If we are to understand the American political system, if we are to cut through the rhetoric that over the years has encrusted it, we had best begin by going back to fundamentals, by ensuring that we have a firm grip on the basic abstract principles of modern politics. The first of these is that the United States is a nation-state; therefore, like all modern, sovereign nation-states, it is in essence a power construct. What does this mean?

It means two things. First, America has a relatively developed and stable political culture. Second, within America’s national boundaries, the established governments—...

The general thesis advanced in this chapter is that the content poured into American power constructs was essentially an individualism divided between its Protestant and bourgeois components. Moreover, to a remarkable degree, historically and practically, the Protestant elements of that individualism came to occupy and fill up almost exclusively the legitimation, mythic side of American power constructs, while the bourgeois elements of that same individualism were with equal exclusiveness pouring into and filling up the governance, ideological side of those constructs.

The thesis advanced in this chapter is that the Protestant and bourgeois elements of American individualism are, simultaneously, radically...

We now observe how the American people filled up their formal power constructs with a Protestant/bourgeois content and with what effect, first at the level of general conceptions of democracy, and then (as we will see in the next chapter) at the more specific level of institutions and processes.

The thesis advanced in this chapter is, first, that from the time of the Revolution forward the bourgeois element of the American political character had virtually a free hand in designing and stabilizing the ideological side of America’s power constructs. On the other hand—more hesitantly at the beginning but just...

The presence of two sharply differing democratic traditions in the American political system as a whole requires that we make a systematic effort to determine their differing institutional needs. We also want to characterize the success they have had in getting these institutional needs met in the actual daily practice of American politics.

The main contention of this chapter is that both of America’s conflicting theories of democracy have had remarkable success at shaping the nation’s practical political institutions to their particular requirements. These practical institutions (the various governments, federal, state, and local; their respective branches, executive, legislative, and judicial;...

The American political systemʹs broad theoretical characteristics achieve their practical reality in the systemʹs diversity of political institutions and offices. Moreover, the contradictions and tensions in the general patterns of the system all find reflection in its particular offices and their occupants. These officeholders all become ʺadoptively schizophrenic.ʺ They parallel both in their understandings of their responsibilities and in their individual personalities the divisions in the system as a whole. Nevertheless, they create these characteristics in widely contrasting ways and with sharp differences of emphasis.

The primary task of the judges is to stabilize the system as a whole by...

Americans are a litigious people. In terms of sheer volume, the law contained in books housed on American library and law-office shelves that is to be enforced, abided by, broken, neglected, cited, deciphered, and above all learned, sets world records. The same is true with the number of lawyers practicing and employed, both absolutely and relatively; the number of cases brought to court; and the amount of time spent processing these cases.

And Americans are a litigious people not just quantitatively. They also attach an extraordinary qualitative significance to what they do with the law, lawyers, and the courts. Americans...

The American presidency is, in conventional wisdom, the focal point of the American political system. In this office the contradictions and tensions, the hopes and fears, the creative possibilities and crippling limitations of the whole system seem to come together. The analysis of this office, of its powers and responsibilities, both explicit and implied, of its modern institutional articulations, of its full panoply of emotion-engendering symbols, and to some extent of its actual record of success and failure, must have a high priority in any survey of practical American institutional theory.

Our analysis of the presidency in this chapter can...

The thesis of this chapter can be put in challenging terms: Congress is a legislative body—but only in myth. In ideology, its essential function is very different. In ideology, Congress is the nation’s primary and paradigmatic instrument for harmonizing the conflicting claims of the competing interests. This is in fact its primary role.

We can put this thesis in institutionally more dramatic terms. The president’s State of the Union Address is his finest—mythic—hour. It is so for the Congress, too. In myth, the first function of Congress is to sustain the president, Tribune of the People, Leader...

It would be a serious omission for this book to have no chapter on local government. The American local government system is integral to the national political system as a whole in two important senses.

First, the national system’s confederalism/federalism ensures that the 80,000 or more state, city, county, town, and special-purpose governments of the local government system are, structurally, all members with the federal government in the one overall national network of law and custom.¹ Moreover, for all their individual differences in resources and functions, they all appear in that one vast network on something like the same footing,...

We have surveyed thus far in this part of the book the dominant elements of the American political system, its pinnacles of power (the courts, the presidency, the Congress, and their parallels at the state and local levels). We have finally to examine what must seem at times a veritable monster in their midst: ourselves—or at least the vast majority of us, organized rank on rank as the more or less professionalized employees of America’s multifarious bureaucratic structures both public and private.

It may not be immediately obvious that nearly all of us in modern America are, at least...

We have now concluded our survey of America’s major political institutions from courts to bureaucracy, and some readers, looking back, may perhaps wonder why we did not include a separate chapter on parties and elections. American government textbooks do, without exception, and usually early on in their coverage. This is a tribute to the central excitement that elections, especially presidential elections, generate in the political system. Even more, it is a tribute to the widely heralded belief that the ballot is the citizen’s single, most important weapon.

Indeed it is, but this is a truth that should be meant ironically....

As we have pushed forward with our analysis of the American political system, the argument has been studded with analytical assertions one by one, for example: that the system is essentially schizophrenic between its religious and secular impulses, that the founding fathers were intellectually and theoretically confused, that the presidency is simultaneously too strong and too weak, that the Congress is a legislative body only in myth, that bureaucracy does not ʺbelongʺ in America, and many more. Each of these statements was, it is hoped, interesting in itself. But of more importance was the effort to portray them as bound...

Life is a quest, personal and urgent. That is the fundamental formulation of American individualism.¹ In this spirit—and not without paradox—the American citizen, as a recognized and defined member of the political system as a whole, looks to it for support and assistance, for all the help he (or, more recently and to a different scale, she) can get. But, as an integral element of the system, the citizen is typically as schizophrenic as the system itself. He—or she—thereby places on its contradictory capacities contradictory demands. These demands in all their complexity become the standards by...

The contrasts between the demands that the two sides of the dominant American political psyche make on the nation’s political system are sharp, and both are qualitatively opposed to the needs of their rational-professional servants in the bureaucracy. Bourgeois men demand freedom with security for their ventures, each of which they approach with the congenital question, “What’s in it for me?” Bureaucratic civil servants seek opportunities to do their professional best in a meaningful environment.

In contrast, the Protestant spirit very specifically seeks opportunities to do good. With an idealism aglow with faith, the Protestant burns to love neighbor with...

As a breed apart, America’s rational-professional community—its huge army of bureaucratic servants, both public and private—might be thought too isolated, too unconnected to and unrepresentative of America’s dominant self-definitions to have an opinion of the nation’s political system and its possibilities that would command a general respect. In fact, the situation is quite otherwise. Simply because so many of us in America are active members of this community—earn our livings as trained, tested, and competent members of it in one guise or another, at one level or another—the rational-professional critique is easily the most widely accepted...