Archives for March 2018

Blauner, Robert: Racial Oppression in America. New York: The Viking Press, 1972.

Browning, Rufus P., Marshall, Dale Rogers, and Tabb, David: Racial Politics in American Cities. New York: Longman, 1990.

Dahl, Robert A.: Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970 [1961].

Dubois, W. E. B.: Dusk at Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. New York: Schocken Books, 1968 [1940].

_____. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. New York: The Free Press, 1992 [1935].

Greenberg, Cheryl: “Or Does It Explode? Black Harlem in the Great Depression. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Katznelson, Ira: City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Mollenkopf, John H.: The Contested City. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.

Moynihan, Daniel P.: The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Washington: Office of Public Planning and Research, United States Department of Labor, 1965.

Pinderhughes, Dianna M.: Race and Ethnicity of Chicago Politics: A Reexamination of Pluralist Theory. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Piven, Frances Fox and Cloward, Richard A.: Regulating the Poor: The Function of Public Welfare. New York: Vintage Books, 1993 [1971].

 

In 1961 Robert A. Dahl published his well-respected study, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. The city he studied was New Haven, Connecticut–a city which not only surrounds Yale University, Professor Dahl’s academic home, but could be described by him as “in many respects typical of other cities in the United States” (v). This typical city had a very small population of non-whites; only 6% of the residents were African-American, and there were few Latinos or Asians.

Dahl’s primary interest was in showing why economically advantaged people tended to participate less in city government and politics than economically disadvantaged people did (see pp. 293-295). That is, Dahl’s interest in blacks was instrumental to understanding the behavior of whites. As to the condition of black New Havenites itself, Dahl contented himself with saying that discrimination was declining and that they were rather well-integrated into the politics and government of the city.

Who Governs? is a very informative book, still useful to read. But it could not be written the same way now. A city with a nonwhite population of 6% could not be represented as “typical” in America today; even in cities with small minority populations, more care would have to be taken to treat whatever such populations existed as important ‘in themselves,’ not merely as illustrations of some putatively larger point. Inasmuch as Americans have made much of ‘race’ throughout their history, the new approach is truer, or at least potentially truer, to the way citizens in cities actually think and feel. The new approach is therefore likely to have more explanatory power regarding ‘on-the-street’ conditions in the city or cities studied. But as with all scholarly approaches, this one has its dangers, particularly those associated with the concept of ‘race’ itself. Precisely because ‘race’ is a notion deeply felt, but notoriously difficult to define precisely, it can involve scholars in a maze of traps.

Take, for example, the pioneering study by W. E. B. Dubois, The Philadelphia Negro. DuBois deplored the lack of “organization” in the life of urban blacks, a deficiency that put them at a competitive disadvantage in America. He accepted the view that democracy was “premature” for American blacks. Left to their own devices, they would be governed by oligarchs or even dictators. Hence the need for the “talented tenth” of urban blacks to guide a racially insulated (not integrated) population through the hazards and complexities of modern civilization. This is not so much Jeffersonianism as vanguardism; insofar as it is Marxist-Leninist it is a Marxism without much faith in the proletariat as the agency of change. DuBois perhaps thinks of urban blacks as lumpenproletarians, too far removed from modernity to organize themselves effectively. The argument is implausible because before and at the very time DuBois wrote, no less agrarian peoples, often under the tutelage (as it were) of political bosses who had no pretensions of vanguardism, were acculturating their ethnic groups to American city politics. DuBois operates under the spell of a commonplace ideological trope of the time, the claim that civilization in the modern world was a thing so complex that one needed an extraordinarily long apprenticeship to grasp it. DuBois was applying the underlying theory of European imperialism to American urban politics.

DuBois’s major contribution to the study of race isn’t so much in the specifics of his analysis, now understandably ‘dated,’ but in the challenge he issued to his fellow Americans in his later book, Dusk at Dawn. The race problem is “the central problem of the greatest of the world’s democracies and so the problem of the future world” (vii). The race problem may be seen in what DuBois takes to be the fact that “in America, not the philosophy of Jefferson nor the crusade of Garrison nor the reason of Sumner was able to counterbalance the race superiority doctrines of Calhoun, the imperialism of Jefferson David, nor the race hate of Ben Tillman” (139). Whether or not the indictment is too sweeping, it is an indictment and served as a call for future research, to say nothing of future reform.

For a long time this challenge was not answered by mainstream political scientists who looked at urban politics, as may be seen in Dahl’s study. But the urban unrest of the 1960s could scarcely be ignored, and it shattered any complacency with respect to race relations in American cities.

There has been considerable difficulty among urbanists not so much in trying to define ‘race’—those conundrums have been left in the (ham) hands of anthropologists—but in how exactly to assess its political importance. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward begin their book, Regulating the Poor, by emphasizing not race and ethnicity but institutional/legal control of ‘the poor.’ They associate racial focus with Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his critique of ‘the black family,’ a critique to which they take strong exception (193). But then, two-thirds of the way through their book, they begin to consider African-American poor in the cities, bringing race and class together under their overall thesis, which is to describe how politicians—in this case, Democrats, who run the cities—have attempted to bypass their own local political machines and to offer a bureaucratic system of poor relief in order to dampen social unrest. This approach makes sense, but it comes rather too late in a book whose authors feel they must engage in elaborate rhetorical and methodological maneuvering just to get to their main point.

