The making of American domestic policy 235the war seemed to show that only the president could provide the coherent
initiatives in internal and external policy that were required to deal with the
complex problems of the modern world. More and more it seemed as if the
legislature could only follow where the president led. Furthermore, under
Roosevelt a new liberal establishment had been created in Washington, with
the federal civil service evolving policies in the fields of employment, social
welfare, transport and a hundred other areas, which were then to be imple-
mented by the state governments, sometimes reluctantly, on conditions laid
down by the federal government.
The Roosevelt system, then, represented an attempt to bring the United
States into the twentieth century by developing new social and economic
policies, but it was dependent in the last analysis upon the same political
infrastructure that had supported the system of government since the Civil
War. Roosevelt, though an innovator, depended upon the party bosses and
political machines that had formed the substructure of American politics for
many decades; but many of his own policies were to undermine that system
and help to transform American politics into something very different.
The new political system
Most of the basic characteristics of the Roosevelt system have now been
changed almost out of all recognition. Although American politics is still very
much characterised by the interplay of group politics, the nature of those
groups has changed considerably. To the older groups have been added new
ones concerned with issues such as environmental protection, pollution con-
trol, social issues such as women’s rights and abortion, and many others.
The quality of the pluralistic battle has changed also because of the decline
of the importance of the party system. As a result of the extension of pri-
mary elections, particularly presidential primaries, and the new rules for the
selection of delegates to the national conventions, professional politicians,
particularly in the Democratic Party, came to play a much-diminished role
in the organization and operation of the national political parties. In effect,
the Democratic Party’s selection procedure for the choosing of Democratic
presidential candidates was taken over by pressure groups, who have a for-
mal position in the party, and who are represented in it as of right. Thus the
old linkages, corrupt as they often were, between bosses at the state and local
level and national politicians, were broken. This in itself might have been
highly desirable, but nothing has replaced these former linkages, and there
remains largely a void. National nominating politics has become a matter
of personalities, of the ability of presidential candidates to attract to them-
selves an organisation to promote their candidature, and above all a matter
of the use of the mass media to project the candidate’s image across the na-
tion, using soundbites.
This new style of politics has been accompanied by a change in the kind of
presidential candidate that is successful, and also by an undoubted decline in