Category: Bibliography

American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony

American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony https://a.co/d/1pYrQ0h

This stunningly persuasive book examines the persistent, radical gap between the promise of American ideals and the performance of American politics. Samuel P. Huntington shows how Americans, throughout their history as a nation, have been united by the democratic creed of liberty, equality, and hostility to authority. At the same time he reveals how, inevitably, these ideals have been perennially frustrated through the institutions and hierarchies required to carry on the essential functions of governing a democratic society.

From this antagonism between the ideals of democracy and the realities of power have risen four great political upheavals in American history. Every third generation, Huntington argues, Americans have tried to reconstruct their institutions to make them more truly reflect deeply rooted national ideals. Moving from the clenched fists and mass demonstrations of the 1960s, to the moral outrage of the Progressive and Jacksonian Eras, back to the creative ideological fervor of the American Revolution, he incisively analyzes the dissenters’ objectives. All, he pungently writes, sought to remove the fundamental disharmony between the reality of government in America and the ideals on which the American nation was founded.

Huntington predicts that the tension between ideals and institutions is likely to increase in this country in the future. And he reminds us that the fate of liberty and democracy abroad is intrinsically linked to the strength of our power in world affairs. This brilliant and controversial analysis deserves to rank alongside the works of Tocqueville, Bryce, and Hofstadter and will become a classic commentary on the meaning of America.

Review

This is an enduring and classic study of American politics. Professor Samuel Huntington (April 18, 1927 – December 24, 2008) had a gift for formulating concepts that clarify political history, and his Curriculum Vitae is replete with distinguished honors. He was a lifetime Political Science professor at Harvard, co-founder of Foreign Affairs, and had hands-on experience as a government advisor in numerous capacities over a period of many years.

Huntington held no “pendulum” theory of American politics. He does not expound the simplistic idea that political swings to the right will be balanced by swings to the left so that American politics will stabilize in the long run. There is, instead, a constant tension in American political life between the “ideal” and the “real.” The ideal of egalitarian populism must co-exist with the real hierarchies necessary to manage systems of power in the business world as well in the national and international world.

A central theme that runs throughout this study is Huntington’s notion of “The American Creed.” He avers that since the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries there has been a cultural consensus that may be described as “The American Creed:” “liberty, equality, individualism, democracy, and the rule of law under a constitution.” In this rigorous study Huntington shows how the Founding Fathers accepted the conflict inherent in human nature, and built their system on it.

This review will not attempt to convey the many, many insights that Huntington brings to light in this highly readable analysis. Of note is his description of what happens when the “ideal” clashes with the hierarchies of the “real,” and America goes through a period of “Creedal Passion.” The bulk of the book is given over to an exposition of the history of such periods in America, what they mean, and how they are resolved within the dynamic of the American Creed.

In apt conclusion, Professor Huntington writes: “critics say that America is a lie because its reality falls so far short of its ideals. They are wrong. America is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope.”