Didn't Happen Here," Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks quote historian Richard Hofstadter: "It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one." And late in the game the authors speak for themselves: "A culture can be conceived as a series of loaded dice" in which "past throws" constrain the present. By then they've comparison-shopped the labor-left all over the world; consulted everybody from Trotsky and Gramsci to Irving Howe and Ira Katznelson; and outlined, rehearsed, staged, critiqued, summarized, reiterated, rewound, rerun and Mobius-looped every conceivable scenario. The odds, they conclude, were so steeply stacked against socialism in America that its defeat was "overdetermined."

Lipset professes public policy at George Mason University and is a fellow at the Hoover Institution. Marks professes political science at the University of North Carolina and directs its Center for European Studies. They are fair-minded, open-handed, flat-footed and lily-livered (that is, value neutral). They aren't saying that socialism deserved to flunk our litmus test because there's something wrong with it. Nor are they saying there's anything right about it, either, unless its washout would help explain why we happen to be the only Western democracy without a comprehensive healthcare system, the only one that doesn't provide child support to all of its families and the worst offender on economic inequality, with a greater gap between rich and poor than any other industrialized nation, double the differential of the next worst down the list. What they do say is that almost everything distinctive and exceptional about America made socialism a harder sell here than in, say, Australia. And that the pigheaded behavior of American Socialists only compounded the problem.

Be warned that Lipset and Marks say these things over and over again, after which they repeat them, in the approved reverse-gear style of academic monographs whose feet, like those of the legendary Mikea Pygmies of Madagascar, point backward to confuse their enemy trackers. And yet I can't think of any crime scene they haven't dusted, nor any suspect they haven't cuffed.

The big picture is that, from the get-go, our "core values" glowed in the dark like Three Mile Island: an ethos of individualism, a Weltanschauung of anti-statism and a blank check from God. We sprang full-blown from John Locke's higher brow, a natural-born hegemony of the bourgeois money-grubbers -- unscathed by medieval feudalism (with its fixed classes of aristocracy and forelock-tugging peasants); exempt from 19th century Europe's ideological power-sharing fratricides (by virtue of early white male suffrage, lots of land, waves of immigrants to assume the lousiest jobs while the native-born upwardly mobilized themselves and a ragtag diversity that undermined nascent class consciousness while permitting the merchant princelings to play workers of different racial and ethnic backgrounds against one another in a status scramble); and insulated from revolting developments -- insurgencies, mutinies, Jacqueries, even mugwumps and goo-goos -- by a political system so partial to the status quo that it's almost arteriosclerotic (a winner-take-all presidency, a fragmenting federalism, a bought judiciary and a two-party Incumbent Protection Society).

So everybody is measured by his or her ability to produce wealth, those who die with the most toys win, anyone who fails to prosper is morally condemned and a vote for Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, John Anderson, George Wallace, Henry Wallace or Robert La Follette -- not even to mention Norman Thomas and Eugene Debs -- is considered to be a waste of franchise.

To be sure, we have had more than our fair share of labor violence. Otherwise, we would never have needed Pinkertons. One recalls, at random, the Haymarket riot, the Homestead strike and the Ludlow massacre; Harlan County and Coeur d'Alene; steelworkers in Chicago and Detroit, textile workers in Lawrence and Paterson, dockworkers in San Francisco, rubber workers in Akron, Ohio, and gravediggers in New Jersey; Joe Hill, Big Bill Haywood, Tom Mooney, Mother Jones; Molly Maguires and Wobblies. But the most depressing chapters in "It Didn't Happen Here" are devoted to a labor movement that had already internalized the all-American ethos of anti-statist individualism before the first left-wing agitator explicated the first contradiction -- a working class needing to lose lots more than its chains. "I'm all right, Jack" and "Less Filling! Tastes Great!" don't add up to "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"