American Politics

A Beginner's Guide

Jon Roper

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781780740058
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

To understand the world events today, you need to understand American politics. Exploring the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, Jon Roper provides a sharp analysis of how history has shaped the way America governs itself. Examining the recent emergence of the right-wing Tea Party movement, President Obama's administration, American foreign policy, and the role of powerful lobbies, this is the perfect primer for anyone interested in the world's most powerful (and controversial) country.

1

Political foundations: “A republic if you can keep it”

Who wrote the documents that laid the political foundations of the United States of America and why do their words continue to inspire Americans? On July 4, 1776 the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that the thirteen British colonies clustered along America’s Atlantic coastline no longer considered themselves part of the British Empire. It was an act of rebellion that inspired what Thomas Paine, the British radical who was a witness to the events, memorably called “a revolution in the principles and practice of government,” transforming politics and international relations forever. In 1787, the Constitution created the United States as a federal republic and a representative democracy in which the government is accountable, through the ballot box, to the people. During the subsequent two centuries and beyond America would become, quite simply, the most powerful and important country in the world. It would promote its democratic ideals beyond its borders as a means of preserving them at home, believing that if its values are shared across the globe, it will have fewer enemies abroad. As the events of 9/11 so graphically illustrated, others do not share that vision.

To understand politics in the United States today, it is still essential to appreciate the audacity of that remarkable constellation of talent – the military heroes, the philosophers and the politicians – who were present at the nation’s creation. The first three Presidents of the United States, George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, were among the most prominent rebels. Had America lost the War of Independence, they might be remembered only as martyrs for their cause. Instead, their achievements are still celebrated. So too are James Madison’s contributions to the development of the nation, as the principle architect of its Constitution and the Bill of Rights and as its fourth President. What they helped to create then endures now. How did they do it?

The immediate political purpose of the Declaration of Independence was simply to invite international recognition for the justice of the American case in the colonists’ fight against imperial control. At the same time, it injected the ongoing war between two Georges – Washington and the British King, George III – with a revolutionary impetus that would ultimately lead to the creation of the government of the United States. Adams consistently argued for the Declaration’s necessity. Together with Jefferson, who drafted it, he saw that those who had rallied to their cause had to provide a philosophical justification for their action. The colonial rebellion could be elevated into a fight for broader political principles. Their transcendent “idea of America” is thus expressed eloquently and concisely in the Declaration’s assertion of self-evident truths: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Jefferson argued that when one form of government infringes those rights, then it may legitimately be changed for another. That was America’s situation, exemplified in the Declaration’s detailed list of colonial grievances against the British King. It was also a powerful indictment of the whole idea of monarchy, demonstrating that Americans like Jefferson and Adams were already thinking beyond their immediate struggle to break away from the British Empire and were considering the new political arrangements that could be made in what they now regarded as self-governing states. There was no prospect of George III in Britain being replaced by King George Washington in America. The post-independence constitutions of the former colonies would be emphatically republican.

The newly independent states were also independent of each other. Would they mirror continental Europe as a collection of neighboring nation-states? If so, would the outcome be political rivalries between them? Events in the decade after the Declaration hinted that this might well be the case. The colonies had united to win the war against Britain and had met together in the Continental Congress. This had agreed the Articles of Confederation, finally ratified in 1781 and intended to set up a limited form of national government. They proved inadequate to the task of arbitrating between states which had competing interests and conflicting priorities. The threat of European powers – Britain and France – exploiting internal instability after the War of Independence came to an end in 1783 led American politicians, most prominent among them Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, to argue for the need to create a stronger central government that would unite the states.

CONTINENTAL CONGRESS

During the American Revolution, representatives from the colonies met in Philadelphia to coordinate the political and military campaigns for independence. After meeting for the first time in 1774 to show the depth of opposition across America to British Imperial rule, Congress reconvened the following year as war broke out, setting up the continental army commanded by George Washington. In 1776, it issued the Declaration of Independence.

ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION

The Articles of Confederation, drawn up by the Continental Congress, were the first attempt to establish a national constitution. The Articles committed the states to a “firm league of friendship” with each other. However, the national government had no powers over taxation or interstate commerce, and was without the capacity to enforce its legislation. The Philadelphia Convention of 1787 was called in order to address these deficiencies, but ultimately decided instead to design a new Constitution that created the United States of America as a federal democratic republic.

In 1787, Adams and Jefferson were both still on diplomatic missions overseas, but George Washington was persuaded to re-enter the political arena as President of the Constitutional Convention that met in Philadelphia. During May that year, delegates from all but one of the thirteen American states – Rhode Island stayed away – started gathering there to discuss a framework for a new national government. Four months later, thirty-nine of the fifty-five who had joined in the debates in Independence Hall signed their names to the Constitution of the United States of America.

