20 The nature of American politics
between classes. The working of the democratic system depends upon the
fact that these extremes are never realised, and that political parties must
appeal both to different sections of the country and to different classes of the
population.
Our third approach to the political system we may describe as the pluralis-
tic approach. This views the political system as a large number of groups each
with a different interest, so that politics is a continually changing pattern
of group activities and interactions. Economic, class and geographic factors
are important parts of the pattern, but many other kinds of groups are also
important: religious groups, ethnic groups and other social groupings. Fur-
thermore, although economic groups play an important part in the political
system, they do not coalesce into two or three big classes for purposes of po-
litical action. They are divided among themselves, union opposing union, one
type of producer battling with his competitors, agriculture ranged against
industry, small businessman against big businessman, the retailer against
the manufacturer, and so on without end. Class and regional loyalties are
fragmented, each group seeking for support to win its battles wherever that
support is to be found. Thus we have a picture of the political system as a col-
lection of a very large number of groups, of varying size and importance, bat-
tling for their interests in a society where no single group dominates. Since
the membership of these groups overlaps considerably, there are Catholic
businessmen and Protestant businessmen, Irish-American labour leaders and
Italian-American labour leaders – there is a continual set of cross-pressures
upon the leaders of these groups which helps the processes of compromise
between them and moderates their demands. At the extreme, the role of gov-
ernment in such a society is simply to hold the ring, to act as referee between
the groups to enable the necessary bargaining and compromise to take place.
The political machinery becomes simply the mechanism through which equi-
librium is achieved between the contending interests. As the government’s
main autonomous interest becomes that of maintaining law and order there
is little scope for active leadership to give direction to national policy, and po-
litical parties have little coherence or discipline, being merely organisational
devices devoid of policy content. Pluralism is very much an American view
of the political process and many accounts of the working of the system of
government, and in particular the role of interest groups in it, are couched in
these terms. It is essential to approach American politics from a pluralistic
viewpoint but, as with the other models so far discussed, the temptation to
push it to an extreme as the sole explanation must be resisted.
A rather different approach to the nature of the American system, but
one closely related to both class and pluralistic theories of politics, is the
belief that the United States is governed by a series of elites, or indeed by a
single power elite. The latter view, associated with the name of C. Wright
Mills, tends to place great emphasis upon the power and wealth of those
groups in the population that control crucial areas of the economy. President
Eisenhower, himself a great general, warned against the influence of the