Comedy

In his famous defense of the newly-proposed U.S. Constitution, James Madison argued that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” The intention was not a unified, but rather a coordinated polity. One can never remove the causes of faction, yet one can control its effects by the establishment of a republican government based on the partition of power and an extensive citizenry. Seen through the lens of literary theory, comedy sits at the core of the Madisonian vision. (By contrast, the real historical person seems to have displayed little sense of humor.) “Opposite and rival interests” exist naturally in a free society. As air is to fire, liberty is to faction. There are no grounds to hope for unanimous opinion and no assurance that higher wisdom will prevail. The harmonious whole is thus always under threat by division; the collective good can be dispossessed by partial and myopic desires. This is a low-mimetic world, in which men are no angels and the “defect of better motives” can be traced “through the whole system of human affairs.”Footnote ¹²

Conflict is inherent to such an arrangement. An outsider might decry the absence of ordered simplicity and might mistake such conflict for chaos. To Madisonian comedians, however, the inevitable expression of faction is but a prelude to the subjugation of faction, a temporary state of affairs foreboding little fear because the expected outcome is equilibrium restored. Resolution is rendered probable through the wise organization of the government apparatus, capable of forging mechanical virtue from the “several constituent parts” that, “by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places.”Footnote ¹³ In a well-designed polity, balance will overcome bias. The wary public should rest assured that the theater of democratic engagement, experimental in 1787, might be inherently turbulent but not at all terrifying.

In a similar vein, modern pluralist scholars, especially those writing during the post-World War II era of domestic prosperity and global preeminence, applaud low-mimetic comedy as the most fundamental and redeeming aspect of American democracy. “The moving pattern of a complex society such as the one in which we live,” wrote David Truman, “is one of changes and disturbances in the habitual subpatterns of interaction, followed by a return to the previous state of equilibrium or, if the disturbances are intense or prolonged, by the emergence of new groups whose specialized function is to facilitate the establishment of a new balance, a new adjustment in the habitual interactions of individuals.”Footnote ¹⁴

The comedic play of interest group democracy is based on two critical elements, one concerning interests and the other change. Interests are inescapable and multiple. As Truman asserts, “in any society, and especially in a complex one, no single group affiliation accounts for all of the attitudes or interests of any individual except a fanatic or a compulsive neurotic.”Footnote ¹⁵ Interests in the American political system have ample ability to organize and gain access, aided by the extreme permeability of the American state structure. Even potential groups, including those representing the interests of unorganized minorities, allegedly are accorded some degree of influence. The “activities of political interest groups imply controversy and conflict, the essence of politics.” It is unreasonable to abhor conflict or dream of some golden era of perfect unity. There are no higher purposes with automatic title to priority, and no reason to view insistent claimants with alarm. “Politics inevitably emerges out of men's specialized experiences and selective perceptions.”Footnote ¹⁶

The outcome of group conflict is dynamic equilibrium. Change results from the accumulation of incremental adaptation. Interest pressure and accommodation moves the political system, establishing adjustment within stability. Resolution maintains the whole, strengthening it through moderate reform and the incorporation of new elements. Institutional openness makes it probable that the system does not suffer too little change; overlapping group memberships and fundamental regime consensus protect against too much change. The comedic refrain of restraint and rejuvenation appears essential to the pluralist perspective. It envisions, one might say, a taming of the shrewd. The historic success of the American regime testifies to the effectiveness of such dynamic stability and augurs well for its future. As Truman concludes, “We can be fairly certain that such changes as occur in the basic relationships that characterize the American governmental process will be gradual, slight, and almost imperceptible.”Footnote ¹⁷ The American political comedy might appear to the outsider as chaotic, complicated, contradictory and bewildering, but one must equally appreciate the wit characteristic to its fundamental design. Apparently, says Truman (paraphrasing Otto von Bismarck), “the Lord takes care of drunkards, little children, and the United States of America.”Footnote ¹⁸

Comedic themes are visible throughout the pluralist repertoire: in Robert Dahl's politics of dispersed inequalities and minorities rule, in which any “active and legitimate group can make itself heard effectively at some crucial stage in the process of decision”; in Nelson Polsby's critique of the community power literature; in Braybrooke and Lindblom's defense of disjointed incrementalism in decision-making; in Banfield and Wilson's analysis of city politics; in Aaron Wildavsky's examination of role specialization and sequential accommodation in the federal budgetary process.Footnote ¹⁹ The actors and their motivation in all these works is low mimetic. Humans are not, by nature, inspired by higher virtues. Homo politicus is born only when the goals and gratifications that animate private-regarding homo civicus become “durably attached to political action.”Footnote ²⁰ Politics, in all these works, emerges from conflict, whether of ideology or interests, and proceeds in numerous overlapping episodes reflecting the various opportunities for organization, voice, and influence. The resolution for each episode produces substantive public policy, but it also produces effective conflict management and it reproduces the conditions for continued, future episodes of the “game.” In pure comedic form, each story that is told about U.S. politics reveals the frictions inherent in our complex society, yet each climax strongly confirms that the moral order is thriving and secure.

