236 The making of American domestic policy
the power and importance of the presidency. In spite of the attention that has
been given to the idea of an ‘Imperial Presidency’, firstly after the Vietnam
War and more recently in the wake of the invasion of Iraq, there has in fact
been a continual decline in presidential power since the time of Roosevelt.
The new American nationalism
The explanation of this new political system can be found only by an exami-
nation of the nature of American society, and by an examination of the stage
of development that the United States has reached in its perception of its
own national identity. The unique character of American nationalism lies at
the heart of the political system in the United States. Americans have had
to develop a sense of national identity over a much shorter period than most
European states, and in quite different circumstances. The United States is a
country of immigrants and the descendants of immigrants and at the outset
of the new nation there were doubts about whether a sense of national iden-
tity would ever emerge. As late as the middle of the nineteenth century there
were those who were prepared to give their total allegiance to one section of
the country, rather than to the nation as a whole. The American system of
federalism grew out of this conflict between local loyalties and loyalty to the
nation.
Today, however, the United States exhibits a kind of nationalism that
is quite unique in the modern world. America differs from any other large
nation, European or Asian, because it is in a very real sense an artificial
construction of the modern age. European nations have been created as the
result of the bringing together through conquest of tribal units, which have
been forged into a single society. But such societies are never fully integrated.
The tribal and sub-national divisions within them reappear, because they are
associated with a historic territory, a homeland, a language or some other
ethnic characteristic that can form the basis of nationalist sentiment. Thus,
since the end of the Second World War, nationalist movements have sprung
up in Britain, France, Spain and other European countries where ethnic
groups look back over many centuries to an earlier national identity, real or
imagined. Although the United States is a country composed of an enormous
diversity of ethnic origins, there are really no important historic commu-
nities in the United States that have a close association with a particular
region or area. The old loyalties to New England, the sense of community in
Louisiana – none of these has the kind of importance in day-to-day American
politics that the Scots have in the United Kingdom, or the Basques in Spain.
The closest analogy to such European loyalties to be found in North America
is that of Quebec in Canada, although many Mexican-Americans do now look
upon California in a rather similar way.
During the twentieth century the development of rapid transport, the
expansion of settlement into new areas such as California and Alaska, the
spread of industrialisation into the South – all these things tended to produce