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PSC 201: American Government

9: Richard Hofstadter, Amer. Pol. Tradition.
10: James Madison, "The Federalist 10"
12: C. Wright Mills "The Power Elite"
14: Robert Dahl, "Who Governs"

I. Hofstadter background

    A. Nation's leading historian.
    B. His work The American Political Tradition points out Founding Fathers'
true views of the human nature in relationship to religion and politics.

II.Founders' views of human nature

    A. Calvanistic view of human evil and damnation.
    B. Believed men are selfish and contentious.

III. Government of the people

    A. Government could not violate prejudice of the people
    B.Could not change the nature of man in order to conform to an ideal system of government.
    C.Human nature could control vices in government.

IV.Quest for form of government

    A. Fearful poor would plunder the rich.
    B. Wanted various interests to check and balance each other.
    C.Various people represented in government.
    D.Each element given its own house with veto power.

V. Prejudices of Fathers

    A.Believed liberty was menaced by democracy.
    B.No high regard for what is considered basic civil liberties.
    C.Liberty alone linked to property.
    D. Constitution did not deal with rights of slaves or the poor class.
    E. Freedom for property was only for what might be deemed as worthy men.

VI. Influence of land in government

    A. Broad dispersion of land property influenced Fathers
    B. Influence in government would be proportionate to land owned.
    C.Merchants and great landowners dominate government.
    D. Small land owners would have a say in government.

VII. Conclusion

    A. Fathers were compelled by class in the design of the Constitution
    B. Statesmanlike sense of moderation was also present.
    C.They thought man was a creature of self interest.
    D. No matter the flaws of human nature, however, and no matter the
prejudices present in the time of the Fathers, they wanted man to be free.

• A faction is a  single groups who try to dominate the political process.
• He calls factions  mortal diseases
• Madison also says one of the problems with factions or rival political parties is that politics become more about what’s good for the party than what’s good for the people of the nation
• Madison says he relizes why people join factions over common interest for the betterment of the community

• The way to destroy its causes are to take away it liberty which is essential to its existence or to make everyone have the same opinion
• However he understands that Taking away liberties is worse than having factions
• He also understands it is impossible to control peoples opinions and says it’s the governments job to protect these rights
• He says our upbringings cause us to oppress each other instead of working to a common good

• He says that people who still won businesses, land, and wealth are unfit to run the gov because they will make decisions to benefit themselves
• Says there is no cure for factions in a true democracy

• Says a republic promises the cure people were seeking
• Names two points that are different from democracy.

That republics elect people to vote for them which is faster and more efficient but he warns that the same people may betray the people who elected them.

• He says the way to guard against this is to have a large number of representatives to outweigh the corrupt ones.
• Madison believed that the more citizens a country had the more people their where to combat against the factions.

The Federalist 10
· The government is capable of controlling factions
· Factions: group of people who gather together to help promote their ideas
· Factions work against the public interest
· As long as men hold different beliefs factions are inevietable
· Most important source of faction is unequal distribution of proper
· Conflicting interest of landowners and those who don't own land
· Pure and Direct democracies cannot control factions
· Strongest factions rule, cannot protect weak
· Madison hopes good representation will be chosen not prejudice factious men
· Representative government is needed in large countries to protect against mob
· To control faction: remove causes and control it's effects

o First impossible second improbable

- Born in Waco, TX on august 28, 1916.
- Studied philosophy U TX Austin, PhD., U. Wisconsin
- His heroes were Max Weber and Karl Marx
- professor at U MD, and Columbia University
- Most famous books, “The New Men of Power: America’s Labor Leaders” (1948), “White Collar: The American Middle Classes” (1951), and controversial work, “The Power Elite” (1956).

- Power in the United States is and has since the creation of the nation been divided among the elite in three areas: Politics, The Economy, and The Military.
-The elite in these institutions tend to have common ties to the economic and social upper class but in no way comprise an aristocracy.
- Supports the Marxist view that there is a divide between the powerful and the powerless, but argues that the divide isn’t a matter of property.
- One of the original sociologists, believing that a rational view to everything existed in the concept of its ideology as opposed to hard fact.
-Taught that new members of the elite are best accepted when they do a good job of mimicking the success of those to come before them.

