Was America viewed as being to the left of most of Europe in the 19th Century?

[darklordoftech]

I ask because I know that most of Europe disenfranchised people who didn’t own property until the 20th Century and much of Europe had monarchs with real power.

[MABA 2020]

I believe it was yes and Russia ironically enough was the most right wing nation in 19th Century Europe.

[Sumner 1868]

There's a moment in the Sherlock Holmes story A Study In Scarlett where it's mentioned that the Daily Telegraph portrays America as being overrun by socialists.

[PSOL]

Maybe you can make the case that compared to England and other Monarchist states, post-1865 America was immensely progressive, but that falls apart pretty quickly in the 1880s and the end of reconstruction.

Compared to France and the Low Countries, the argument doesn’t work, and it can be argued that late 18th century America was very similar to western German states.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Until the 1870s it was the only example of a large nation managing to maintain a stable democracy (at least in its minimalistic sense as a system without class barriers to political participation) in the modern world, which certainly placed it to the "left" of most European countries at the time. Third Republic France joined it after 1871, with some fits and starts, and then most of Europe only embraced democracy after WW1.

[PSOL]

Until the 1870s it was the only example of a large nation managing to maintain a stable democracy (at least in its minimalistic sense as a system without class barriers to political participation) in the modern world, which certainly placed it to the "left" of most European countries at the time. Third Republic France joined it after 1871, with some fits and starts, and then most of Europe only embraced democracy after WW1.

See even that is pretty much wrong. New Zealand and Australia broadly had more of the population legally able and safely allowed to vote in the 1890s than the US and had better labor rights than the US. Even in Australia the Aboriginal population could have easier access to vote in certain areas earlier than what amounts to 10-15% of the black vote barred since the civil rights act.

Swedish and Finnish democratic periods had much more freer elections all in the middle of the 1700s. The North German Confederation had a more progressive government if we were to look at voting rights. This is not even looking at the fact that the the Labor parties of the late 1800s were defining what was considered egalitarian at the time and could be seen as major movements in Europe regardless of suffrage or not.

[Death of a Salesman]

Until the 1870s it was the only example of a large nation managing to maintain a stable democracy (at least in its minimalistic sense as a system without class barriers to political participation) in the modern world, which certainly placed it to the "left" of most European countries at the time. Third Republic France joined it after 1871, with some fits and starts, and then most of Europe only embraced democracy after WW1.

See even that is pretty much wrong. New Zealand and Australia broadly had more of the population legally able and safely allowed to vote in the 1890s than the US and had better labor rights than the US. Even in Australia the Aboriginal population could have easier access to vote in certain areas earlier than what amounts to 10-15% of the black vote barred since the civil rights act.

Swedish and Finnish democratic periods had much more freer elections all in the middle of the 1700s. The North German Confederation had a more progressive government if we were to look at voting rights. This is not even looking at the fact that the the Labor parties of the late 1800s were defining what was considered egalitarian at the time and could be seen as major movements in Europe regardless of suffrage or not.

In 1890, the male population of New Zealand stood at 355,190.  115,886 votes were cast, so 32.6% of males voted (presumably a higher fraction of adult men).

In 1890, the male population of the US stood at 32,067,880. Roughly 9.75 million votes were cast in the 1890 house elections (a 30.4% turnout). 11,383,320 votes were cast in the 1888 presidential election and 12,068,037 votes were cast in 1892, so an average of 36.5%.

These are pretty close, but your claim is definitely wrong. The US had broader democratic participation in the 1890s than New Zealand, a tiny island with a broad franchise.

The other claims are bizarre. The old Swedish system gave the vote to about 6% of the population, and had frequent periods of autocratic monarchy. The North German Confederation existed for five years and was replaced by the German Empire, which had a malapportioned lower house and wide aristocratic power. The point about Labor parties is a total non sequitur.

[PSOL]

Turnout doesn’t matter when more of the population is barred or in chains. That just means there was more atomization and less of a civil society in NZ to have strong GOTV machines.

Labor parties were the greatest expression of leftism in the 19th century, so it stands.

[Agonized-Statism]

It depends on whose views you'd want to know in 19th century Europe. Safe to say European reactionaries held the US in contempt as a product of the Atlantic Revolutions, especially early on. Marx for his part seemed to agree with a notion ascribed to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon that the US was "the most progressive nation in the world" in an 1846 letter to Pavel Annenkov, disagreeing with Proudhon more on his approach to ending slavery. He likely saw the US as among the nations closest to proletarian revolution with its bourgeois revolution, industrialization (not as much as Britain, which he was more familiar with and wrote about more, but a noticeable amount), and little in the way of a feudal-aristocratic order outside of LARPing Southern gentry.

