238 The making of American domestic policy
contending group interests is at the heart of the system. Nevertheless, a sim-
ple-minded pluralist view of American politics cannot be sustained. Clearly,
certain groups have more influence, more financial muscle, better organi-
sation and more effective access to the centres of decision-taking, and can
therefore expect to win more often than others. Elite groups of industrialists,
the military, bureaucrats or judges can have a decisive effect at the right time
in the right circumstances. Although one can search in vain for the power
elite that determines all important matters in the United States, any study of
American politics that ignored the significance of elites would be inadequate.
‘Class politics’ is also an essential fact of life in America, but it is emphati-
cally not the class politics of the Marxist analysis. That analysis centres on
the concept of a small ruling class that dominates and exploits the masses,
and in many societies that was, and is still today, a fair representation of
the situation. In America, however, we see a very different position. America
is overwhelmingly and increasingly a middle-class society. It is this middle
class, and not the industrial proletariat or the bourgeoisie, that is the fly-
wheel of the political system. In some senses this makes for a more insoluble
problem than that posited by the Marxist critics of the system. In a society
where a small, powerful and wealthy minority exploits the vast majority of
the citizens, some relief might come from revolution, but the American situ-
ation is one in which perhaps 80 or 85 per cent of the people are satisfied
with the system and have more to lose than to gain from radical change. The
remainder, who are underprivileged and live in relative poverty in an affluent
society, can see little prospect of attaining the levels of wealth of the more
prosperous sections of the community. It is therefore more a case of ‘majority
tyranny’, and much more difficult to resolve. It is here that the major threat
to the stability of American life lies.
Above all, America remains a country in which individuals can have an
impact, at all levels, on the outcome of political decisions. The relative lack
of ideological restraints and of strong organisational structures makes it pos-
sible for the individual, if sufficiently determined, to influence the outcome
of decisions by the local school board, or even to defeat the intentions of
the president of the United States. The policy outcomes of this system, its
results, are not necessarily ‘good’ or ‘desirable’, for the people who make up
the system are unfailingly human. However, the ‘openness’ of the American
political system, the fact that no single person or group can control the flow
of information within it or impose upon it a single all-inclusive organisational
structure, ensures that it comes closer than any other modern state to being
a representative democracy.
The American political system was deliberately fragmented by the Found-
ing Fathers, distributing authority between the federal government and the
states, separating legislative, executive and judicial powers, and creating a
genuinely bicameral legislature, in which the two Houses of Congress both
exercise considerable power. Congress was created as a legislature in its own
right, not dependent on the president, but as a rival. Later developments in