American politics is exciting. It is compelling because of what the United States is and what it represents. America is the most powerful nation on the planet. Its industries and innovations drive the global economy. Backed by an arsenal of nuclear weapons, its military presence is felt worldwide. Countless Hollywood productions project its popular culture abroad. Throughout its history, the United States has been a magnet drawing immigrants from everywhere. They are attracted by what it offers: economic opportunities, political freedoms and the prospect of a better life. Americans participate in what Abraham Lincoln famously called “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Debates are heated. Freedom of speech encourages open discussion. Arguments can be highly charged as ideological opponents seek to sway public opinion on controversial political, economic and social issues. Politics in America matters.
It began as an experiment. At the end of the eighteenth century thirteen rebellious American colonies fought a war and won their independence from the British Empire. Their collective Declaration of Independence, issued on July 4, 1776, based its reasoning upon a democratic belief in an individual’s equal rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Americans rejected the idea that those who inherited their position in society through an accident of birth should exercise political power. Instead, they placed their faith in written constitutions that established new and more representative systems of government. In 1787 delegates from the independent states gathered in Philadelphia and ventured into unknown territory. They agreed a constitution that created a new nation: the United States of America. Nobody could safely predict whether or not it would endure.
With the outbreak of the French revolution in 1789, the year after George Washington had been inaugurated as the first President of the United States, it seemed that monarchies were on the retreat on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1804, however, after years of political turbulence, Napoleon Bonaparte became Emperor of France, extinguishing hopes of maintaining a republican government there. That same year, President Thomas Jefferson successfully ran for a second term. When Jefferson had entered the White House in 1800, following the election in which he defeated Washington’s successor, John Adams, it marked the first time that executive power had been peacefully transferred from one political party to another. Whereas a fragile French democracy failed to find its foothold, America’s federal republican government survived – despite the tragedy of the Civil War (1861–1865) which finally ended slavery in its southern states.
The issue of race remained a sensitive sub-text in the nation’s politics. In July 2008 at a campaign event in Springfield, Missouri, Barack Obama, the first African-American to be nominated as a presidential candidate, made the prediction that at some point during the election that year the Republican party would try a scare tactic by suggesting that he did not “look like all those other Presidents on the dollar bills.” He had made similar remarks previously elsewhere. This time his comment caused a flurry of accusations and denials that he had “played the race card.” The brief but intense controversy highlights the cultural and historical baggage that accompanied his candidacy. For an African-American to occupy the White House is undeniably an historic achievement. Obama is representative of a twenty-first-century American society that is becoming increasingly multi-ethnic and multicultural. After the election, President George W. Bush, in accepting his party’s defeat, acknowledged the wider significance of Barack Obama’s victory and “the strides we have made toward a more perfect union.”
The struggle to advance the cause of democracy has defined American political life. The right to vote in elections was restricted initially by wealth, by gender and by race. By 1840, however, most of the white male population could participate in elections. The battle for the right of women to vote was finally won in 1920 with the passage of the nineteenth amendment to the Constitution. Yet it was only in the 1960s that the descendants of those brought to America as slaves could claim their civil rights and take part in national politics.
When decisions are made, it is the majority that rules. This simple political fact is both democracy’s strength and its potential weakness. In his first inaugural address as President, Thomas Jefferson acknowledged that “though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable.” Similarly, James Madison, the architect of the Constitution and Jefferson’s successor in the White House, realized that “If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.” Democracy in America endorsed the strength of collective action when it was agreed by a majority of its citizens. Yet it was also recognized that minorities should still have the right to voice their opinions and squabble on the side-lines of national political life.
Jefferson, Madison and their contemporaries believed that in federalism – the coexistence of state and national governments – they had found a way of limiting the capacity for majorities to ride roughshod over minority opinion. Madison was convinced that American society would “be broken into so many parts, interests and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.” It followed from this argument that the more states that joined the union, the more pluralist its free-wheeling society would become. A belief in the advantages of federalism imparted an expansionist dynamic to the nation that led to forty-eight contiguous states eventually being carved out of the North American continent. An additional two – Alaska and Hawaii – also joined the United States, despite their geographical disconnection from it. Federalism continues to shape the landscape of American politics. Nowadays the distinctive traditions and individual concerns of the fifty states help to create a vibrant political culture that would have met with Madison’s approval.
European monarchs had derived their legitimacy and authority from the idea of their “divine right” to rule over their subjects. They considered themselves accountable to God alone. Republican governments were answerable instead to their citizens. Separation of church and state lies at the heart of American political and constitutional thought. The first amendment to the Constitution prevents Congress from passing laws “respecting an establishment of religion” and “prohibiting the free exercise” of any faith. Yet this is not to deny the significant influence that religion has in shaping America’s political culture. Faith remains important to many of its citizens, underpinning the contemporary moral climate and influencing attitudes toward political issues.
The democratic idealism that has defined the nation to itself has also shaped its sense of place in world affairs. Throughout the nineteenth century, the United States looked inward as it expanded across the North American continent. Nevertheless, the advance of democracy elsewhere in the world was seen as an endorsement of the way in which America had designed its system of government. John Quincy Adams, who in 1824 followed in his father’s footsteps to become President, argued that the United States:
goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own … She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.
Times change. During the twentieth century and beyond, as it has developed into an undisputed world “superpower,” the United States has become more outward looking. It has seen its national security in terms of promoting the values of democracy abroad in order to preserve them at home. Moreover, America has shown itself prepared to exercise its military power overseas. Ignoring John Quincy Adams’ advice, it has sent its troops abroad “in search of monsters to destroy” in both world wars, in Korea and in Vietnam during its Cold War confrontation with communism, and, in its response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Belief that the United States now has a moral purpose – often expressed as a God-given providential mission – to advance the cause of democratic freedom throughout the world gives both direction and force to the formulation of foreign policy.
On December 1, 1862, with the nation he presided over fighting the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln sent his annual message to Congress. In it he famously described the United States as “the last best hope of earth.” One month later, the President issued the Emancipation Proclamation, signaling the end of slavery should the Union win the war. It did. The United States survived the greatest threat to its existence. Almost one hundred and fifty years later, Barack Obama, an African-American from Lincoln’s state of Illinois, felt empowered to run for and ultimately win what had until then been the white’s house. His victory in the 2008 presidential election symbolized a potentially seismic shift in American politics. It pointed the way toward the nation’s multicultural future, moving it beyond the long and bitter memories of its racially segregated past. Yet as the nation confronts fresh challenges in extending equality, liberty and the promise of American life to all its citizens, to fulfil the potential of a “more perfect union,” its politics remain argumentative, inventive and brash. Democracy in America is still a fascinating work in progress.