blican forms of government in ancient Rome and Greece and sought to guard against what Hamilton called in No. 9 "domestic faction and insurrection" (Quinn 63). Madison in No. 10 envisaged that the disruptive effects of factional struggle would be contained in a pluralist society governed by popular sovereignty (Quinn 75-76).
Political Genius of the American System
Alexis De Tocqueville commented in the 1840s on the health of the American political system. He noted the development of political parties nowhere mentioned in the Constitution, but he said "the people reign in the American political world as the Deity does in the universe. They are the cause and the aim of all things, everything comes from them, and everything is absorbed by them" (57-58).
In reviewing American political history, Philips noted the American political genius which "has rested in the U.S. ability to stage political revolutions or watershed elections every generation, thereby putting the nation on a new course and sweeping the old regime's exhausted interest groups and elites from Washington" (xiv). Third political parties have never caught on, but the two party system has been invigorated by third parties with new ideas which had broad appeal such as the Populists in the late 19th century and the Progressives in the early 20th century. The Constitution has proved to be a flexible, living document which could accommodate enormous political, economic and social changes, including a Civil War, the (Franklin) Roosevelt Revolution and the civil rights movement.
A number of recent observers detect what they suspect is a hardening of the political arteries of the American system, inertia to change and a reluctance to reform. Philips speaks of "the rise of a massive, special-interest-driven Washington and its tightening death grip" (xiii). According to him, "by the early 1990s three decades of evidence that U.S. politics and government didn't work . . . ...