Presidents do this by endless maneuvering, manipulating, compromising, persuading, and bargaining and on the other side, congressional leaders use the same methods to hamstring them. To get any major legislative program off the ground in our Madisonian maze of countervailing and overlapping powers, politicians are compelled to piece together a new patchwork of factions, congressional votes, and temporary coalitions. A standard device of both presidential parties is to choose the Vice President from one of the congressional parties. The parties move in and out of coalition at any time any one of the four might coalesce with any one of the others. Congressional committees are countered by presidential commissions. The President flanks Congress with legislative powers, just as Congress flanks the President with executive powers. Their own counterpart of the gerrymandered congressional district is the electoral college. ![]() ![]() Presidential parties are typically, though not uniformly, majoritarian, activist, and welfare-minded and internationally oriented. The congressional parties fear “the tyranny of the majority,” stress (certain) minority rights, and are rooted in the one-party areas, North and South. Its prophets are Madison and Calhoun and its contemporary spokesmen are James Burnham, William S. It is basically Madisonian and rests on states’ rights, local elections, rural over-representation, restricted franchise, powerful congressional committees, the seniority system, and the filibuster. It is generally conservative, isolationist, and intrinsically negative. Burns’s view-and the historian will not accept this without qualifications-the congressional parties have a common ideology. Both the Democrats and Republicans are divided into a presidential party and a congressional party, and Pennsylvania Avenue is approximately as long for the Democrats as for the Republicans. Ours is in fact a system of four parties, each of which is made up of coalitions. For only nominally is ours a two-party system in order to govern, these Presidents have been compelled to manipulate multi-party coalitions more complex than those of France before de Gaulle. They have been hobbled by Madisonian checks and hamstrung by coalition politics. Bums points out that the Presidents who have tried to play this role have been dogged by frustration. ![]() Burns labels this fragmentation the “Madisonian Model,” and he is persuaded that it has long since outlived its usefulness.īut Mr. The fragmentation of power thus produced was further aggravated by the federal system, with its rivalries between state and nation, governors and legislatures, city mayors and state governments. Burns attacks neither the motives nor the methods of the framers, but rather their often celebrated handiwork of checks and balances: elaborate safeguards, countervailing forces, separate constituencies, staggered elections, separated powers, counterbalancing vetoes, overlapping authorities. Not since Charles Beard published his Economic Interpretation of the Constitution fifty years ago have the framers of the Constitution had so rough a time. ![]() Burns devotes half his book to a revision of American political history. Burns has struck a telling blow at both the American political tradition itself and at all the scholarly and public complacency about that tradition. As for the present, the conventional field of operations for political scientists, his estimate of the situation might have been more accurately represented by substituting in the title of this book the word “Breakdown” for “Deadlock.” For all his mild-mannered tolerance and all his deference to classical authorities, Mr. James MacGregor Burns, the genial professor of political science at Williams College, has a deceptively bland way of advancing revolutionary readings of the past and revolutionary proposals for the future. The Deadlock of Democracy: Four Party Politics in America.
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