1-The creation to 1824 with the downfall of the congressional caucus. Multi-sided men tied themselves politically to people’s ideas of familiarity. Traditionally powerful families formed almost an autocracy.
2- The second ran to the Civil War and was composed of a loose coalition of the Political, Economic, and Military arenas. This was sparked mostly because of the Jacksonian Revolution which lessened the social divide among classes and briefly weakened the power elite.
3- end of the Civil War to the depression era, transfer from government power to corporate power. Legislators and Judges were simply bought-up in this “culture of corruption”.
4- depression sparked the need for reform and the New Deal era came about. With the expansion of the government into social areas it had never been, the political aspect of the three elites reached new heights.
5- The 1950s:  intertwined interest of the Military and corporations. Military capitalism: corporate executives using the military for economic purposes and both were gaining power, phasing out the political arena which fought for the good of the people.

America in 1940’s and 50’s
• During this period the USA was in the World War II. After the war the United States was
in a bloodless cold war with Soviet Union.
• America was the worlds most wealthy and industrialized nation.
• The United States had 48 States, and 3 territories.
• America was mostly urban, because of heavy industry.
• A modern civil rights movement was born in 1948.
• America developed the atomic bomb.
• Americans were more conservatives than today.

Philosophy
• The Elite has enormous power
• Government as a 3-part Elite rules

a) Composed of corporate
b) Political
c) Military

a) Advisors and consultants to help them make decisions
b) Spokesmen and opinion-makers to help them shape public thought.
c) The Elite need these opinion-makers and public relations people, to help them maintain
their power.

a)  Economic: The modern individual depends not only on his family but increasingly on his
job.
 b)  The political: He depends not only on the school, but also the state.
 c) The military:  He depends not only on his religious doctrines, but also his military
discipline.

In the excerpts from "Who Governs" and "A Preface to Democratic Theory," Robert Dahl brings to our attention pluralism: the dispersion of power among many groups of people. He differentiates the "political stratum," made up of interested and involved citizens, from the "apolitical stratum," those who are not active in government.

Dahl stated that Americans take their democratic beliefs very seriously, to the astonishment of foreign observers, such as Tocqueville and Bryce. He also says that in the political system of the patrician oligarchy, political resources were marked by a cumulative inequality, whereas in the political system of 1961, inequalities in political resources remain, but tend to be noncumulative. He thought that if the pluralist system was very far from being an oligarchy, it was also far from achieving the goal of political equality that almost every American upholds.

Dahl believed that one of the difficulties people have with answering the question, "Who rules in a pluralist democracy?" is the ambiguous relationship between leaders and citizens. Some people think leaders are enormously influential, while some believe many influential leaders are captives of their constituents. To some, a pluralistic democracy with dispersed inequalities is all head and no body; to others it is all body and no head.

He thought that among all the people who influence a decision, some do so more directly than others in the sense that they are closer to the stage where concrete alternatives are started or declined in an explicit and immediate way. Indirect influence may work well but is comparatively difficult to observe and weigh. To ignore indirect influence in analysis of the distribution of influence, however, would be to exclude what may prove to be a highly significant process of control in a pluralistic democracy. Next, the relationship between leaders and citizens in a pluralistic democracy is frequently reciprocal.

Dahl said that in the political stratum, politics is highly salient; among the apolitical strata, it is remote. In the political stratum, information about politics and the issues of the day is extensive; the apolitical strata are poorly informed. In the political stratum, citizens tend to participate actively in politics, and in the apolitical strata, people seldom go beyond voting, if they even do that.

Dahl believed that the political strata of different communities and regions are linked in a national network of communications. Also, many channels of communication not made specifically for political purposes serve as a part of the network of the political stratum.

According to Dahl, in many pluralistic systems the political stratum is far from being a closed group. In the United States, for example, the political stratum does not constitute a homogeneous class with well-defined class interests. In an open pluralistic system, the stratum embodies many of the most widely shared values and goals in the society. The apolitical strata can be said to "govern" as much through the sharing of common values and goals with members of the political stratum as by other means. If it we did not have elections and competitive parties, this sharing would rapidly decline, while other things stay the same.

Robert Dahl defined the "normal" American political system as one where there is a likelihood that an active group in the population can make itself heard at some crucial stage in the process of decision. In American politics, control over decisions is unevenly distributed; and neither individuals nor groups are equal in politics. To appease a group may need one or more of a great variety of actions by the responsive leader, such as the right combination of reciprocal noises.

Dahl believed that decisions were made by endless bargaining. To have highly integrated, consistent decisions in some areas it often seemed to operate in a way teetering on total collapse.

He said we should not be too hasty in our appraisal, for where its iniquities stand out, its qualities are hidden. With everything wrong with it, it does give a high probability that any group will make itself heard at some stage in the decision making process.

Finally, Dahl stated that the "normal" American political system may not work well for others. However, as long as the social prerequisites of democracy are intact in this country, it seems to be a comparatively efficient system for reinforcing agreement and maintaining social peace in a very complex society.