The boring answer is that more Europeans would be likely to think this back then, especially those who would agree with Marxist historiography in considering bourgeois democracy to be to the left of the old feudal-aristocratic order. Fewer probably thought so as the century went on for European countries that responded to 1848 with reform.

[Samof94]

I believe it was yes and Russia ironically enough was the most right wing nation in 19th Century Europe.

Russia was an absolute monarchy back then.

[PSOL]

When judging things on both feminism and LGBT rights, England and the Francophone European nations were clearly more advanced on these fronts, or in case of England about equal. Racial views were more progressive in Europe, and language rights and treatment of minorities like Jews were more advanced in North and Central Europe until the end of the 19th century.

Information was very choppy and scant back in the day, so major leaders like Marx or Bukharin had opinions sent by middle class diaspora primarily in the North. The horrors of slavery were not exactly overlooked but not adjusted for size and scope of the American project, as was the prisonhouse of nations in the cities and Manifest Destiny.

[RINO Tom]

When judging things on both feminism and LGBT rights, England and the Francophone European nations were clearly more advanced on these fronts, or in case of England about equal. Racial views were more progressive in Europe, and language rights and treatment of minorities like Jews were more advanced in North and Central Europe until the end of the 19th century.

Information was very choppy and scant back in the day, so major leaders like Marx or Bukharin had opinions sent by middle class diaspora primarily in the North. The horrors of slavery were not exactly overlooked but not adjusted for size and scope of the American project, as was the prisonhouse of nations in the cities and Manifest Destiny.

Progressive =/= whatever you know think was ~better~.

[Aurelius2]

Nobody with a brain cares what Marxists think.

[Samof94]

When judging things on both feminism and LGBT rights, England and the Francophone European nations were clearly more advanced on these fronts, or in case of England about equal. Racial views were more progressive in Europe, and language rights and treatment of minorities like Jews were more advanced in North and Central Europe until the end of the 19th century.

Information was very choppy and scant back in the day, so major leaders like Marx or Bukharin had opinions sent by middle class diaspora primarily in the North. The horrors of slavery were not exactly overlooked but not adjusted for size and scope of the American project, as was the prisonhouse of nations in the cities and Manifest Destiny.

Slavery was already seen as disgusting in most western European cities and was seen as pretty backwards. No wonder "Cotton is King" was not that popular a slogan for any country to aid the confederacy.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

I believe it was yes and Russia ironically enough was the most right wing nation in 19th Century Europe.

Russia was an absolute monarchy back then.

Even more than that: almost all liberals/radicals/socialists viewed Russia and the Tsar as a representative of everything that was evil and backward, with a surprising amount of conspiracy theories about the Tsar himself bankrolling reactionary movements (Marx, for example, was a full on believer).

[Antonio the Sixth]

I believe it was yes and Russia ironically enough was the most right wing nation in 19th Century Europe.

Russia was an absolute monarchy back then.

Even more than that: almost all liberals/radicals/socialists viewed Russia and the Tsar as a representative of everything that was evil and backward, with a surprising amount of conspiracy theories about the Tsar himself bankrolling reactionary movements (Marx, for example, was a full on believer).

Back then leftists could recognize a far-right Russian autocrat as a fundamental danger to democracy. Now a lot of them make up absurd excuses for him and a few even actively celebrate him as an anti-imperialist hero. We really have fallen off...

[PSOL]

I believe it was yes and Russia ironically enough was the most right wing nation in 19th Century Europe.

Russia was an absolute monarchy back then.

Even more than that: almost all liberals/radicals/socialists viewed Russia and the Tsar as a representative of everything that was evil and backward, with a surprising amount of conspiracy theories about the Tsar himself bankrolling reactionary movements (Marx, for example, was a full on believer).

Back then leftists could recognize a far-right Russian autocrat as a fundamental danger to democracy. Now a lot of them make up absurd excuses for him and a few even actively celebrate him as an anti-imperialist hero. We really have fallen off...

So far the greatest supporters of reaktion, imperialism, and Capitalist hegemony come out and are moved by institutions in the United States. Been that way since the late-40s and has not stopped. Russia now is just a shark in a pond dominated by American whales.

[Republican Party Stalwart]

Yes, obviously.

[Republican Party Stalwart]

I believe it was yes and Russia ironically enough was the most right wing nation in 19th Century Europe.

Russia was an absolute monarchy back then.

Ergo right wing by definition.

