. The American system as it has developed is an elitist system, based on an analysis of Congress, the bureaucracy, the domestic presidency, and the foreign affairs presidency. There are a number of non-elitist elements in American society which are promoted as the identifying characteristics of the system, among them a supposed classless social structure, egalitarian educational and legal institutions, and so on. However, the way the system operates serves the needs of a number of elites much more than the broader coalition, and in any case America does not have a completely classless society with a level laying field for all as often claimed. The political system indeed perpetuates a number of social, political, and economic inequalities between classes, racial groups, and other social and economic divisions.
Harrigan (1993) points out that American government and politics are not neutral and that any government action produces winners and losers, those who get benefits and those who pay most of the costs of those benefits: "Political processes inherently give more advantages to some people than to others" (Harrigan, 1993, 1). Harrigan further states, "The most persistent lines of conflict in American politics. . . occur around wealth and class" (Harrigan, 1993, 5). The ideal of the American system, as embodied in the Constitution, is to limit the separation between winners and losers and to see that no one group is always to be found in either category. This is an ideal that is not met as it should be.
The Framers of the Constitution created a document in which three branches of government were described, with the three set in a perpetual balance so that each would have some oversight over the other two in order to prevent any one from gaining complete ascendancy. However, this balance has not remained the same at all times, and at different times critics of the way government is operating have described an imperial pr...