68 The two-party system
party supports and the other opposes. Furthermore, neither party is ever
wholly united against the other. Always there are members of one party who,
on a particular issue, feel more in sympathy with the majority view in the
opposing party. The intra-party divisions can be just as deep and just as bitter
as the inter-party divisions. And there are issues enough to be bitter about,
for the problems facing the United States, in domestic and in foreign affairs,
are real enough. Civil rights for ethnic minorities, racial integration, the war
on poverty, the provision of health care, the role of the federal government in
education, the problems of urban renewal, the attitude of the United States
towards Latin America, the ‘War on Terror’, the invasion of Iraq; these are
just a few of the tortuously complex problems that have faced policy-makers
in recent years. So the content of American politics is by no means dull or
uneventful. The politics of consensus does not result in a shortage of issues.
Furthermore, the role of government in American life is much greater than
many people outside the United States imagine. The view of the United
States as an extreme laissez-faire capitalist society is very far from the truth.
Regulation of labour and industry, and government intervention in economic
life, have in many respects gone much further than in European countries.
Federal government expenditure on social welfare constitutes approximately
10 per cent of the national income; the demand for government action to
solve social problems has been a characteristic of American society through-
out its history. America is a much-governed country, for regulatory activities
and welfare services are the active concern of three levels of government, in
part competing with each other, in part cooperating.
The explanation of the two-party system lies therefore in the complex
interrelationships between the constitutional structure, party organisa-
tion, ideology and the issues that face American politicians. The Constitu-
tion provides a stable framework within which political forces can form and
re-form over individual issues and create coalitions, some relatively stable,
others quite transient. The Constitution does not demand of president and
Congress a degree of unified, coherent action that they probably could not
sustain in view of the latent multi-party tendencies in the political system.
The presidency does, however, provide an institutional focus for politics that
tends to polarise the political system around two great party organisations.
The basic ideological consensus allows this organisational tendency towards
two parties to evolve without its being disrupted by strong commitments to
particular principles or programmes. It enables the two major parties to de-
velop a different emphasis towards the role of government in society without
coming into a head-on collision, and it makes it possible for each issue to
be considered almost in isolation and a judgement to be made in pragmatic
terms. The advantages of this system in a diverse society like the United
States are obvious, for it damps down potentially serious divisive tendencies;
but there are, of course, disadvantages as well. It makes it virtually impos-
sible to achieve a planned, coherent set of policies to deal with related prob-
lems, for the criteria applied to the solution of each problem are as diverse