RE THE WEAKNESS OF THE CONCEPT OF THE COMMON WELFARE AND THE LEFT IN AMERICAN POLITICS

This is not a big surprise, and is not a recent development.


The American working class movement always was at risk, partly by ideological confusions early in the 20th Century, eg partly by allying with the Russian Revolutionary movement after 1917, during World War I, very importantly.


Ironically, at that time, Democratic sympathy for revolutionary movements, similar, it was erroneously thought, to the American one, so to speak, were common.


The New Deal suffered, then and later, from this sad sympathetic weakness.


These powerful views even polluted ideology during and after WW II until the US then turned hard against Communism, in an equally sad ideological debacle.


Through most of the 20th Century, 
regarding leftism, the US, 
stupidly, 
zigged when it should have zagged, 
and then with McCarthyism, 
zagged when it should have zigged.