Cheryl Greenberg’s “Or Does It Explode?’ has no such inhibitions about addressing race, but commits the opposite error, using ‘race’ too unproblematically, almost as an independent variable in the urban equation. Greenberg tries to account for the fact that newly-arrived European immigrants in the period 1900-1930 rose faster in the economic order than newly-arrived blacks, despite “equally low levels of education in the two communities” (21). This is a continuation of one of DuBois’s questions. She observes further that even well-educated blacks found only menial jobs, and public jobs were in large measure off-limits to blacks during the 1920s. The Depression accordingly brought greater hardships to urban blacks than to urban whites, with blacks accounting for 15% of New York City’s unemployed, even as they were but 5% of the population at the time. Greenberg’s account is descriptively powerful but analytically weak. She explains these discrepancies by citing the racial prejudices of whites as the blockade faced by New York blacks. She does not show the whys and wherefores of such prejudice, which presumably did not just exist as a force of nature.

Robert Blauner interprets the crises of the late 1960 and early 1970s in American cities sociologically. Urban life reflected the American social structure; minority racial groups (Blauner does not overlook Latinos) and their oppression by whites are central features of a social dynamic not reducible to class or economics. Rather, race privilege is a matter of status. Racial groups are not classes but Weberian “status groups,” monopolies of honor, “packet[s] of privilege” (27, 31). This tends to falsify Dahlian optimism, and leads to a more realistic assessments of future prospects. Races will not be assimilated at any time in the near future, Blauner predicts. He was right.

Blauner observes that cities have been centers of industrialization. White immigrants competed successfully for industrial jobs against emancipated Southern blacks and poor Southern whites—a datum that complicates any easy assumptions about racism as an explanation of the condition of urban blacks (64). More ambitious, Blauner argues, racial minorities are colonized, Third-World peoples, “part of the world-historical drama” of Western conquest (74), peoples who may unify as a worldwide political movement (52). Such peoples do not fit “the collective self-image of democracy for all men” established by whites in Europe and North America (52). Third-World peoples did not immigrate to America; they were colonized. This overlooks the fact that Latinos do in fact immigrate to the United States, and many, especially those who arrived prior to the recent ‘waves’ of immigration from Mexico and Central America, seem to be tracking the progress of previous ethnic, notably Italians. If Blauner were to argue that Latinos were colonized by Spaniards and Portuguese adventurers before arriving here, the answer is obvious: Welcome to the club. What ethnic group wasn’t colonized by some more powerful group, before arriving here? Even the English were mastered by the Romans.

Further, Blauner doesn’t show exactly why industrialism would single out racial minorities for long-standing oppression, or why democracy would single them out for exclusion from its “self-image.” There is a somewhat Procrustean attempt by Blauner to fit urban racial politics into a global Leninist network (evidently in imitation of Fanon), an attempt that, though impressive, seems too polemical by half.

Similarly, Blauner’s critique of the McClone Commission report on the 1965 race riot—or, as he prefers to put it, the Watts rebellion—in the Watts section of Los Angeles combines insight with polemical distortion. The McCone Commission report, he charges, assumed that the disorder was simply a matter of law-breaking caused by unemployment and poor education, along with bad public relations by the Los Angeles Police Department. The report ignores the way police were used as controllers of a ‘ghetto.’ The report also ignores the issues of nationalism raised by the ‘rebellion.’ This has the unmistakable hint of special pleading: If the ‘rebellion’ were as politicized as Blauner wishes it were, it would have issued in more explicitly political organization by blacks, in the aftermath of the riot—and not only the blacks who showed up a few years later in Mayor Tom Bradley’s administration. Blauner starts out as a sociologist, but ends by looking at politics in the wrong place, namely, among those excluded from the political process who subsequently made no attempt to enter it.

The more successful efforts focus not on ‘race’ or ‘society’ or economics in isolation or in combination, but on those things as exploited by the political structure of the city. As John H. Mollenkopf notes, whether market-oriented or Marxist, earlier economics-oriented accounts of city life did not allow for political differences; two capitalist cities might differ more from each other than from a capitalist city and a socialist city (8). “[G]overnment intervention follows its own logic rather than that of private interests” (9). Mollenkopf emphasizes the interventions of federal government agencies and of the Democratic and Republican parties in urban politics, and is very informative about politics ‘from above.’ He has no feel for street-level politics. But this isn’t a problem specifically caused by his use of race as a key factor in urban politics.

Dianna M. Pinderhughes, like Blauner, questions pluralist accounts of racial and ethnic groups, observing that pluralism tends toward optimism, partly because it focuses on white ethnics, not racial minorities. Pluralism ignores such governmental practices as redlining and restrictive covenants to confine minorities to certain parts of the city; deliberate division of the labor force along racial lines in order to minimize bargaining power of labor groups; the use of violence and/or heavy police activity; and restriction of black leaders within Democratic political machines to their own neighborhoods, with none of the citywide influence enjoyed by white ethnic leaders. “Racial status so pervaded the Chicago environment that it affected every sector of the economy and the polity (234); Pinderhughes shows how this politics of exclusion backfired in the end, leading to the political cohesion among blacks which resulted in political victory in the 1980s, once blacks had sufficient numbers to form effective alliances with sectors of the white community.