[Republican Party Stalwart]

Until the 1870s it was the only example of a large nation managing to maintain a stable democracy (at least in its minimalistic sense as a system without class barriers to political participation) in the modern world, which certainly placed it to the "left" of most European countries at the time. Third Republic France joined it after 1871, with some fits and starts, and then most of Europe only embraced democracy after WW1.

See even that is pretty much wrong. New Zealand and Australia broadly had more of the population legally able and safely allowed to vote in the 1890s than the US and had better labor rights than the US. Even in Australia the Aboriginal population could have easier access to vote in certain areas earlier than what amounts to 10-15% of the black vote barred since the civil rights act.

Leftism =/= multiracialism.
Leftism =/= pluralism.
The opposite is true, if anything.

Side note, neither Australia nor New Zealand are in Europe.

Swedish and Finnish democratic periods had much more freer elections all in the middle of the 1700s. The North German Confederation had a more progressive government if we were to look at voting rights.

LOL

This is not even looking at the fact that the the Labor parties of the late 1800s were defining what was considered egalitarian at the time and could be seen as major movements in Europe regardless of suffrage or not.

The fact that the labor movements were more popular among the working class in Europe is, if anything, evidence of the fact that the status quo of European society was to the right of contemporary American society, not the other way around. Also, Europe at the time had a much greater population density, more urbanization and industrialization, and much less free land than in America (a gap widened by the fact that much of America's "free land" was forcibly "cleared" by the American government, another testament to America's leftist lean relative to contemporary Europe), so of course the European proletariat would have been more receptive to it than their American counterpart regardless of which society was to the left of the other at the time.

Information was very choppy and scant back in the day, so major leaders like Marx or Bukharin had opinions sent by middle class diaspora primarily in the North. The horrors of slavery were not exactly overlooked but not adjusted for size and scope of the American project, as was the prisonhouse of nations in the cities and Manifest Destiny.

Manifest Destiny was, if anything, a left/liberal-leaning position within the American Overton Window of the 19th Century.

[Samof94]

I believe it was yes and Russia ironically enough was the most right wing nation in 19th Century Europe.

Russia was an absolute monarchy back then.

Even more than that: almost all liberals/radicals/socialists viewed Russia and the Tsar as a representative of everything that was evil and backward, with a surprising amount of conspiracy theories about the Tsar himself bankrolling reactionary movements (Marx, for example, was a full on believer).

I mean, the Tsar backed the Austrian monarchy during the 1848 revolts in Hungary. The idea of Russia going Communist was obviously unthinkable, especially given how religious Tsarist Russia was.

[ReaganLimbaugh]

Nobody with a brain cares what Marxists think.

is right.

[Georg Ebner]

It was clearly viewed subjectively that way - resulting in the imMigration of hundredthousands of political reFugees from Old Europe - and was it also objectively:
Sure, in the 1820ies England appeared on its way to a revolutionary & radical republic and the mood was in the U.K. leftier than in the U.S. - but did not materialize. Also not Paris 1871 for a longer period. The agitation for socialism&communism was premature. A fairly conservative liberal demoCracy like the USA was the most radical position possible at that time.
Its european counterPart was - what has surprisingly not been mentioned here - SwitzerLand, "the morast of Europe" (v.METTERNICH). The latter called, by the way, the reVolution in Geneve 1847 "the first proletarian revolution in world-history".

P.scr.: The Tsar tried indeed to stabilize England,  France or Austria financially, partly in an extremely generous way (175 years ago He offered far more, than Vienna was - despite being bankrupt - willing to take...) - but the enemies' stories of the horrible spider being everywhere and behind everything and paying everyone was surely another leyenda negra.

[Georg Ebner]

Some here mentioned the NorthGerman Federation and later v.BISMARCK's German (pseudo)Reich because of its universal suffrage for men. But the latter was introduced by v.BISMARCK - after all an "Ultra"<Conservative> - in order to weaken with the masses of cons. peasants the pro- and the anti-democratic Liberals. And the latter had in NorthGermany absolutely the upperHand, whereas the pro-democratic Liberals (the "Radicals" of those days) were strongest in the SW. (Even in the secularised present is FDP in Catholic areas usually more to the left.)
Then they forget, that the federal level was - deliberately, of course - outbalanced by Prussia, which had a plutocratic elec.system until its abolishment by WILLIAM II at Easter 1917 (the deFacto-demoCratization of Germany, an unbloody revolution). A typically Prussian system, so heartless and cold, but also - if You accept its fundament of "those, who pay, must have the say" - abolutely precise, "rational" and fair: The Reich got the indirect taxes and the soldiers, thus affecting everyone, thus universal equal votingRights for all men; the regions the direct ones, thus affecting the wealthy more, thus their votes should deserve a higher worth, too.