America Divided

As Americans, we are used to seeing the 220-year stability of our constitutional system, unique in modern history, as a homogeneous narrative, interrupted by crises like the Civil War and the Depression–and perhaps, Vietnam and its aftermath–but essentially consistent. Typically, the American story is broken down into brief intervals associated with leading personalities, from Thomas Jefferson to Ronald Reagan and beyond.

But close analysts of the evolution of the republic have (according to various criteria) sought to distinguish longer periods in American political development. The establishment of successive “ages” in world history has been a significant, and at times fruitful, enterprise, undertaken by historians of various cultures over the past millennium. Professor Morton Keller of Brandeis has performed an important service with this brilliant, engaging new book, which convincingly identifies three discrete configurations of the American commonwealth.

Keller names the three stages “the deferential-Republican regime,” “the party-Democratic regime”–which comprises two subperiods, political and industrial–and “the populist-bureaucratic regime.” This perceptive theory provides an excellent tonic for citizens who empirically observe that civic expectations and idioms have changed dramatically in America after two centuries, but who are confused as to how such contradictions emerged.

Such an examination is especially important today. We live in a country where a term such as “progressive,” originally applied to opponents of party corruption, has come to be associated with leftist ideology. Rhetoric against foreign intervention is heedlessly reintroduced into the political discourse without regard for context, and diatribes against democracy are commonplace–either from leftists dissatisfied with an agenda for global transformation, or in the mouths of dogmatic conservatives in favor of the “virginal” republic.

In prefatory remarks to each of the book’s four parts, Keller explains the background of each phase in the long American transmutation. He writes that the first American regime, beginning in the early 17th century–that is, under British colonial rule–and extending to the early 19th century (soon after independence) “both derived from and reacted to” the Old World social background. The English environment was the place of origin for the majority of colonists who would create the United States. It featured a legacy of Protestant-Catholic conflict, followed by a fusion of monarchy and parliamentary authority, but with maintenance of aristocratic power and a gentry, a “fiscal-military” state originating in continuous war against the French, and common law.

From these European patterns, Americans forged a “deferential” authority organized as a republic. In earlier works, this system might have been simply defined as feudal, based in landed privilege, and stratified. Keller provides a thorough inventory of the customs and institutions that appeared in the English colonies, many of them clearly imitative of European models. But, like prior scholars, he notes that the rigid structures of the Old World were mitigated by the greater land resources available to white colonists with the removal of the American-Indian population. With so much territory open, the legal restrictions represented by inheritance soon became elastic.

Keller has adroitly included in his narrative many fascinating, but now obscure, details of life in the new conditions of the American colonies. These include local rebellions and attempts at authoritarian rule, in addition to such better-known incidents as the Massachusetts witch trials and the affirmation of press freedom in the case of John Peter Zenger. Keller portrays an American colonial system in which “adaptation and innovation” necessarily replaced the tradition and precedent of the European past.

This genius for adjustment of political philosophy to practical needs produced an American Revolution that was unlike its predecessor in England, the Puritan Revolution. The latter produced the rule of Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector, and its successor in France ended in the Reign of Terror and the dictatorship of Napoleon.

As many have noted, the American overthrow of the old order did not produce an absolutist ruler. But a gap in political thinking had become visible: Rousseau’s belief that social benefit was brought about by governmental power, against the affirmation of John Adams that “government ought to be what the people make of it.” In addition, George Washington, the chieftain of the American revolutionaries, did not harbor the expansionist ambitions of Cromwell or Bonaparte, whose wars are still vivid in the world’s collective memory. In the 19th century, new nation-states such as a unified Italy, previously broken into a constellation of imperial, aristocratic, and religious states, had to create an Italian identity, which remains diffuse and disparate today. By contrast, Americans knew who they were, but had to create a country to fit their cultural and spiritual ambitions.

In revolutionary America, human nature reshaped institutions, while in radical France, institutions were destroyed in an attempt to found a new human existence. In Keller’s words, “past, present, future: all was grist for the American revolutionary mill.”

In fulfillment of this principle, the interests and capacities present in the foundation of the American order assured that the “deferential” republic would give way relatively soon to the dominance of parties over classes and the rise of democratic politics. For the Founders, parties had been an object of anxiety, as agencies of division. Keller refers to the triumph of political parties as a “regime change in American public life.”

Party-democracy in its early form reflected a turn in America’s orientation from issues involving Atlantic commerce to a growing internal market, the expansion of capitalism, and the influence of slavery. Each of these impelled the arrival of new political trends and conflicts. One of the most remarkable described by Keller was the debate over internal improvements, such as roads and canals, in which federal planning was replaced by the initiative of local legislators–the standard with which we still live. But westward expansion stimulated the consciousness of Americans as a people, and a political idiom devoted to the pioneering ideal of the log cabin, in contrast with the elitism in the personalities and discourse of the Founders. It also animated such ugly phenomena as anti-Catholicism and nativism.

The first articulation of the democratic regime collapsed in the Civil War which, as Keller indicates, is universally regarded by historians as “the great divide” between “the early Republic and urban-industrial modern America.” Keller, however, declares that the direct effects of the conflict on the American polity were “ephemeral and superficial.” Most notably, the Civil War and Reconstruction represented no more than an interlude in the history of party rule. Race, the essential problem driving both the armed confrontation and its disastrous sequel, not only survived, but in some respects was strengthened.

In Keller’s view, the industrial chapter in the course of party-democracy–a continuation of the second regime rather than a new system–was marked by sociological more than political change. Where early democracy contended with contradictions between the power of federal and state authorities, democracy after the Civil War faced the challenges of industrial transformation. Along with the triumph of American industrial organization came a new supremacy of the political organization. The industrial ascendancy in American democracy generated progressivism which, like the Civil War, promised to preserve the essence of the republic. Where northern opposition to southern secession represented a successful effort to maintain the primordial union, progressivism, in Keller’s words, “sought to preserve an older America from the transforming power of big business and politics.”

But progressivism, like the Civil War and Reconstruction, was merely an interlude, and as Keller indicates, by the 1920s the party system had been reestablished. The final shift in American politics came during the 1930s with the triumph of “the populist-bureaucratic regime.” Keller is notably eloquent in his analysis of this new and seemingly permanent style of politics, writing that the country has remained “under the sway” of this regime since its inception.

“Today,” he affirms, “this regime is in its full maturity: as distinctive, and as pervasive, as its party-democratic predecessor.”

The contemporary regime is dominated by interest groups rather than party politicians; the welfare state has generated new relations between the government and the citizenry. Finally, a long epoch of obliviousness to the outside world, punctuated by brief foreign wars, ended with a new American global engagement.

In America’s Three Regimes, Morton Keller has produced a valuable, highly readable survey of American political history that answers many of the questions about government and the people that we ask today. This is the epitome of pleasurable reading: It makes you want to go back and reread page after page, not because the text is difficult but because it is filled with genuine insights. Kudos to Professor Keller and congratulations to those lucky enough to encounter his book.

Stephen Schwartz is the author of the forthcoming The Other Islam: Sufism and the Road to Global Harmony.