The making of American domestic policy 237a population that has many diversities within it, but is spread out across the
whole face of the United States without the kind of local or regional dif-
ferentiation that one would find in Europe. In one sense, therefore, America
is more of a single, united nation than any other in the world. The loyalties
of the population have no other focus than that of the United States. Old
sectional and regional loyalties persist, but they are no longer strong enough
to have any real claim to the allegiance of Americans.
Such a situation might be thought to lead to a highly centralised politi-
cal system, in which a powerful national government was the only effective
political force. Clearly this is not the case. The nature of American society
in the post-industrial age is such that there is no desire for a strong, power-
ful central government. Individualism remains a very strong element in the
make-up of the American electorate. A large proportion of the population
resists the centralisation of power and the extension of government activ-
ity. As a result of these two factors – the peculiar uniformity of American
nationalism, and the resistance to big government – there has resulted a
strangely unstructured, decentralised system of government and politics.
The institutions of state and local government are used in order to prevent
the centralisation of political power, without their being themselves the focus
of strong loyalties.
Political power is diffused across a large but an increasingly undifferenti-
ated country. Political parties have provided little structure to the system,
at least until recently. After the congressional elections of 1994 when Newt
Gingrich became the Speaker of the House of Representatives the increas-
ingly ideological nature of the Republican Party, combined with the change
of allegiance from the Democrats to the Republicans made by many South-
ern whites, resulted in politics becoming more partisan, but that partisan-
ship is still not as intense as in most European countries. It did not prevent
President Clinton being re-elected in 1996 alongside a Republican major-
ity in both Houses of Congress. In spite of the Republican control of both
presidency and Congress since 2002, the constitutional separation of powers
and the electoral system still hold out the distinct possibility of a return to
divided government, with a president of one party faced by a majority of the
opposing party in one or both of the Houses of Congress.
Democracy in the United States
The American political system is a combination of pluralist, class, elitist and
individualist influences. In a sense, that must be true of any political system,
for in the real world no actual system of government will fit exactly into any
single intellectual category. The special quality of the American system is the
way in which all these different elements are kept in balance, through a con-
stitutional system the main purpose of which is to prevent the accumulation
of power in the hands of any single individual, section or group. Politics in
America is group politics, and the process of achieving compromises between