104 Pressure politics
group may be little more than one ‘wing’ of a political party; on the other
hand, a group may be at pains to remain aloof from both parties in order to
be able to appeal to them both on an equal basis. Thus interest groups may
be seen either as alternatives to the political parties or as complementary
to them. The complexity of the American party system gives added signifi-
cance to this characteristic of interest groups, for a particular group may be
identified more closely with a political party at state or local level than at the
federal level, or have a closer relationship to the presidential party than to
the congressional party. A group of individuals may emerge and re-emerge in
different guises at different times, as the occasion demands. Thus, although
for analytical purposes it is useful to describe the party system and the struc-
ture of interest groups as if they were quite distinct entities, the realities of
political life are more complex.
This blurring of the distinction between parties and interest groups is par-
alleled at the other end of the spectrum by the way in which the structure of
interest groups merges into the machinery of government itself. Thus some
groups, the American Farm Bureau Federation, for instance, achieved a posi-
tion that made them almost an essential party to any government action af-
fecting their interests: groups formally outside the government can become
appendages to it. In the same way, parts of the government machine itself
may behave like interest groups in order to safeguard their own position.
Thus for many years the Air Force was a powerful interest group exercising
influence on Congressmen in opposition to the policy of the Defense Depart-
ment and other branches of the armed services. The National Guard, a part-
time reserve military organisation, was extremely successful in obtaining its
aims through traditional interest group methods, particularly through the
efforts of the National Guard Association.
Bearing these complexities in mind, it is true to say that the importance
of interest groups in the American political system has given rise to a theory
of politics in which the interaction of groups becomes the essence of demo-
cratic government. Group pluralism is perhaps the American theory of poli-
tics, finding its roots in James Madison’s theory of the Constitution in 1787,
and providing an alternative both to the Marxist class theory of politics and
to the nineteenth-century individualistic theories of democracy. This theory
of government is based upon the assumption that individuals as such can
have little or no impact upon the way in which decisions are taken. The group
is the significant unit of the political system. In a free society innumerable
groups will form and re-form to express the diverse and changing interests
of their members. Such groups are not a threat to the traditional channels of
government action but a necessary complement to them. The groups perform
the functions of supplying information about the enormous range of complex
activities in which government becomes involved, and of giving expression to
a range of opinions of far greater diversity than the normal representative
machinery of government could cope with.
Two things are necessary for the successful operation of this type of