To its initial proponents, pluralism was simultaneously descriptive and prescriptive, helping the United States to escape the twin dangers of fascism and communism and to emerge unscathed as the leader of the free world. Yet similar comedic refrains are typical to an enormous number of more contemporary works—especially studies of congressional behavior, regulatory administration, and public policy—that find in the American system of fragmented and permeable institutions a particularly salutary form of commodious democracy. It is, moreover, to be found in recent neo-Madisonian defenses of the U.S. constitutional system of multiple veto points against proposals for sweeping reform. As one set of commentators conclude, “The U.S. organizational design is not to be commended to all nations seeking a constitution. But it is reasonably well-adapted to the tasks of dealing with the myriad concerns of a vast, extended republic, whose far-flung constituent parts may rightly worry about excessive governmental activity at the center adverse to their immediate interests.”Footnote ²¹

Northrop Frye makes a distinction between those comedies in which the main emphasis is on the blocking characters or situation, and those in which the emphasis is on the pattern of eventual harmonious discovery and resolution.Footnote ²² Whereas the pluralist literature generally is of the latter type, there are other works of American political science whose comedic accent is on the former. These tend to focus on a particular character whose lack of fundamental understanding temporarily places equilibrium at risk. In literature, such a character is often “the miserly or ferocious parent, the boastful or ferocious rival.”Footnote ²³ In politics, she is usually the petty tyrant, the unethical politician, or the immovable bureaucrat who acts with an exaggerated sense of self-importance. The blocking character in a comedy is incongruous and out-of-place, misapprehending the nature of the proper social order and the mechanisms to secure it. Her ascension to power is sufficient to cause consternation, until sanity inevitably returns. Such a comedy of errors is typical in American political science studies of corruption and scandals. To take just one example, it is visible in many accounts of Watergate and the Nixon presidency.

Richard Nathan, for instance, with an instinctive sense of the comedic, gave his examination of Nixon's administrative strategy a thriller-like title, The Plot That Failed. U.S. administrative politics, he argued, depends on a delicate compromise between the president as unifying central manager and the separate agencies that reflect the diversity of national objectives and interests. Nixon's strategy, to infiltrate the bureaucracy with “like-minded men, devoted fully to the president,” resulted from a “warped and unbalanced perspective” that ultimately proved incapable of repressing the natural expression of American political competition.Footnote ²⁴ Nixon's resignation thus represented the moral triumph of normality. “The presidency,” writes Colin Campbell, “survived in the 1970s … blows that would have torn apart a less stable constitutional system.”Footnote ²⁵ “Watergate,” according to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “was potentially the best thing to have happened to the Presidency in a long time,” helping the country to “work its way back” to constitutional limitations and inoculating the occupants of this strong office against latent impulses for transgression.Footnote ²⁶ Nixon's over-reaching ambition, by definition, declared him unworthy of the public trust. Yet the American system by the end of this episode presumably was made better and more secure for expelling the miscreant and sending him into exile, having demonstrated its inherent capacity for self-correction.

Finally, we turn to a very different comedic locale, to indicate the range of application for this particular narrative mode applied to American politics. The theory of critical realignment detects punctuated equilibrium conditions in macro-history rather than micro-politics. Allegedly, realignments are periodic events, preceded by increased political participation and intensity, ideological polarization, and third-party revolts. They emerge because the country's great engines of socio-economic development inescapably produce disturbances and dislocations, affecting the interests and opinions of major segments of the population. Yet ordinary American government is static and institutionalized, rooted in existing routines and allegiances. There exists a fundamental disjunction between America's relatively stable political system and its rapidly changing material base. When this disjunction becomes extreme, the vehicle of critical elections facilitates regime reconstruction, transforming the boundaries of legitimate discourse and re-forging the alliances necessary for political cohesion. They result in “constitutional readjustments in the broadest sense of the term,” profoundly altering policy and influencing “the grand institutional structures of American government.”Footnote ²⁷

The realignment mechanism has been called the American “surrogate for revolution,” forestalling tragic disintegration of the polity by incorporating, at critical junctures, emergent demands into a winning electoral and governing coalition.Footnote ²⁸ Transformation is accomplished by the low-mimetic process of political party competition in the pursuit of support. Institutional rigidities delay necessary adaptation, raising concern for social stability, but the curtain comes down on each historic period with harmony restored. It is curious to note that, among the critics of realignment-comedy, are representatives of pluralist-comedy asserting that the everyday intricacies of American politics are too multiple to be compressed into so strict an arrangement.Footnote ²⁹ It is also important to note that forecast realignments are dependent upon a party system strong enough to produce enduring partisan attachments and regularly to reconnect the people and their elected officials. Without such attachments, the reassuring comedy of periodic regime reconfiguration might instead have to be re-written into a structurally contrasting narrative form. But that is getting ahead of our story.