For a survey of urban politics in a number of American cities, a survey that enables the reader to compare the circumstances in a variety of places, Racial Politics in American Cities provides the best-balanced view of any of these studies, deserving of the stature it has earned as a standard text in the field. The authors eschew polemics and repeatedly show exactly how and why blacks and Latinos succeeded (or, in the case of New York, usually failed) to acquire political power commensurate with their numbers. The authors identify two basic strategies that can be used: the “outside” strategy of interest-group pressure on government and the “inside” strategy of obtaining direct power via elections. They lay out the different phases of successful uses of each strategy, based on the specific case studies presented in the volume (12). They discuss various factors influencing outcome: size of minority populations; the extent of support from liberal whites; and what might be described as the political styles (often linked to the political purposes) of black leadership. (To understate the matter, the Black Panthers in Oakland generated a different sort of political atmosphere than moderate-liberal mayor Wilson Goode in Philadelphia.) The authors present information on the political success is assuredly ‘worth the effort’—as measured in the establishment of such long-held minority goals as civilian police review boards, government appointments, city contracts, and government jobs (24). Fully integrated governments are demonstratively more responsive governments. In short, the authors actually ‘do political science’ as it relates to racial politics in cities.

The results show the importance of not assuming that ‘objective conditions’ will flow into a more just urban political order. Political organization building is crucial, both within and among minority communities, and between minority and white communities, especially politicians. As in any democratic regime, the demographic transformation of racial minorities into racial majorities within a city is a necessary but not sufficient condition for success in the election of black, Latino, and Asian mayors and city council members, who can then strengthen coalitions with influential white minorities within the cities. And of course what is made can be unmade. As in Chicago in 1989, a biracial coalition can fall apart if political acumen is missing, or if co-optation occurs.

When done intelligently, the new focus on racial issues in urban politics politicizes urban studies, not in the sense of making them more partisan than they have been, but of getting urban studies away from the technocratic, sociological approach seen in a focus on housing problems, transportation, and finance considered as ‘things in themselves.’ Rather, the study of urban politics becomes ‘political’ in its focus on structures of political authority. Unjust disparities of political power yield unjust disparities in housing, transportation, and finance. In City Trenches, Ira Katznelson worries that race-oriented studies may neglect social class—which can and should be treated politically. Class is particularly salient in understanding the white ethnics, many of whom have thought of themselves as ‘labor’ while in the workplace or union hall, but as Poles, Italians, Irish, etc. as soon as they get back home. This bifurcation of urban life among white ethnics helps to explain the lack of socialist politics in American cities, Katznelson thinks; he might well go on to think that this indicates a deficiency in socialist politics and the ideologies which animate it.

Such cautionary points as Katznelson makes are well taken, but they really suggest only the commonsense observation that any well-delineated picture must include some things at the expense of excluding others. Any single approach to the study of politics, urban or otherwise, will see some things clearly, others obscurely or not at all. That is why one needs to read more than one kind of study of politics.

Unlike parliament-centered governments, in which the chief executive is a ‘prime minister’—a member of the legislature, usually the head of the majority party—American republicanism separates executive from legislative powers, with the legislature itself separated into two branches. This means that different parties might control those branches of government, leading to ‘divided government.’ In America, one-party control of both houses of Congress and the presidency can result only from sweeping victories at the polls.

From 1800 to 1945, such victories were common. Sharply divided government—which I am defining as the circumstance in which the president is of one party and both houses have majorities of another party—occurred only five times during that period: 1849-50, when the Whigs Taylor and Fillmore were presidents and the Democrats held Congress; 1865-68, when Johnson, a Democrat elected on the Republican ticket, was president and the Republicans controlled Congress; 1879-80, when the Republican Hayes was president and the Democrats controlled Congress; 1895-96, the last two years of the Democrat Cleveland’s second term, in which Republicans controlled Congress; 1919-20, when the Democrat Wilson, disabled by a stroke, was president and faced a Republican Congress. Short periods of time, all of them. The longest was during the Johnson Administration, which only occurred because President Lincoln had been assassinated in the first year of his second term.

From 1945 to the present, within the lifetime of the postwar generation, ‘sharply divided’ government has occurred much more frequently, and for more extended periods of time: 1947-48, the last two years of Truman’s first term; 1955-60, the last six of Eisenhower’s eight years; 1969-76, all the Nixon and Ford years; 1989-92, all of George H. W. Bush’s one term; 1995-2000, the last six years of the Clinton Administration; the last two years of George W. Bush’s second term; and the last two years of Barack Obama’s second term.

Modern-day divided government was prefigured during World War II by the erosion of the New Deal coalition in Congress in the period beginning in the midterm election of 1942. At that time the North-South fissure in the Democratic Party began to widen sufficiently to show up in election results. The Democrats, and the Southern Democrats in particular (it will be recalled), faced a serious dilemma coming out of the Civil War. They were the party of treason: rebels in the South, Copperheads in the North. This gave Republicans a rhetorical bludgeon in northern and western States, and they backed up their rhetoric with organization–not only the party itself but the Grand Army of the Republic, the veterans’ organization whose members were rewarded with generous pensions from the federal government (cf. Skocpol, passim). From the Civil War to the Depression, only two Democrats won the White House: Cleveland and Wilson. Both presidencies were flukish, in the sense that they were beneficiaries of major splits in Republican ranks.

