AMERICAN POLITICAL SYSTEM: ITS NATURE AND VICES
This research paper considers the essential features of the American political system as it has evolved since the founding of the Republic and seeks to characterize its current reality as opposed to its pretensions, both in terms of its political integrity and as a system for providing social justice.
The American political system still has many of the characteristics of representative democracy in which political moderation and respect for the civil rights of the individual and minorities prevails, but it has become largely unrepresentative of and unresponsive to the will of ordinary citizens and shows signs of being incapable of reforming itself. It is also a political system which enshrines a seemingly permanent division between economic and social haves and have nots and in which the American dream of equality of economic opportunity has greatly diminished.
Intent of the Framers. The Federalist Papers indicate that the framers of the American Constitution intended to establish not a pure democracy but a representative system of government subject to popular sovereignty in which the potential for tyranny and the abuse of political power would be limited. In Federalist No. 15, Alexander Hamilton said that government was instituted "because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint;" and in No. 51 James Madison said that "if men were angels, no government would be necessary" (Quinn 83 & 133). Hence, the elaborate separation of powers and checks and balances at the federal level and division of federal and state powers. Anarchy was threatened by the excessive fragmentation of power during the Articles of Confederation, hence the delegation of certain strong central powers to the president and to the national government.
Many of the framers including Hamilton, Madison and Thomas Jefferson had studied the failures of repu...