A republican constitution

The Convention’s proceedings were kept deliberately confidential so that political differences that might threaten the success of the enterprise were not made public. So on September 18, 1787, when Elizabeth Powel – a prominent member of Philadelphia society who had regularly entertained delegates,including George Washington, during their summer stay in the city – met Benjamin Franklin who, at eighty-one, was the most venerable among those who had witnessed the events inside the Hall, she took the opportunity to ask him what had been achieved. Was the United States to be a monarchy or a republic? The Convention was over and he could be candid. They had agreed, he said, to a form of government which was “a republic if you can keep it.”

Franklin’s reply was deceptively simple. On the one hand, it was reassuring. The Convention had kept faith with Adams and Jefferson. There was no real desire to import the form of government that their generation had rejected back into American political life. On the other hand, there was an awareness that, in designing a republic in which citizens had a say in electing representatives to institutions which had the power to make and execute laws in their names, Americans were making another leap of faith of the kind that had inspired the Declaration of Independence. The sixteen delegates who refused to sign the American Constitution evidently were skeptical about the success of this new experiment and Franklin’s remark suggests that although, along with the other thirty-eight who had been prepared to add their names to the document, he was more optimistic about what had been achieved, he too was fully aware of the challenges that lay ahead. The concern was understandable, because at Madison’s urging the meeting in Philadelphia had agreed to a new approach to the creation of a viable republic. He was confident that it would overcome the instability caused by the alternation of different factions in government, the main political problem that had afflicted America since the colonies had become states. But no one was sure.

Madison believed that the task of the Convention was to “decide forever the fate of Republican government.” By that he meant that its task would be not only to strengthen the union of the states in order to preserve their independence. It had also to find a solution to the political instability that seemed to be endemic across America at that time and which was potentially fatal to the whole idea of representative government. Historically, republican experiments had failed. Madison was among those classical scholars who knew that in the ancient world, the republics of Greece and Rome had eventually collapsed. More recent events might have reminded him that a little over a century earlier, the attempt to do without a monarchy in Britain – Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan commonwealth – had proved to be a relatively short inter-regnum before the restoration. Contemporary events in revolutionary France would soon confirm how quickly republicanism could turn toward civic violence and political turmoil.

During the colonial era, the American experience with democratic government had been limited largely to those New England town meetings that had allowed concerned citizens a voice in local politics. This form of direct participation in decision making was self-evidently confined to small populations. During the War of Independence, Adams and Jefferson had argued the case for popular sovereignty. The new governments of the states that replaced the colonial regimes were based emphatically and universally on the principle of delegated authority. The people chose representatives empowered to make political decisions in the legislature where laws were proposed, debated and either rejected or passed. These law-makers were then held accountable for their actions through what became that most democratic of inventions: the ballot box.

It was this that caused the problem. Elections were based on a simple idea. The candidate with the most votes won. Within state legislatures, a similar procedural device was then employed: those laws that attracted the support of a majority of representatives were enacted. But what happened if a majority was elected to the legislature that proceeded to enact laws in its own interests? This rapidly became the problem that had bedeviled American state governments in the highly politicized post-independence period. Contemporaries – Madison among them – identified it as a disease: the emergence of factions which pursued their own political agendas rather than the common good.

Factional politics created an atmosphere of instability, particularly in those states, such as Virginia, New York and Pennsylvania, that had adopted the radical mantra widely quoted among the revolutionary generation that “Where annual election ends, tyranny begins.” Suspicion that the default position of politicians was to abuse power meant that in many cases majority factions were routinely turned out of office after twelve months. When this happened, a rival political grouping gained control of the legislature but was then subject to the same electoral sanction. Laws passed became laws repealed. In such circumstances, many Americans doubted if republican government could survive. Indeed, it was this concern that led James Madison and others down the road to Philadelphia in 1787. Convinced of the need to refocus Americans on the Jeffersonian ideals that had inspired the move to independence, their mission was nothing less than to reconstruct the idea of republicanism into a workable form of representative government. As representatives gathered at the Convention, however, it became obvious that political compromises would be necessary to persuade states to sign up to a new Constitutional settlement that would create a federal government. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the dispute that arose over the continuing presence of slavery in the South.

Slavery, its existence, its abolition and its legacy, has been a defining issue in the nation’s political life. In remarks he made at the Philadelphia Convention Madison observed that:“It seemed now to be pretty well understood that the real difference of interests lay, not between the large & small but between the N. & Southern States. The institution of slavery & its consequences formed the line of discrimination.” It was a major concern in Philadelphia in 1787 and influenced the eventual framework of government that was agreed there. Ultimately it provoked the South to leave the Union after Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency in 1860. The Civil War ensured its abolition and that the United States survived as a federal republic. But the residual racism that endured for a century and more after the South surrendered at Appomattox continued to haunt American society. Madison was both right and prescient.

Aware of the deep divide between states that maintained slavery and those that did not, at the Convention, the less populous southern states were concerned to preserve their minority political influence within the proposed structure that created the government of the United States. They insisted on the clause in the Constitution which allowed them to count their slave populations in determining the allocation of seats in the federal House of Representatives. Slaves were the “three fifths of all other Persons” who, along with the free citizens of each state, counted for the purposes of apportionment. So the South was initially over-represented in the Congress and, by extension, in the Electoral College that was established to elect the President.

