A government of limited powers 17religions of Europe. The breaking of the ties with Great Britain in a violent
and glorious act of defiance set the seal upon the American self-image as
the propagator of revolutionary ideals of freedom and democracy. America
became to the downtrodden peoples of Europe the symbol of the ability of
man to break the shackles of tradition and to triumph through reason and
determination. No American could declare allegiance to the principles of
true conservatism, that is, of utter resistance to all change, and remain an
American. Yet the American revolutionary tradition is of a very special vari-
ety. Those ‘aristocratic’ leaders of the American Revolution who took their
places at the head of the movement for independence were not firebrand
revolutionaries with extreme ideas of democracy and equality. They were not
the Jacobins of revolutionary France. They achieved the remarkable feat of
leading a revolutionary war to a successful conclusion while maintaining the
existing structure of American society. They enshrined in their Constitution
a respect for the slow processes of the law, for the sanctity of property and
contract, and for the leadership of the solid men who had a stake in the
community. The counter-revolutionaries of 1787 who wrote the American
Constitution were the same men who had led the Revolution itself in 1775–6.
Thus there is in America an equivocal reaction to the idea of democratic
revolutionary movements in the rest of the world. Americans are democrats,
but conservative democrats; revolutionaries who oppose revolution. Thus the
soil was prepared for the flowering of ‘neoconservatism’ at the end of the
twentieth century, one element of which is to seek to foster democracy in
countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, if necessary by force.
Further reading
Dahl, R. (1956) A Preface to Democratic Theory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Esler, G. (1997) The United States of Anger, London: Penguin.
Hamilton, A., Madison, J. and Jay, J. (2000) The Federalist, or The New Constitution, ed-
ited by William R. Brock, London: Phoenix Press.
Hartz, L. (1955) The Liberal Tradition in America, New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Huntington, S.P. (1981) American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, London: Harvard
University Press.
Kelly, A.H., Harbison, W.A. and Belz, H. (1991) The American Constitution: Its Origins
and Development, 2 vols, 7th edn, New York: W.W. Norton.
Lipset, S.M. (1964) The First New Nation, London: Heinemann.
Websites
US Constitution online: http://www.usconstitution.net
There are many thousands of websites giving information on the American political
system and they are being added to all the time. Fortunately, the New York Times
provides a Politics Navigator for websites covering the whole field of American politics.
It can be accessed at http://www.nytimes.com/ref/politics/POLI_NAVI.html