Thanks to the Depression and the magnetism of FDR, the Republicans were finally discredited and the Southern and Northern Democrats could unite in a coalition that appealed to broad elements of American society. But the legacy of the Civil War persisted, just beneath the surface. Or, rather, the legacy of one major cause of that war, race-based slavery and racial prejudice, persisted. The tension between the Northern and Southern wings of the party had to surface in some way at some point. They were united inasmuch as both sides agreed that the role of the federal government should be expanded dramatically in order to meet the challenges of the domestic and international economies, as well as the challenges of national defense in a world where worldwide conflicts were now technologically feasible. The South had never been economically isolationist; its far-flung cotton trading drove the regional economy. With the political success of the TVA and other New Deal programs, ‘big government’ was no economic threat to the South. But a strong central government also entailed a relative weakening of state governments, and state governments were the bulwarks of racial segregation and of domination by Southern whites over Southern blacks. Big government threatened the social and political structure of the South.

FDR temporized by leaving the Southern states alone; he could afford to do so because the war against Old Man Depression, and then the war against rightist tyrannies in Europe and Asia, galvanized the nation throughout his tenure. But Truman faced a different set of problems, nationally and internationally.

The Cold War against Soviet Union-based international communism gave impetus to the divided government that was only potential during the World War. Elements of the New Deal state apparatus in Washington—specifically, those associated with FDR cabinet secretary and 1948 presidential hopeful Henry Wallace—had been too close ideologically and politically to the Soviet Union, which had been an ally-of-convenience during the war. The Hiss-Chambers case and other espionage cases—some real, some invented—enabled Republicans to compete plausibly with Democrats on foreign-policy territory, despite the Democrat-led victory in the war and despite the key Truman victory of the period, the Marshall Plan. This Republican strategy was fully consistent with their long and consistent history of nationalism, dating from the origins of the party in the 1850s. It was also consistent with their successful strategy of painting Democrats as not quite patriotic enough, an image Democrats had resisted by fighting a couple of world wars. The issue of communism revived a problem for Democrats which might have been supposed to have been put to rest. But the ‘Progressive’/historicist foundations of the twentieth-century Democratic Party, seen not only in FDR’s attempt to court Stalin during the war but in the party’s Popular-Front strategy in the mid-1930s, left it vulnerable to criticism from Republicans. By 1948, the Democratic Party had split three ways: mainstream New-Deal, anti-communists led by President Truman; left-wing ‘Popular-Front’ Democrats led by Wallace; and segregationist ‘Dixiecrats’ led by Senator Strom Thurmond. Truman eked out a victory over a lackluster Republican candidate, but the seams in the New Deal coalition were fraying.

War and international politics generally empower the executive, a point well known to the old Whigs including, in America, the Jeffersonians. An atmosphere of perpetual ‘Cold War’ against the international Left thus put Democrats at a disadvantage in presidential elections. Former Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first Republican to demonstrate the truth of this. Democrats retained domestic-policy popularity, as they could rightly take credit for the New Deal welfare state, and voters still recalled the Depression and linked it with Hoover and the Republicans. But Eisenhower did not attack the still-popular welfare state. Rather, he concentrated voters’ minds on the Korean War quagmire—Democrats’ botched anti-communism—while also benefitting from, while deftly distancing himself from—the Senate investigations into communist infiltration of government agencies led by Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Democrats tried to beat Republicans at their own game in 1960. John F. Kennedy successfully accused Richard Nixon of countenancing a (fictitious) ‘missile gap’ vis-à-vis the Soviets, but his successor Lyndon Johnson’s overextension of American military involvement in the Vietnam War reproduced the Korean-quagmire dilemma, with a difference: This time, not the Republicans (who were hawks) but liberal Democrats split off. Simultaneously, the same liberals were driving Southern Democrats out of the party with their support for federal-government intervention in the civil rights struggles of the South. To put it another way, the Kennedy-Johnson political strategy was to shore up party support among African-Americans by backing their legitimate aspirations respecting civil rights, but at the same time to appeal to conservative Southerners with a strong anti-communist effort in Vietnam. The strategy didn’t work because Southern Democrats cared more about segregation than they did about communists, and Northern liberal-Progressive Democrats cared more about promoting civil rights and ending the war—both popular causes in their constituencies—than they did about keeping the Southerners in the fold.

Republicans inherited many Southern Democrats without losing their anti-communist edge. Alienation from the Democratic Party also entailed substantial party ‘dealignment,’ as well; in the mid-1950s, 20% of voters were ‘independents’ (more precisely, ‘undeclareds’). By 1970, the number was up to around 30%. The jarring shifts in policy seen among Democrats, and especially the social and political dislocations of the 1960s, eroded partisan allegiances along with other bonds of social trust.

Meanwhile, the liberal-Progressive Democats who gained undisputed control of the party by the late 1960s were again vulnerable to the charge of softness on communism. The party’s 1972 nominee, George McGovern, resembled Henry Wallace rather too much to make a plausible major-party candidate, and Nixon buried him that November. But voters hadn’t turned against the New-Deal welfare state, and Democrats continued firmly in control of Congress. Democratic Congressional leadership, sensing they were in for a long siege, began building bigger staffs. In the 1970s House staff tripled, Senate staff doubled (Jones 17-21).