In this sense, it is no accident that of the first six Presidents of the United States, four came from Virginia. Moreover, southern states also had political parity in the federal Senate, where each state was represented by two senators. Such compromises were made possible because of the agreement in Philadelphia that the United States government should be anchored to the principle of federalism, the division of sovereignty that allowed a boundary to be drawn between the centralizing authority of the national government and the preservation of individual states’ autonomy over their internal political affairs. Like many borders, however, this one would be constantly patrolled and often disputed.

Federalism, the separation of powers and checks and balances

It was Madison who ensured his reputation as the driving force behind the shaping of the Constitution by keeping the most complete account of the Convention’s proceedings. This account reveals the way that, throughout the debates, delegates combined an intelligent understanding of political philosophy with an intuitive grasp of political realities. Moreover, it shows that genuine negotiations took place as each state accepted the need to give up some political ground in order to promote the collective security that was the anticipated outcome of strengthening the national government. In essence, this was the idea of federalism. It is nowhere more evident than in the structure of Congress, the legislature that was designed as the centerpiece of the Constitution.

From the outset, Madison attempted to hijack the Convention’s agenda. Instead of allowing it merely to adhere to its ostensible purpose – to discuss revisions to the existing Articles of Confederation – he ensured delegates started by considering a radical new design for a national government. One feature of the Madison-inspired Virginia plan was its proposal for a bi-cameral legislature, in which the two houses would be elected independently and according to different rules, but in both of which the states would have a number of representatives allocated according to their populations. Less populous states saw the immediate political disadvantages in becoming an outvoted minority. The New Jersey delegation countered with its own plan, exploiting the sense of unease that the Convention was overstepping its original mandate and proposing to keep the national legislature that existed under the Articles of Confederation: a single chamber in which each state had equal representation.

Two delegates from Connecticut, Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth, helped to broker the eventual agreement. There would be two houses in the legislature. One of them, the House of Representatives, would be elected by the people and each state’s representation would be determined proportionately by a census of its population. In the other, the Senate, each state would have equal representation, with members elected by the state legislatures. The principle of federalism was enshrined at the heart of the American Constitution. The “Connecticut Compromise” created the federal Congress in the form in which it has since remained: the House of Representatives and the Senate, each with a distinctive role and purpose in the framework of the nation’s government and politics.

The principle of federalism also introduced the potential for the expansion of the United States across the North American continent. Madison was not alone in realizing that “the accidental lucky division of this Country into distinct states” had the equally fortunate outcome of allowing the United States to increase in size according to the federal principle. Additional states were carved from new territories rather than as a result of existing states annexing more land at the expense of others. Moreover, he was convinced that the creation of more states imparted a political dynamic to the republic, allowing a greater diversity of interests to be represented across the nation and avoiding the creation of a fixed permanent majority that would pursue its own interests at the expense of the public good.

Slavery proved him wrong. Its persistence in the South meant that the acquisition and organization of new territory remained a contentious political issue. As the United States acquired fresh land, slave-owning southerners argued that what they came to refer to as their “peculiar institution” should be allowed to spread, while a growing number of northern abolitionists refused to countenance the contamination of slavery entering new territories. Congress brokered compromises. Eventually, however, southern states, increasingly perceiving themselves powerless in the face of an intractable northern majority, took the decision to leave the Union. The collapse of Madison’s republican ideal into the chasm of the Civil War was a result of the collision between different interpretations of federalism, the running political sore of slavery and the inexorable demands of expansionism. Ultimately,the only way to keep the republic,as Abraham Lincoln realized, was to fight for it.

Those gathered in Independence Hall in Philadelphia in 1787 would not have imagined that future for the nation they were attempting to create. Nevertheless, they did have some insight into the way in which the Constitution could create a political framework within which the different functions of government might be accommodated to one another. Federalism was not the only political idea elevated to a constitutional principle. Equally important was the doctrine of a separation of powers. This principle had already established itself in the newly independent states. John Adams had observed that:

a legislative, an executive and a judicial power comprehend the whole of what is meant and understood by government. It is by balancing each of these powers against the other two, that the efforts in human nature towards tyranny can alone be checked and restrained.

He had come to that conclusion, like many colonial American politicians, from his knowledge of classical political philosophy, his study of contemporary French political ideas and his experience of British rule.

The ancient Greeks, notably Plato and Aristotle, had argued that an ideal form of government would reflect what they saw as the natural divisions within society between those individuals whose claim to political power was based on their birth-right, the enlightened few who professed to govern in the best interests of everyone and the wider community who expecte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Politics USA
• 1. Political foundations: “A republic if you can keep it”
• 2. The federal government: “Separated institutions sharing powers”
• 3. Political parties and the perpetual campaign
• 4. State governments and the politics of federalism
• 5. Religion in American politics: “In God we trust”
• 6. Foreign affairs and the idea of America abroad
• 7. Conclusion: Democracy in America
• Further reading
• Index