A funny thing happened on the way to the collapse of market capitalism in the face of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. It didn't. Indeed, in Germany voters relieved Chancellor Angela Merkel of the necessity of cohabiting with a left-wing party, allowing her to form a new coalition with a party favoring lower taxes and free markets. And in Pittsburgh leaders representing over 90 percent of the world's GDP convened to figure out how to make markets work better, rather than to hoist the red flag. The workers are to be relieved, not of their chains, but of credit-card terms that are excessively onerous, and helped to retain their private property -- their homes.

All of this is contrary to expectations. The communist specter that Karl Marx confidently predicted would be haunting Europe is instead haunting Europe's left-wing parties, with even Vladimir Putin seeking to attract investment by re-privatizing the firms he snatched from their owners. Which raises an interesting question: why haven't recent economic turmoil and rising unemployment led workers to the barricades, instead of to their bankers to renegotiate their mortgages?

It might be because Spain's leftist government has proved less able to cope with economic collapse than countries with more centrist governments. Or because Britain, with a leftist government, is now the sick man of Europe, its financial sector in intensive care, its recovery likely to be the slowest in Europe, its prime credit rating threatened. Or it might be because trade unions, greedily demanding

All of those factors contribute to the unexpected strength of the right in a world in which a record number of families are being tossed out of their homes, and jobs have been disappearing by the millions. But even more important in promoting reform over revolution are three factors: the existence of democratic institutions; the condition of the unemployed; and the set of policies that have been developed to cope with the recession.

Democratic institutions give the aggrieved an outlet for their discontent, and hope that they can change conditions they deem unsatisfactory. Don't like the way George W. Bush has skewed income distribution, toss the Republicans out and elect a man who promises to tax the rich more heavily. Don't like British prime minister Gordon Brown's massive tax increases, toss him out and hope the Tories mean it when they promise to lower taxes. Result: angry voters but no rioters, unless one counts the nutters who like to break windows at McDonald's. Contrast that with China, where the disaffected have no choice but to take to the streets. Result: an estimated 10,000 riots so far this year protesting job losses, arbitrary taxes, and corruption.

A second factor explaining the left's inability to capitalize on economic suffering is capitalism's ability to adapt, demonstrated in the Great Depression of the 1930s. While a gaggle of bankers and fiscal conservatives -- the latter including Franklin D. Roosevelt in his early incarnation as a deficit-cutter -- held out for the status quo, FDR and his experimenters began to weave what we now call a social safety net. In Britain, William Beverage produced a report setting the stage for a similar, indeed stronger, safety net in the UK. Continental European countries recovering from World War II did the same. So unemployment, as unpleasant as it surely is, no longer dooms a worker to close-to-starvation. Yes, civic institutions were able to soften the blow for the unemployed before the government safety net was put in place, but they could not cope with massive, protracted lay-offs.