The characteristic technique of an aggressive Congress facing off against an enemy president is the investigation. This has been true since James Madison led the Jeffersonians against the Federalists during the Adams Administration. If conducted shrewdly, Congressional investigations hamstring an enemy president by making him look bad—evil and/or inept. There is a downside, as McCarthy demonstrated, but that only proves that you need to be reasonably intelligent in employing the tactic, and even Tailgunner Joe got a fair amount of play while he lasted. The large Congressional staffs can always find rich sources of scandal in large executive-branch staffs, inasmuch as who is always doing whatever to whom.

Reagan reinvigorated the presidency in the 1980s, faced off successfully against Congressional Democrats discredited by their own scandals. More than one observer considers the Iran-Contra affair to have been the central event in the constitutional history of divided government in the 1980s, as a more-assertive presidential staff clashed with a still-assertive legislative staff over the issue of who would control foreign policy. The longtime Republican trump card, anti-communism, matched the traditional Congressional trump card (Democratic and Republican), investigation into constitutionally-dubious executive-branch doings. Meanwhile, the Republican-controlled executive put the squeeze on the Democratic Congress’s domestic agenda with its policy of tax cuts and budget deficits, for which it had just enough Congressional support to sustain—thanks to the depleted by still numerous-enough-to-make-things-awkward ranks of Southern Democrats. In this double conflict within a divided government, the Republicans enjoyed a narrow, vulnerable, and (thanks to George H. W. Bush’s mishandling of the 1991 recession) temporary victory, setting the stage for the politics of the 1990s.

Divided government in the 1990s saw a musical-chairs reversal, with Democrats controlling the White House, Republicans controlling Congress. The first reversal was made possible by victory in the Cold War. Foreign and military policy lost its saliency, at least for the time; coupled with economic recession, this cost the Republicans the presidency. But the young, untried President Clinton overreached in pushing for a national health-care system and in other areas. Congressional Republicans seized control, for the first time in a generation, in the midterm election of 1992.

The new century saw a slight abatement of the trend. The George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations saw divided government, but only in the final two years of their second terms—the ‘lame-duck’ years of any presidency, with or without a hostile Congress.

‘Divided government’ became a common feature of American politics throughout the second half of the twentieth century and into the first years of the twenty-first, with only a few short-lived exceptions: the early years of the Johnson Administration; the blundering, weak Carter Administration; in effect the firs couple of Reagan years when Republicans had a workable coalition with conservative Democrats; the first, inept, two years of Clinton; the first administrations of George W. Bush and Obama. Its analytic value for understanding major tendencies in contemporary politics is very strong, so long as one keeps an eye on who the players are and what policies they are attempting to enact. As seen above, the power equations within the overall structure of divided government are constantly shifting, and even divided government itself has on occasion been breached.

Divided government does not necessarily mean lack of government, a Burnsian ‘deadlock of democracy.’ David L. Mayhew’s study, Divided We Govern, identifies many other factors that influence policy outcomes. The most important structural factor, perhaps even more than the executive-legislative division, is the bicameral division between House and Senate. Sarah A. Binder has argued that bicameralism is more relevant to policy than divided government. This is clearly consistent with Madison’s argument in Federalist 62, which Binder cites, but even more in keeping with John Adams’s massive study, Defence of the Constitutions of the United States, the pioneering work in American in the field of historical and comparative politics, the principal point of which is to establish the utility of bicameralism as against unicameralism as an essential component for making republican government properly deliberative. The underlying principle is simple: If, to reach the president’s desk, a major bill must pass two hurdles instead of one, and if each ‘hurdle’ is made of different materials—if, for example, members of the ‘lower’ house have shorter terms and smaller constituencies than members of the ‘upper’ house—that bill must be very well-thought-of indeed merely to survive legislative scrutiny, let alone executive scrutiny. When action slows, thought has time to take effect. When action flows, those who can act may see their opportunity and take it: divided government doesn’t divide the bureaucracy; when others cannot legislate, it can still regulate.

Other factors that lead to gridlock or no-gridlock, as Binder observes, include ideational divergence (the greater the divergence, the less incentive for compromise) and the pent-up energy of a party many years out of power, now victorious (most strikingly, Republicans of the Class of ’94), who tend to unite militantly to obtain those legislative objects they’ve long for during their years in the desert. The extra-institutional fact. public sentiment, also matters—the most obvious example in the last century being the first years of the New Deal, when divided government was nearly impossible.

A perennial possibility in the American political framework, divided government has occurred more often since World War II, owing to the instability of the old Democratic Party coalition that predated the war and the political ramifications of the Cold War that came out of that war. Its analytical value in understanding major tendencies in contemporary politics is high, but it is one factor among several, not an analytic panacea.

 

Works Cited

Binder, Sarah A.: “The Dynamics of Legislative Gridlock, 1947-96.” American Political Science Review, Volume 93, Number 3, September 1999, 519-533.

Mayhew, David R.: Divided We Govern: Party Control, Lawmaking, and Investigation, 1946-2002. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

Scocpol, Theda: Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Grant McConnell argues that state governments enforce, if not local tyrannies, then local oligarchies. Typically, state regulatory boards have been captured by the organizations ostensibly to be regulated (McConnell 187-188), and in the state legislatures logrolling based on not-so-good old-boy networks prevails (194). “Self-government in this sense may enlarge the freedom of the powerful,” he argues, “but it may also diminish the freedom of the weak” (194).

