Like clockwork, the long-standing controversy over why the US has no mass labor or socialist party reappears every few years. Labor and the American Left is the latest to address this question, this time “without embracing any form of ‘American exceptionalism’ whatsoever” (4, original emphasis). The author begins with the obligatory discussion of America's problematic electoral system, but what is most interesting about this volume is its discussion of the tension-fraught relationship of the political left with the trade unions. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the drift toward business unionism involved a struggle between socialists and the Gompers-led “pure and simple” unionists within the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The rise of the Socialist Party and a challenge from the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World before World War I seemed to reveal a radicalism in the American working class which early analysts of “American exceptionalism,” such as Sombart (1906), had missed. By the mid-1920s, however, these movements, along with postwar efforts to build a labor party, had been marginalized.

When the labor upsurge of the 1930s took hold, despite a high level of class conflict, the unions, new and old, deepened their alliance with the Democratic Party. Much of the book deals with this problematic relationship and the dilemma it poses for the left. To a large extent, Van Elteren argues, it was the New Deal of the 1930s that defined the limits of the possible for most American labor leaders. Labor's ideology became a form of liberalism that rejected class politics and accepted capitalism with only minor reforms. Following the union leadership, the Communist Party in the 1930s and, much later in the 1970s, the Democratic Socialists of America led by Michael Harrington made the Democratic Party their main focus of activity in hopes of a progressive “realignment” in the two-party system. As the Democrats moved to the right in the late 1930s and again in the 1970s this failing strategy became a barrier to the political independence, visibility, and growth of the socialist left.

Breaking out of this dilemma was no easy task for the left. To address this conundrum Van Elteren draws on the work of Piven and Cloward (1977) to argue that US politics are not moved so much through the ballot box as through disruptive mass social movements. It was the labor upheaval of the 1930s, with its mass strikes and sit-ins, that made the New Deal possible, while the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, characterized by mass marches and civil disobedience, brought not only civil rights legislation but reforms such as Medicaid and Medicare. The movements were still dependent on the major political parties to enact new legislation, however, and the outcomes were bound to be less than the activists demanded.

Looking at the late 2000s, Van Elteren takes a slight detour from the theme of the book to analyze what passed for the major “movement” of the period, the right-wing Tea Party movement. Though the Tea Party reflects the malaise of recent years, he argues, it is based in the more-prosperous-than-average middle class than in the working class, is supported in various ways by business figures such as Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers, and has more of an “AstroTurf” than a grassroots character. At the same time, the author notes a shift to the left in American opinion, reflected in a series of polls that reveal, among other things, the almost inexplicable finding that 43 per cent of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds think socialism is a good idea. Yet when the book was written movement on the left remained relatively marginal. Since its publication, however, the question arises whether the “Occupy Wall Street” movement is a harbinger of the sort of upsurge he projects.

Labor and the American Left has its weaknesses. For some reason it relegates many important details to twenty pages of long endnotes. This takes some significant actors out of the narrative, for example the Trotskyists and Mustyites in the crucial 1934 strikes. More recent successful left–labor initiatives such as the Teamsters for a Democratic Union and the widely read publication Labor Notes are neglected as well. Nevertheless, Labor and the American Left should be read as the latest contribution to the ongoing debate as to why America is different, if not exceptional.