Romance

There are three types of romances common in the literature on American politics—of the founding, of great leaders (especially presidents), and of the people empowered. In the structured equation of narrative emplotment, harmonious resolution plus elevated leadership equals romance. The protagonists are high-mimetic heroes, acclaimed by virtue of their special aspirations and achievements. The result of their action is moral uplift, strengthening our social bonds and exemplifying worthy principles. This truly must be a brave new world, to have such people in it.

To many scholars, romance is the proper narrative mode for the American founding, remarkable for the efforts of a few, noble individuals who successfully forged E Pluribus Unum—Out of Many, One. Such scholars remind us that the American founding was precarious, the first experiment of anti-colonial revolution joined to democratic intentions. Moreover, unlike many subsequent revolutions, it did not unleash ideological passions, ruthless terror, or civil unrest. Just the opposite, according to the romantic vision, the American founding fathers deliberated wisely in order to produce a moderate, stable, and enduring republic.Footnote ³⁰

The men who met in Philadelphia allegedly should be recognized for their extraordinary ability and patriotism. Herbert Storing, for example, favorably cites the words of Richard Henry Lee, that “America probably never will see an assembly of men of a like number more respectable.” Their “high liberal statesmanship” reflected an unparalleled “devotion to public duty” and an understanding of the principles of sound government “of the broadest and deepest kind.”Footnote ³¹ The system that they established, however, does not require similarly august leaders, for it accepts human weakness and demands for daily operation only reasonably decent citizens guided by the constitutional structure and its precepts. The American founding was thus a rare moment in time, when the country consented to be led by an assembly of demi-gods. By romantic accounts (in contrast to those emphasizing class and regional interests), the Philadelphia delegates debated the great principles of republican government and their application to the regime under construction, and they demonstrated how such a great debate ought to be undertaken. Ordinary persons can learn from this example but they need not copy it. As Martin Diamond states, the “posthumous duration” of the constitutional design requires only veneration by future generations, and “has no necessary place and makes no provision for men of the founding kind.”Footnote ³²

The romantic narrative of American politics does not end with the founding. There have been times of great crisis and major reformation, requiring leaders capable of uniting various factions and mobilizing public opinion. Thus the second common version of romance in the literature features the politician-hero who steps briefly into the spotlight to help the nation achieve its destiny. Most often, this person has been the president, as occupant of the preeminent elected U.S. national office. “By the twentieth century,” George Reedy claims, “the presidency has taken on all the regalia of monarchy except ermine robes, a scepter, and a crown.”Footnote ³³ The president thus becomes the nodal force for government decision-making, and emerges as the nation's prime legislative agenda-setter, macroeconomic manager, budget writer, and moral spokesperson, as well as its chief executive and commander-in-chief. Her leadership allegedly is necessary to inspire the nation to higher purposes; to overcome the separate, selfish, parochial and fragmented forces that dominate in Congress; and to motivate popular assent to policies in the national interest. As Clinton Rossiter wrote, expressing the cult of the presidency once found in much of the political science literature, “The people of the United States are no longer interested in presidential aspirants who promise only to be meek and mild. In the foreseeable future, as in the recent past, they will expect and get a full measure of presidential leadership.”Footnote ³⁴

James MacGregor Burns and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. are perhaps the two most prominent authors of presidential romances. It is not surprising that both published studies of Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, telling the story of their triumphs despite obstacles to overcome, as well as essays on the character of leadership in modern society. It is also not surprising that both, when turning from celebrations of the past to challenges in the present, envision solutions achieved not by reorganizing the machinery of government but by the authority of great men. To Burns, the problem is the excessive fragmentation of the American political system, which has produced “dangerous drift and deadlock in our national affairs.” In response, he calls for a Jeffersonian president who “must publicize his and his party's program and goals with such clarity and conviction that he can help convert latent and amorphous popular attitudes into a powerful public opinion bolstering his cause.” By such means, the leader “will have enabled Americans to regain control of their national politics and to define and assert their national purpose.”Footnote ³⁵ To Schlesinger, the hope for effective national governance lay “in the election of competent Presidents who will thereafter act to revitalize their party in the interest of their own more effective command of the political process.”Footnote ³⁶

The romance of the politician-hero in America, we observe, is carefully constructed to accord with democratic principles. Mass participation is certainly necessary—to articulate demands, provide consent, and check abuses—but it is not thought capable of coordinated and coherent action. Democratic statesmanship is thus required to provide integration and innovation. As the agent of transaction, the statesman applies lubricants and pressures, organizing the exchanges fundamental to coalition construction and maintenance. As the agent of transformation, the statesman secures the moral order and enriches the populace by her vision of progress. “Great leaders,” writes Schlesinger, “embolden the rest of us to rise to our highest potentialities, to be active, insistent, and resolute in affirming our own sense of things.”Footnote ³⁷ Similarly, writes Burns, great leaders are elevating; “by boldly interpreting the nation's conscience,” they “lift a people out of their everyday selves … into their better selves.”Footnote ³⁸

