Review of American Socialist: Laurence Gronlund and the Power Behind Revolution by Ryan C. McIlhenny (LSU Press, 2025)
Recent months have exposed a stunning paralysis of the broad political center. While the 2024 election fueled MAGA to wildly exaggerate its popular mandate, many liberals and self-described moderates — through an anti-politics that combines resignation with their own sense of ideological predestination — have cited Donald Trump’s victory as evidence to assert yet again that the United States is somehow a “center-right nation.” Of course, basic evidence counteracts such claims. Economic redistribution — from government-ensured health care coverage and tuition-free public college to paid family and medical leave and COVID-19 monetary relief measures — remains broadly popular, and labor and wage laws won sweeping referenda even within so-called red states.
The problem, one might reasonably conclude, is not the rejection of the Left’s stances on core issues — many of which command majority support — but the failure to mobilize a mass political base that can create and sustain a cohesive narrative around economic democracy.
The dependent issue of how to optimally deliver Left ideas to a mass audience is not unique to today. Generations of socialists have attempted to simplify theoretically complex politics and package them in accessible ways for a wide populace. And for many Americans searching for an alternative to the capitalist order during the first Gilded Age, their initial exposure to a serious critique of classical political economy came courtesy of a reformer named Laurence Gronlund — the first person to attempt what historian Howard Quint called “a…
Auteur: Matthew E. Stanley