The list of offenses committed by state governments could be lengthened. Southern states banded together to fight the bloodiest war in our history over the worst of lost causes. The invocation of states’ rights from 1865 to 1965 became a code word for racial bigotry. Without national legislation and national court decisions to prevent them, the states might have beggared themselves with high tariffs and other devices of trade war. These and other tyrannical and centrifugal tendencies were of course recognized by the Framers of the 1787 Constitution. In the history of the world, confederations more usually dissolve because member states overwhelm the center, Madison observed in the forty-fifth Federalist, not the other way around. Under the Articles of Confederation, for every injury to local governments by national government there had been a hundred done by the states to the nation (Federalist 46).

All this notwithstanding, Americans have stuck with federalism for good reason, at least since the 1760. It was at that time Americans saw firsthand the dangers of centralization of power.

In the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, the British government under Lord Grenville sought to tighten imperial administration over the North American colonists, seeking to impose direct taxation, a standing army, and restrictions on immigration to the western territories. Against these plans, the colonists asserted, famously, the demand for real rather than virtual representation in the British parliament. Less famously today, they also asserted a federal theory of empire, whereby the colonists would govern their own internal affairs while the imperial government in London would govern foreign policy, international commerce, and the money supply. Parliament countered that sovereignty is indivisible and, further, that sovereignty inhered in Parliament. There can be no imperium in imperio. Recalling that the king, not Parliament, had established the American colonies, the colonists denied Parliament’s authority over Americans. When they finally declared their independence, the Americans accordingly condemned the tyranny of the king—his designs against their unalienable natural rights as well as their common-law and chartered rights. The central authority or sovereignty wrongfully asserted by Parliament and the central authority and sovereignty wrongly used by the king were equally dangerous.

It was out of this experience that the American argument for a federal system of government arose. Madison called it “a system without example ancient or modern—a system founded on popular rights, and so combining a federal form with the forms of individual republics, as may enable each to supply the defects of the other and obtain the advantage of both” (Madison, Introduction to Eliot’s Debates, 109). This concise statement deserves unpacking, because it provides the justification for American federalism and therefore supplies the criterion by which one can answer the examination question.

The Framers agreed with the British Parliament on one point: Finally, sovereignty cannot be divided, and that imperium in imperio is a solecism. Unlike the mixed regime of England, where sovereignty inhered in both king and parliament—with an increasingly implausible claim to rule by the titled nobility thrown in—American sovereignty was wholly popular. The people of each State ratified both their State’s constitutions and their federal constitution, in order to secure their own—’popular’—rights, natural and civil/conventional. The first conventional protection of natural rights was of course the regime itself, commercial republicanism, a regime established not only by means of the national constitution but guaranteed by that constitution to each state. The defect of republicanism is the turbulence caused by faction, inasmuch as republicanism frees the citizens to form factions and to agitate for their interests. The defect of confederation is disunion, as each constituent state tends to go its own way, ignoring the common good of the confederation as a whole. American federalism as a system of government stops faction in two ways.

First, along with the device of representation, it enables a republic to extend its territory to encompass a large territory inhabited by divers groups and factions, none of which, therefore, is likely to be able to tyrannized the others—the argument of Federalist 10. An extended republic can remain republican in part because each representative has a constituency neither too large—which would lead to remoteness from the people—nor too small—which would lead to the election of representatives from one faction. And even if a faction controls one State, the others—”constituent parts of the national sovereignty” via the Senate (Federalist 9)–will prevent “a general conflagration” (Federalist 10).

Second, the extended republic federalism makes possible enables the American people to defend themselves against the threat of foreign invasion. The danger was not so much that the English would return to conquer the continent. Rather, as Madison urged at the Philadelphia Convention on July 29, 1787, the threat of foreign invasion will transform the states’ governments into despotisms, as war preparation feeds state-building (Farrand I. 464). The American republic was made all-republican by authority of Constitutional law for the same reason. Confederations comprised of very different regime types fail (Federalist 43). Although Publius was not optimistic that a very loose confederation of commercial republics will not also bring war—some skirmishes had occurred already—he does prefer a regime-homogenous confederation to a heterogeneous one, especially if its components are all commercial-republican.

These are powerful arguments with considerable intuitive appeal. But are they demonstrably true in light of the experience of the ensuing centuries? And how could we know whether they are or are not true?

There is obviously no way to demonstrate the truth of such arguments in a geometric-deductive way, except in the limited sense that they could be true because they are not illogical. We are left with the same kind of arguments the Framers themselves employed when talking politics: prudential arguments based on comparisons with the experiences of other regimes that were equally tested by those breeders of tyranny, war and domestic conflict.

Before engaging in a comparison exercise, one should notice two early examples in which the States were directly involved which did indeed erect barriers to the potential development of tyranny.