Many other political scientists concur in these judgments, despite repeated self-deprecating rejections of the genre of personality-based presidency studies. For example, Harvey Mansfield argues that the American form of government has existed for so long precisely because of the occasional exercise of heroic presidential power. The Constitution's strength is the possibility of unbridled executive power, answering to the demands of necessity. By channeling ambition through constitutional forms, the Framers ensured that the American executive would be “more like a knight answering a challenge than a merchant seeking gain.”Footnote ³⁹ Choosing a more pedestrian, if equally revealing metaphor for presidential responsibility, Marc Landy and Sidney Milkis write that the best presidents are like “good parents,” who “encourage their children to become independent and responsible.” By “taking the people to school,” great presidents “shape the quality and character of the citizenry.”Footnote ⁴⁰

American democracy, however, has often been ambivalent regarding leadership. The fear of central power in American political culture is attached to a fear of the powerful. Thus the third form of romance visible in the literature on U.S. politics is the romance of the people, celebrating the role of the masses against the classes. “The people reign in the American political world,” wrote de Tocqueville, “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 in them.”Footnote ⁴¹ James Morone argues that such romantic populism reflects an idealized yearning for direct, participatory democracy “of a united people pursuing a shared communal interest.”Footnote ⁴² It arises from American anti-statism, positing against complex government and hierarchical authority the notion of a simple, consensual, and moral collection of basic citizens bound together to perceive, articulate, and implement the public good. There is an apparent role reversal intrinsic to populist romance. The common person is elevated because her vision is discovered to be elect; ostensibly superior individuals are brought low because their motives are base and self-interested. The people are instinctually more virtuous than their leaders, and are capable of powerful action when regime values are threatened.

Romantic populism has two implications. First, it interprets the comedic play of pluralist interests as deficient and sometimes corrupt. The democratic people, allegedly, represent a natural whole, as opposed to some artificial combination of parts; they pursue honest expression, which should triumph over attempts at manipulation, influence, and bias. Second, romantic populism often emerges in the guise of crusading reform, seizing power from petty politicians and vesting it in the people themselves. Thus it can be seen as an aspect within anti-federalist, Jacksonian, Evangelical awakening, Populist, and Progressive social movements, as well as in more contemporary calls for participatory and communitarian democracy.Footnote ⁴³

There is even a suggestion of populist romance to median voter theory. In two-party competitive elections, as exist in the United States, with equally weighted voters and single-peaked preferences arrayed along a one-dimensional scale, electoral politicians will respond rapidly to shifts in the location of the median voter, and the result will be utility maximizing for any system of preference aggregation from individual votes.Footnote ⁴⁴

Yet there is an objection to romantic populism as a reflection of everyday mass American politics. As survey research repeatedly has shown, individuals rarely are expressing high-mimetic values as they develop opinions, evaluate candidates, and seek to influence outcomes. “American elections are hardly a classic model of democracy with rational, well-informed voters making dispassionate decisions.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The response by aspiring romantics is that the electorate as a whole is—or can be—far more elevated than electors taken individually.

The former position is taken by Page and Shapiro. They argue that U.S. public opinion taken collectively is relatively stable, sensible, coherent, changes gradually and in a plausible manner. Through aggregation, random measurement errors and outliers within public opinion tend to be offset. From discussion, people help formulate their preferences, develop trust, and learn to discriminate among cue-givers. Distortions, they insist, come primarily from insufficient political education and elite manipulation of information. One should thus not fear the extension of the majoritarian principle because of any presumed incapacity of ordinary citizens. “We do not know who is better able to judge the public interest than the public itself.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The latter position is expressed by Ackerman and Fishkin, who argue that the American electorate, if given the opportunity to engage one another in a meaningful way, can become fully capable of the sort of sophisticated deliberation in which its leaders conspicuously fail to engage. To take fullest advantage of the public's reasoning skill, every four years members of the public should be brought together in randomly selected groupings for “Deliberation Day.”Footnote ⁴⁷ If only our governors would listen to the masses and facilitate the expression of their voice, we could eliminate barriers against the triumph of that noble political ideal—a democratic government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Tragedy

Uncompromised tragedy does not come easily to Americans. It appears almost as heresy to contend that our society is destined to collapse in the pursuit of its most cherished ideals. Possibly for this reason, tragic American political science has tended to back off from its worst forebodings. Similarly, although personal tragedies describing the fall of national leaders have long been a staple of biography, the flaws that led to the political demise of such figures as Woodrow Wilson, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon typically are located in their individual psyches, not in the nation's core institutions and values.Footnote ⁴⁸ Yet, as the post-war boom faded and American politics increasingly was convulsed by exogenous and endogenous shocks, a more systematic tragic literature has arisen.

