Why Americans are Different

It is plainly different because it avoided the world view and the trap that Lenin defined to be at the core of his social thinking:

"Since there can be no talk of an independent ideology being developed by the masses of the workers themselves in the process of their movement the only choice is: either the bourgeois or the socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for humanity has not created a 'third' ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms there can never be a non-class or above-class ideology). Hence, to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn away from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology."

So for all of the “populism” attributed to him, he did not think that people could see the world in their own way and think for themselves. Man, he believed, would need him and his party, despite anything mankind has yet done or is understood to be capable of. East German Communist party organ “Roter Morgen” put it this way, in a similar bid to arrogantly prove its’ indispensability to an otherwise unthinking and humanity, “selfish” to retain its’ dignity:

In 1902 Lenin's book "What Is To Be Done" was published, which had great significance for the struggle against opportunism. In this book Lenin explained that socialist consciousness can not emerge out of the spontaneous workers' movement, but only out science, that consequently socialism can only triumph if the workers' movement is connected with the theory of scientific socialism. This connection is the communist party.