The first is the ratification of the 1787 Constitution by the people within each State—not by the State governments themselves—and the resultant enactment of the Bill of Rights. During the ratification debates, numerous opponents of the proposed constitution cited the document’s lack of a bill of rights as a serious flaw. In Pennsylvania, the “Address and Reasons of Dissent of the Minority of the Convention of the State of Pennsylvania to their Constituents” (December 1787) argued so, as did Anti-federalists “John DeWitt” and “Agrippa” of Massachusetts, George Mason and “Federal Farmer” of Virginia and, most notably, “Brutus” of New York. Brutus summarized Locke’s argument concerning the ‘state of nature,’ remarking that “in this state of things, every individual was insecure” because every individual pursued “his own interest.” Although “a certain proportion of natural freedom” must be “yielded by individuals, when they submit to government,” individuals do not surrender “all their natural rights”—only those incompatible with civil society. It is therefore useful to spell out, at “the foundation” of a new government, exactly what those rights are, “expressly reserving to the people such of their essential natural rights, as are not necessary to be parted with: (Essays of Brutus II). Because “rulers have the same propensities as other men” to injure and oppress the ruled, “it is therefore as proper that bounds should be set to their authority, as that government should have at first been instituted to restrain private injuries: (Ibid.). Publius-Hamilton replied in Federalist 84 that the Constitution as it stood was already a Bill of Rights, more effectively so because not merely declaratory but constitutive of an actual governmental structure that would protect rights in the real world. But Madison in Virginia got the Constitution ratified in part by agreeing to push for a Bill of Rights in Congress. In effect, then, we owe the Bill of Rights—often in recent debates used against unjust actions by both State and national governments—to federalism of the ratification process itself.

Second, the controversy over the Sedition Act that was passed during the Adams Administration provided an early test of the efficacy of the Bill of Rights. Although not in itself tyrannical, the Sedition Act led in the direction of tyrannical abridgement of the freedoms of speech and of the press. Party feelings ran high in 1798 when Jefferson wrote to John Taylor, with understandable exaggeration, “It is a singular phenomenon, that while our State governments are the very best in the world, without exception or comparison, our general government has, in the rapid course of 9 or 10 years, become more arbitrary, and has swallowed up more of the public liberty than even that of England.” In his Kentucky Resolutions, he wrote that when the federal government “assumes undelegated powers” as in the Sedition Act, “its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.” Even if all its branches concur with the act, the federal government is not “the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself.” With no common judge between federal and states’ governments, “each part has an equal right to judge for itself” the Constitutional legitimacy of any law. “[T]o take from the States all the powers of self-government and transfer them to a general and consolidated government, without regard to the special delegations and reservations solemnly agreed to in the compact”—notably the Tenth Amendment—”is not for the peace, happiness, or prosperity of these States.” Accordingly, every State has not merely a constitutional but a natural right “in cases not within the contract, to nullify of their own authority all assumptions of power by others within their limits.” Without such a right, “absolute and unlimited dominion of the federal government over the States’ governments will prevail. As in England, the national government and not the people would be sovereign.

The Kentucky Resolutions (and the Virginia Resolutions authored by Madison) did not assume unilateral action. Although Jefferson asserted a natural right to States’ sovereignty, in practice he effectively conceded that States would need to act in concert in order really to establish that right legally. In the event, the States did not do so, but did not need to do so. Jefferson’s election to the presidency, two years later—effected in part by capitalizing on anti-consolidationist sentiments expressed and fanned by the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, proved a more practicable means of protecting constitutional rights, and of course led to the repeal of the Sedition Act. As in the case of the Bill of Rights itself, the Stated provided an indispensable strategically-placed battleground for the defense of natural and civil rights against potential danger from the national government.

 

Madison’s Claim Examined

As Madison wrote, federalism is not a regime but a system of government distinguished by a greater degree of decentralization than a small, centralized ancient polis or ‘city-state’ and a large, also centralized modern state—the system first advocated by Machiavelli. A federal state, a city-state, or a modern state might have any regime; regimes are defined by the type of rule seen in the political community—the persons who rule, the institutions they use in ruling, their purposes in ruling, and the way of life the persons, institutions, and purposes impart to the people who live there. The workings of the federal system against the growth of tyranny are, well, unsystematic—not susceptible of cut-and-dried test cases. But, with the help of comparative political analysis (which is really only one form of prudential reasoning based on experience) one can test the Madisonian hypothesis.

As mentioned above, one part of the hypothesis is that federalism, combined with the regime of republicanism, defends against tyranny from without by affording vulnerable, small republics the opportunity to summon the material resources needed to defend themselves militarily against foreign tyrants, without leading to the permanent military establishments that threaten the republican regime itself. On the latter point, the comparativist Michael Mann confirms Madison’s claim. The American Revolution actually democratized American politics by “letting the ‘people’ onstage,” from which vantage point they preferred not to move after the war was over (151). But elsewhere war expanded the state—indeed, Mann remarks that “only war did this before 1850″ (359, emphasis added). After 1850, civilian bureaucracies also grew, but the military itself bureaucratized, becoming more efficient and deadly. In Germany, the combined civilian and military bureaucracy of the central government overwhelmed federalism, opening the door to the Kaiserreich of the turn of the century and the Third Reich a few decades later: Statism overwhelmed weak republicanism. The United States saw the same pressures at the same time: labor-capital strife, world wars, depressions. But although the central state apparatus expanded as a response to those pressures, it did not go the way of the German state.