The forms of tragedy in the literature on American politics reflect, in the sense of a reversed or mirror image, the patterns seen previously for romance and comedy, replacing the temporal dynamic of positive optimism with negative despair. Our highest national aspirations, which ennoble and give significance to the American experiment, appear within this narrative as beyond our grasp.

For example, frustrated romanticism regarding U.S. constitutional foundations leads often to a tragedy-from-the-right. The institutional moderation essential to republican government allegedly has been undermined, replaced by a tendency toward personalism, professionalism, and populism. The president, according to this perspective, has emerged as an egotistical and plebiscitary leader, afflicted with a tendency toward exaggerated assertions of executive power. This carries systematic costs, “among them an increasing lack of ‘fit’ between institution and occupant, a greater mutability of policy, an erosion of the processes of deliberation, and a decay of political discourse.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Congress equally has lost the capacity to deliberate. Self-advertisement and parochialism among careerist legislators has subordinated policy content, resulting in an overall decline in respect for the national legislature.Footnote ⁵⁰ The courts, too, have become engaged in institutional aggrandizement, arrogance, and personalized rule. Insulated yet activist judges, it is said, re-make the constitution according to their own arbitrary prejudices, expanding their intrusive purview without constraint and substituting will for considered judgment.Footnote ⁵¹

Constitutional tragedy asserts that the glorious dream of the founders has been undermined, not by conscious conspiracy or revolutionary outbreak, but from the everyday use of established institutions by those who neglect their fundamental purposes. Emboldened by the long and successful history of the U.S. regime, modern leaders submit to the temptation toward factional self-interest, assuming that it is no longer necessary to respect those procedures established to keep such temptations in check.

In the most extreme versions of academic tragedy-from-the-right, this neglect has found its way into the heart of the American political character. Our historic challenge has always been to combine mass and morality, representation and responsiveness, inclusion and intelligence. Instead, lured by extreme visions of essential human freedom and equality, the nation allegedly has lapsed into a moral relativism in which every opinion is equally valid and democracy becomes merely a procedure for the arithmetic summation of preferences. America, no longer moving in a republican direction, has evolved into a directionless republic.Footnote ⁵²

On the opposite pole, the frustration of populist romanticism has inspired a tragedy-from-the-left. To its authors, the great promise of America was the expansion of mass empowerment, not its moderation. However, the very success of America as an enormous, vibrant, participatory society has undermined the very democratic power that it celebrates. Mass democracy depends on the means of mobilization, but that mobilization requires huge resources for impulsion. Mass democracy depends on available channels for access and influence, but those channels are finite and allow only a few signals to squeeze through. Large-scale capitalism has become necessary to employ the American public and insure its material standard of living. Large-scale bureaucracies have become necessary to manage its health, regulatory, and social welfare commitments. The democratic shell thus remains without the substance. The high moral promise of an empowered citizenry has been eroded by the mechanisms of citizen expression and the institutions needed to organize that expression.

Among the more moderate tragedians-from-the left, the problem is that our politics is more biased than balanced. An insufficient number of interests become mobilized politically; they possess an inadequate share of influential resources; they find the channels of access somewhat blocked; and their issues are unsatisfactorily addressed by policy outcomes. Disproportionate oligopoly has replaced pure popular competition, and the result is the political chorus that sings with a notable upper class accent.Footnote ⁵³

Among more extreme left-tragedians, the menace is not mere oligopoly, but instead uncontested and arrogant monopoly dominance. The most common version of this claim is that money talks. This is the nickelodeon interpretation of U.S. politics: the person who pays the coin calls the tune. Allegedly, effective power is narrowly concentrated, with democracy thriving only among the privileged few whose corrupt influence accomplishes class legislation within the guise of popular sovereignty.Footnote ⁵⁴ Other versions of the democratic left-tragedy emphasize family background, hierarchical organizations, the structural dependence of government on corporate investment, and the contradictions inherent to pursuing jointly the imperatives of mass legitimacy and capitalist accumulation.Footnote ⁵⁵ Even the political party that presumably represents the mass has fallen to elite domination.Footnote ⁵⁶

Nevertheless, tragedy in the American politics literature increasingly has been written not from the right or the left, but from the center of the political spectrum. It emerges not from frustrated narrative romanticism, but instead from comedic aspirations now believed incapable of achieving the social integration necessary to insure harmony within the complex regime. Such tragedy entails two necessary steps: the elevation of comedy into a technique for national salvation, followed by despair that it no longer can perform the anointed role. In the widening gyre, centrifugal forces predominate over centripetal ones and things fall apart.

