Over the centuries, Americans have built themselves a great engine for political change. We cannot understand our present situation without understanding how this machinery was built, how it has been transformed, and how it threatens to take us off course in the twenty-first century.
The engine contains three moving parts. The first consists of political movements that have repeatedly catalyzed sweeping transformations over the course of American history. From the days of George Washington to those of Martin Luther King, Jr., Americans have regularly mobilized themselves for fundamental change, sometimes propelling government in radically new directions. Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the civil rights revolution are obvious examples.
The second part of the machine links popular movements to political parties. During the nineteenth century, rising movements consistently transformed themselves into new parties. From Jefferson's Democrats to Bryan's Populists, these movement-parties became the engines of basic change, sweeping away previous coalitions and compromises in the process.
The rise of movement-parties created conditions for the construction of the third piece of machinery: the plebiscitarian presidency. Above all else, the Founders feared that presidential demagogues might destroy the republic by making populist appeals in the manner of Caesar or Cromwell. But movement-parties promised to transform the presidency into a more controllable vehicle for the expression of the popular will. By the end of the nineteenth century, Americans had created the movement-party-presidency as their central mechanism for political transformation.
In the twentieth century this machinery has been transformed again. As parties have grown weaker, the change engine has worked mainly with two parts—movements and presidents. Today we only seem capable of recreating the classic movement-party-presidency. We continue to lack a comparable engine for change unless parties learn how to put movement, party, and presidency back together again.
GZ |