Victory in those wars also confirms part of Madison’s hypothesis: that commercial republics, sufficiently extensive in territory and therefore formidable in human and material resources, will be able to fight to defend themselves. Regimes as diverse as the British mixed regime, the Confederate oligarchy, the German Kaiserreich, the Nazi tyranny, the Soviet tyranny followed by the Soviet oligarchy, have all grossly underestimated the battle-readiness of the American commercial republic. So far, that republic has enjoyed more military success than the regimes that deliberately cultivate a militarist ethos.

More worrisome from a Madisonian (and indeed from any Whiggish) viewpoint is the existence of a large standing military force in post-World War II America. The longterm ‘Cold War’ did in fact lead to considerable state growth. But there has been nothing approaching a military tyranny or a coup attempt of any sort, evidently because the military draws its personnel from the ordinary civilian population of a commercial republican society, still somewhat decentralized despite the weakening of federalism during the same period, a population whose ‘habits of mind and heart’ are decidedly non-autocratic. Madison and Jefferson would undoubtedly continue to view the military establishment with profound suspicion, but so far it looks as if federal, commercial republicanism is even more resilient than its first friends expected it to be.

The second part of the Madisonian hypothesis is the domestic component: that federal republicanism will defeat the factionalism to which small republics are prey by extending the sphere of government to a bigger territory with a larger population, in which factions are too numerous to enable any one faction to dominate. In Germany, as Mann explains, Bismarck’s authoritarian (if not tyrannical) state came about in part to manage class conflict; Hitler’s Reich came in after a decade of severe, partisan class conflict. After 1850, generally in Europe, state-building was tied at least as much to the need to assuage class conflict; in fact, Theodore Roosevelt was interested in Bismarck’s projects and thought about how they might be adapted to American circumstances, and cousin Franklin’s New Deal state-building successes were a response to the pressures of economic collapse. Both capitalist-class and working-class politics are to some degree factional in the Madisonian sense. The American federal republic quite likely has helped to prevent the more sharply authoritarian tendencies seen in other countries.

Aristide Zolberg has written that “the single most important determinant of variation in the patterns of working-class politics… is simply whether, at the time this class was being brought into being by the development of capitalism… it faced an absolutist or a liberal state.” In the United States, Zolberg continues, republicanism preceded industrialism, mass parties formed before the working class formed, and political entrepreneurs needed mass support in order to win. Trans-class organizations already occupied “space in the political arena,” and this resulted in accommodation and melioration—admittedly, after some very serious and violent worker-capitalist clashes around the turn of the twentieth century (Zolberg 450 ff.). Before Aristide, Aristotle argued that who rules and the institutions by which they rule will ‘channel’ minds and hearts in different directions in different regimes.

More directly related to federalism is Ira Katznelson’s argument: The federal republican state could present no serious nationally-directed repression of labor unions in America. There was “no unitary state to defend or transform” (Katznelson 64). Madisonian republicanism did in fact yield social diversity, and ethnic clashes were not linked closely to class conflict. Machine politicians, mediators between rich and poor, followed a policy of modest and largely localized redistribution of wealth, an arrangement with which even FDR had to compromise (Bensel 149); that is, the bureaucratization of welfare politics could not become simply national. American has seen plenty of strikes and not a few riots, but no revolutions; the revolutionaries, as Madison predicted, have not been able to unite in strong national networks. Moreover, no systematic critique of the American federal system has ever caught on, although dozens have been offered. ‘The masses’ were not excluded from political representation (unlike the German workers), and so were not really masses (Katznelson 27). This is not to suggest that a sharper, class-conflictual politics in America would have led to tyranny. In some countries it did and in others it did not; England did not have the American system, but it was never in danger of succumbing to tyranny via the path of domestic unrest. Still, it is reasonable to think that American federal republicanism has worked generally to prevent factions from becoming increasingly tyrannical.

Madison himself accounted for the non-tyrannical growth of the federal government in the twentieth century. The people of the United States, he remarked in Federalist 46, are “the common authority” above both national and state governments. “If… the people should in future become more partial to the federal than to the State governments, the change can only result from such manifest and irresistible proofs of a better administration as will overcome all their antecedent propensities.” The increased partiality of Americans for the federal government as against the States can be seen precisely in the former’s necessarily nation-wide response to the Great Depression and world war in the 1930-40s, and to the Cold War thereafter. Now that those stimuli have been removed, there has been some return of authority to the States—again because the people control both parts of the system, and put different weights on the scales at different times, depending upon perceived changes in circumstances.

 

Works Cited

Bensel, Richard Franklin: Sectionalism and American Political Development, 1880-1980. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

Boyd, Julian, ed.: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950-.

Eliot, Jonathan, ed.: Debates on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1845.

Farrand, Max, ed.: The Records of the Federal Convention. 4 volumes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966 [1937].

Katznelson, Ira: “Working-Class Formation: Constructing Cases and Comparisons.” In Katznelson and Zolberg, 1986.

Katznelson, Ira and Zolberg, Aristide: Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.

Ketchum, Ralph: The Anti-Federalist Papers. New York: New American Library, 2003.

Mann, Michael: The Sources of Social Power. Volume II: The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

McConnell, Grant: Private Power and American Democracy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966. 

Publius: The Federalist. Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company. 1990.

Zolberg, Aristide: “How Many Exceptionalisms?” In Katznelson and Zolberg, 1986.