One prevalent version of tragedy-from-the-center stems from the alleged perversion of comedic interest group pluralism. American politics in its neo-Madisonian image encourages multiple voices to organize and press their claims upon a responsive state structure. There can be a point, however, when the system reaches demand overload. There are more actors, effectively using more resources, clogging the available avenues of influence. Voices then become increasingly strident, increasingly jealous of the gains by others, increasingly protective of institutionalized advantage, increasingly suspicious of compromise. Ambition under such conditions no longer successfully checks ambition. Audacity instead threatens to overwhelm authority. Furthermore, the government in attempting to quiet the restive demands upon it is easily tempted by new spending that exceeds tax capacity, new regulations that escape sound implementation. The quantity of inputs thus reduces the quality of outputs, weakening governability and undermining public confidence. Hyper-pluralism emerges as a “democratic distemper.”Footnote ⁵⁷ To its espousers, this tragic fate is inescapable once Americans take seriously their own participatory promises and fully exercise the political liberty they believe to be guaranteed.

A different version of tragedy-from-the-center emphasizes the decline, rather than the excess, of interest group democracy. Political activity in the United States is voluntary, in which ordinary homo civicus becomes transformed into homo politicus only when her interests are strongly aroused. Yet, according to Robert Putnam, we have witnessed recently a marked reduction in collective activity.Footnote ⁵⁸ Americans are not only voting less—they are also attending fewer meetings, contacting officials less often, serving on fewer committees, and discussing political affairs less often with their neighbors. Allegedly, civil associations are the schools of democratic life. They help to develop the skills necessary for an engaged citizenry, encourage a worldview that extends beyond personal egotism, reinforce feelings of efficacy and trust, and deepen the sense of mutual obligation and responsibility for our common fate. As social capital erodes, individuals become increasingly disconnected from each other. The very confidence that allows Americans to attend overwhelmingly to their private lives therefore over time threatens the political conditions that secure such confidence, portending tragedy.

Another form of tragedy-from-the-center focuses on political parties as the intermediary between citizens and their government. American parties are relatively weak, viewed comparatively, but nevertheless are needed to produce the broad if somewhat loose coalitions prerequisite for policy-making in a world of centrifugal forces. To some scholars, the tragic problem with contemporary political parties is rising divisiveness. The combination of safe district seats and aggregate national competitiveness has led to strident partisan and ideological conflict. Purportedly, there is now less representation of the political middle and less concern that it be respected for the purpose of comedic balance. Other scholars instead emphasize declining party capability. Partisan “dealignment” proclaims an end to the comedic play of periodic regime reconfiguration. In the latter decades of the Twentieth Century, allegedly, the conditions for equilibrating realignment were ripe, but the vehicle designated to effect the transformation was no longer sufficient to carry the load.Footnote ⁵⁹

The most common form of tragedy-from-the-center, however, concerns state rather than society-oriented variables. In a constitutional arrangement based on separate yet equally legitimate institutions sharing power, the risk is that institutions might become so separated that sharing becomes impossible. The consequence is then deadlock and stalemate. It is a fear once expressed by Woodrow Wilson, who claimed that the “radical defect” of the American federal system is the extreme to which it “parcels out power and confuses responsibility.”Footnote ⁶⁰ With the growth of the U.S. state, extensively across the continent and intensively in the duties accepted, the “hide-and-seek vagaries of authority” threaten to become ever more dysfunctional, exceeding the capacity of the “frail, extra-constitutional machinery of government” to produce efficient and effective national decision-making. The consequence, asserted by various contemporary studies of American public policy, is the systematic failure of the U.S. to establish coherent economic and industrial coordination, to insure adequate health and social welfare benefits to its citizenry, and to guarantee the basic rights of all.

Moreover, according to recent neo-Wilsonians, the prevalence of divided party government during the late twentieth century ratcheted the institutional threat to new levels. It has always been an American principle to permit multiple forms of representation through multiple elected offices. Yet divided government, allegedly, has now become a normal state of affairs, giving distinct partisan overtones to institutional conflicts and providing extra incentive for veto players to adopt a blocking posture. Politics increasingly has become characterized by standoffs and showdowns; by symbolic posturing and accusations of blame; by non-decisions and empty decisions; by permanent budget deficits and policy drift. Unable to meet its domestic and international responsibilities, a paralyzed government falls further and further into disrespect.Footnote ⁶¹

Looking historically, left-tragedy emerged as the most forceful narrative challenger to the comfortable comedic mainstream from the turbulent middle 1960s into the 1970s. Right-tragedy emerged as the most forceful challenger from the middle 1970s into the 1980s. Center-tragedy seems to have dominated discussion from the middle 1980s into the 1990s. (It is quite possible, given mounting frustrations regarding the Bush presidency and the contemporary U.S. role in the world, that academic left-tragedy once again is in ascendancy.) Importantly, for each period, comedic voices issued vehement rejoinders, refusing to abandon the stage without a fight. The permanent debate in American political science should be understood primarily as occurring between those proclaiming that the sky is falling, and those responding that, not only have things always looked this way, but that the precarious outlook contributes significantly to keeping the sky aloft and the inhabitants safe.

For example, in the political science controversy regarding divided government and stalemate, pluralist comedians have replied that split-ticket voting might be a voluntary choice, that multiple and supermajority requirements menace the success even of one-party governments, and that coalition situations do not effectively deter policy initiatives. In the controversy over political party effectiveness, they have replied that the parties have become neither inexorably antagonistic nor incapable of innovation and rejuvenation. In the controversy over civic capital, they have replied that participation exists in many varieties and that trust as a multi-dimensional concept has not uniformly deteriorated. In various forms, tragedy-from-the-center asserts that the forces of integration, always weak in the U.S., are no long capable of insuring comedic resolution. In various rejoinders, the comedic center answers that such fears are exaggerated and that the stress and noise of short-run politics, ever emerging in novel forms, should not distract from the enduring propensity toward harmony. There is a regular pattern to many of the disputes in American political science, arising from their contrasting narrative messages regarding the nature of our society and its anticipated trajectory.

There are also grounds for wondering whether American narrative tragedians-from-the-center sincerely accept the full implications of their pronouncements. If indeed participation is failing, civic trust eroding, parties disintegrating, groups uncompromising, policy frustrated, and institutions hopelessly deadlocked, then there might be good reason to panic. True tragedy admits no escape, except for such radical reconstitution that removes either the need for elevation or the forces that preclude its achievement. Yet the prescriptive reforms issued by most American political tragedians do not seem equivalently radical. Putnam, for example, calls merely for the voluntary revival of community engagement as was experienced during the Progressive era. Sundquist recommends somewhat partial initiatives intended solely to lower the probable occurrence of divided party government. Other commentators have advocated more vigorous presidential leadership, revitalized political parties, limits on negative campaign advertising and on total campaign spending. Tragedy avoidance for the U.S. regime often is presented as a relatively modest occupation.

When analysis is not matched by effective prescription, when dire forecast is not followed by drastic remedy, one should be suspicious. Possibly the rhetoric is justified but the corrective imagination is limited. However, we suspect the opposite. Change is difficult in the U.S., partly because of institutional rigidity and partly because of a dominant tradition of national self-satisfaction. Exaggerated fears thus function as a useful call to action; projections of impending doom become a vehicle for signaling warning. Americans, by culture and favorable historic situation, are not natural tragedians. Yet there are always frustrated aspirations and unfulfilled ideals, motivating periodic demands for political reform. This is not to imply that the U.S. experience, given oppressions at home and sacrifices abroad, is without true tragedies. Nevertheless, within the doctrinal literature of American political science, most narrative tragedians play instead the role of comics-in-disguise, articulating the expectation that curatives well within our grasp can protect the nation and its exalted project. Resting just beneath the surface of our most extreme complaints seems the belief that the winter of our discontent can still be made into glorious summer.

Irony

While uncompromised tragedy is difficult for American political science to embrace, irony is often perceived as an affront. Irony entails powerlessness plus self-delusion. It is a hapless state, trapped by fate and misled by hope, without the possibility of escape or deliverance. Irony exists in two contrasting variants in the American politics literature, as logical analysis centered in rational choice theory and as empirical analysis attempting to pierce the veil between the observer and underlying reality.

Rational choice theorists tend to deny any connection to storytelling. Shepsle and Bonchek, for instance, celebrate the progress of political science from thick description and anecdote swapping, to rigorous measurement, and then to explanation based on formal models.Footnote ⁶² Yet a narrative message is often inherent to the genre. As William Riker writes, “According to democratic theory, democratic ends can be achieved by democratic means. Of course, this may or may not be true.”Footnote ⁶³ There is irony to the contention that the incentive structures of American politics systematically inhibit the achievement of its moral promise. If so, the more society deepens its democratic commitment, the more it will discover frustration. Critics of rational choice respond that empirical reality is more successful than anticipated from stylized models. Yet irony remains in the rationalist contention that democratic achievement always requires special explanation and its persistence is precarious.

First, the rational democratic citizen is not necessarily the good democratic citizen—informed, participatory, civic-minded, and sincere. Complete information-gathering is usually not cost-efficient, for the work entailed in obtaining additional knowledge will not often result in a substantially revised opinion. Individual participation is similarly costly and its consequences minimal. The wisely calculating voter will not vote, except at the tipping point when a single intervention can alter the expected outcome. The same logic applies to all collective action situations, including those voluntary associations so central to pluralist-comedy. Free-riding is ironically quite reasonable and thus individuals join organizations often for purposes having little to do with their ostensible raison d'être. Footnote ⁶⁴ As for sincerity in deliberation, it capitulates before strategic preference manipulation in many multi-person, multi-option, or vote-trading situations. Against the chorus declaiming the imperative of the noble citizen, the wise fool sings from the corner that instead she is inattentive, inactive, uncooperative, corrupt, and probably quite justified in these attitudes.

Second, rational systems of democratic preference aggregation are not necessarily fair or coherent systems of preference aggregation. The same voter preferences can produce different outcomes when summed by different aggregation rules. The same voter preferences, aggregated under the same rules, can produce different outcomes depending on coalition bargaining. But most disturbing is the fact that democratic aggregation will often produce unstable outcomes, where every viable option can be defeated by at least one plausible alternative; and it can produce no viable options, where consistent individual orderings across alternatives nevertheless sum to an inconsistent group ordering across alternatives. There is a paucity of equilibrium situations in formal voting analysis.Footnote ⁶⁵ Moreover, the most famous such equilibrium is not especially satisfying. In a situation of single-peaked individual preferences and a one-dimensional mapping of available options, two-party competition for votes will result in parties offering identical platforms, thereby denying voters effective choice. Furthermore, the situation dissolves into disequilibrium as soon as another dimension is added.Footnote ⁶⁶ In democracy, the ironic game theorist concludes, voters by themselves cannot determine what they collectively want, absent the prior undemocratic imposition of procedural rules that themselves work to bias the probable outcome.

Third, rational democratic policy-making does not necessarily produce good policy-making. Individual actors tend to under-value and thus under-supply public goods, those that are by nature indivisible and non-excludable. They tend not to penalize sufficiently negative externalities nor to subsidize sufficiently positive externalities inherent to many private exchanges. They tend to abuse the commons, those collective resources to which everyone has equal rights.Footnote ⁶⁷ They tend also to neglect the collective interest, regardless of how intensely that interest is desired, because there is no personal interest in achieving it. Finally, even when appropriate laws are adopted, implementation is always at risk. Bureaucratic agents will tend to find ways to escape oversight from their principals.

It is no surprise that some recent academic tragedians have complained that contemporary developments within the political science profession have served to undermine, rather than contribute to, the noble task of democratic governance.Footnote ⁶⁸ In turn, it is no surprise that certain rational-ironists, Riker most visibly, have castigated political science romantics as naïve and comedians as self-deluded.

Among empirical ironists, the most outstanding was Louis Hartz, who interpreted American politics in terms of a series of paradoxical dualisms: “American political thought … is a veritable maze of polar contradictions, winding in and out of each other hopelessly: pragmatism and absolutism, historicism and rationalism, optimism and pessimism, materialism and idealism, individualism and conformism.” The United States was settled by men of the old world who were “born equal” upon arriving in the new. Their revolution was not accompanied by a demand for revolutionary social change. In a culture where Locke fuses with Burke, pragmatic liberalism is confirmed by tradition and enforced by dogmatism. The American “Whig” commits suicide by condemning a populace that poses no real challenge to property. The American mass is comprised of identical individualists. The great U.S. post-war danger, to Hartz, was that this nation had evolved into a “petit-bourgeois giant,” unconscious of its hegemony and unequipped for its consequences.Footnote ⁶⁹

Few other scholars approach Hartz for his perverse wit and heretical agnosticism. Our national contradictions, allegedly, were present from the founding and are embedded in truths still believed to be self-evident. In a similar vein, Michael Rogin examined the encounter between expansionist American liberalism and more communitarian Native American culture, which it felt the need to possess as well as dispossess.Footnote ⁷⁰ Samuel Huntington argued that the passionate American political creed—committed to equality and liberty, opposed to hierarchy and authority—co-exists incongruously with the institutions and procedures of effective government. The yearning for consistency produces regular intervals of moralist reform that cannot be sustained and are followed by cynicism, complacency, hypocrisy, and then again by moralism. It is an unsatisfying pattern but Americans are ensnared by it, for they are incapable of escaping the paradoxes essential to their nature.Footnote ⁷¹

In a different spirit, Theodore Lowi can be considered ironic for his Malthusian characterization of the no-win situation for presidential-centered U.S. government: “As presidential success advances arithmetically, public expectations advance geometrically.” The modern presidency exalts the incumbent but not her governing capacity, raising high the probability of political failure. Among his “General Laws of Politico-Dynamics,” Lowi includes the proposition that the only certain contribution of each president is to upgrade the reputation of her predecessors.Footnote ⁷² Lowi's former colleague, Benjamin Ginsberg is ironic for his analysis of the dilemma of electoral politics: the principal mechanism by which citizens exert control over their state simultaneously functions to constrain mass political intervention and to maintain state power.Footnote ⁷³ Ginsberg and Martin Shefter are ironic in showing that, as electoral competition has become more routinized, the parties have invented new weapons of political combat including revelations, investigations, and prosecutions aimed at their opponents.Footnote ⁷⁴

Despite its presumed natural attraction for commentators adopting the attitude of scholarly superiority over their subject, the ironic mode has been vastly under-represented in the empirical literature on American politics. There is apparent hesitation, tinged by the suggestion of apostasy, to depict American principles as inconsistent, American foundations as flawed, American advancements as futile. The “first new nation” might be celebrated for its majestic vision, congratulated for its complex accommodations, even mourned for failed heroic efforts—but it ought not be ridiculed, especially by its home-grown academic interpreters, for succumbing to the trite and contradictory.