How to Reform the Political System and Save the United States (How To Save the United States Book 1)

United States Health Care Reform Progress to Date and Next Steps

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In foreign affairs the Federalists generally leaned toward England, while the Democratic-Republicans sympathized with Revolutionary France. Early leaders such as John Adams, who succeeded George Washington as president, had Federalist sympathies. But the Federalists lost control of the government to Jefferson and his party in The Federalists lingered on as a minority party, especially in New England, for 20 years.

By , American political life was being influenced by sharp differences of opinion between sections of the country.

In time, these quarrels led to the Civil War. The slave-holding planters of the South, the frontier farmers of the West, and the manufacturing and banking industries based in the North each wanted the government to follow a different course of action.

Progressives and Progressivism in an Era of Reform

His party had great support in the South and West. Jackson changed the party's name to Democrats. Between and , Whigs gave Democrats strong opposition. By the issue of slavery overshadowed all political debate. A related issue was states' rights. If a state government was in conflict with the national government, which government had the final authority? Debate over slavery and states' rights tore the parties apart.

Northern Abolitionists — people who wanted to abolish slavery — left the Whig party. The Whigs also lost voters to the "Know-Nothing" Party, a new party that violently opposed Roman Catholics and foreigners. The Whig Party began to go to pieces. At the same time, the issues of slavery and states' rights divided Democrats into Northern and Southern branches. Southern Democrats strongly favored slavery and states' rights. Extremists among them believed that a state had a right to secede leave the Union if the national government tried to interfere with slavery.

The Republicans ran their first presidential candidate, John C. Strong antislavery feeling helped Republicans capture the presidency for Abraham Lincoln. In the Southern states seceded and the Civil War began. The defeat of the Southern Confederacy weakened the Democrats, who were associated in voters' minds with the Southern cause. For many years the Republicans were the major party.

They favored business interests and high tariffs taxes on imports. The Democrats supported free trade. They attracted farmers and the immigrants who poured into the country between the Civil War and the turn of the century. The two major parties were not so deeply divided again until the s.

At that time the Great Depression struck the country. The presidential election of brought in Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal programs. Roosevelt Democrats thought that the federal government must actively help people who had been hurt by the Depression. Under the New Deal the government passed economic relief measures, social security, laws helping unions, and other bills.

Republicans thought the government was taking too much power and moving the country toward a welfare state. They fought against governmental interference with business.

Maureen A. Flanagan

Today both parties agree in general on social security, unemployment insurance, basic foreign policy, and civil rights. The issues on which they disagree often are not goals so much as means: In general, Republicans tend to oppose government programs as solutions to national problems. Democrats tend to believe that government can and should act for good.

However, the parties' views on government's role often depend on the specific issue or program in question. The United States has a two-party system. However, nothing in the Constitution requires two parties. The Democrats and Republicans have alternated in power since before the Civil War mainly because they have put forward candidates and policies that appeal to most Americans.

But minor parties, or third parties, have often played a role in politics. Third parties focus attention on issues and ideas. Sometimes they draw enough support to affect the outcome of elections.

Sometimes a third party gains part of its goals by supporting a major party that promises to act on the third party's views. After the Civil War, Americans debated issues such as women's voting rights and labor reform. New political parties helped focus attention on these issues. In , for example, Victoria Woodhull became the first woman to run for president. In the s the People's Party of the U. In a disagreement among Republicans produced a splinter group called the Progressive, or "Bull Moose," Party.

Theodore Roosevelt, the party's presidential candidate, outpolled the Republican candidate, William H. But the Republican split only helped the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson, win the election. The Progressive Party's name was revived in the s. The Progressives opposed big business monopolies and favored the interests of farmers and workers. The Socialist Party favored wider social welfare measures.

It reached its greatest strength in the s, during the Great Depression. It was a factor in the presidential election of The Libertarian Party, formed in the s, stressed individual rights. The s saw the growth of the Reform Party, formed by Texas businessman H. And the Green Party has formed as an outgrowth of the environmental movement. Like earlier third parties, these groups have helped focus attention on important social and political issues. The precinct is the smallest local division. The parties are run by county and state committees.

Committee members may be elected at primaries, chosen at state conventions, or appointed by party officers. The two major parties also have national committees, made up of one man and one woman from each of the 50 states and U.

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Every four years, parties hold national conventions. Delegates are chosen in primaries, by state conventions, or at gatherings called precinct caucuses. These delegates gather at the conventions to nominate a presidential and a vice-presidential candidate. Each party at its convention also drafts a platform. The platform is a statement of what the party stands for. If the party wins, the platform is supposed to guide the actions of the elected officials.

The Origins and Functions of Political Parties

Parties today use computers to draw up lists of possible supporters and take public opinion polls to explore the views of voters on certain issues. They use advertising to mold public opinion and compete for favorable media coverage for their candidates. Special-interest groups able to raise money and turn out voters for candidates they favor have grown in influence.

State and federal laws control the ways political parties can raise and handle money. Political parties are often a standard by which a country's political freedom can be measured. Some countries have only one political party. But in order to do so, government has to be more responsive to average people. This, of course, gets us back to the points I was making a moment ago.

We have got to have a democracy that is not corrupted by great wealth and power. Otherwise the government simply becomes another vehicle for the wealthy to entrench their privileged position. There are similarities between the US today and with what was happening in the early 20th century. Back then there was a clear response to the failings of capitalism, and reforms such as anti-trust laws and labour protection legislation were instigated. Modern American capitalism has been tested several times over the last century. At least twice, reformers have preserved capitalism by responding to its excesses.

The first was during the progressive era, the first decade and a half of the 20th century before World War I. It was not just at the federal level but, perhaps even more strikingly, at the level of state government where you had the beginnings of the reforms that found their full flowering in the s. Yes, anti-trust laws were designed to break up the big monopolies and oligopolies that essentially ran much of the American economy at the end of the 19th century. There were laws to improve the functioning of democracy, to get money out of politics, to reduce the power of the political bosses.

The Federal Reserve Board was created in an attempt to provide some orderly and predictable means of maintaining economic policy and avoid the patterns of booms and busts that had marred the era of monopoly capitalism. Income tax was instituted. Labour protections, at the state level in particular, were introduced — a five-day working week, time-and-a-half for overtime, health and safety measures. The list was quite long. Croly was not entirely responsible obviously, but his book came at a time when there was great optimism about the capacity of our democratic process to control the excesses of capitalism and to make capitalism work for the people.

The second era [of reform] was obviously the s when, after the Great Crash of , [President] Franklin D Roosevelt enacted everything from the minimum wage to social security, unemployment insurance, the hour working week nationally and also the requirement that employers bargain with unions in good faith, thereby laying the foundations for very strong labour unions in the United States.

Much of what the progressives accomplished, and what the New Deal accomplished 25 years later, had to do with changing both the economic and social structure of the country — widening the circle of prosperity, enabling far greater numbers of Americans to participate in the economy and to gain advantages as the economy grew, and at the same time strengthen democracy.

We are now at another crisis. But in many ways The New Industrial State is more interesting because here again we have an economist who reaches beyond the narrow scope of economics and sees economics and social life in a broader frame. Galbraith was looking at what had happened to the large corporation. The New Industrial State was more of an explanation than a call to arms. The United States, and by inference all nations practising democratic capitalism, had to be careful to make sure that we understood what the technostructure was doing and why it was doing it and how it was trying to influence all of us.

Galbraith understood 20th century consumerism probably better than anyone. Just as Thorstein Veblen understood where consumerism was going at the end of the 19th century, Galbraith really saw the future with regards to consumerism in the last decades of the 20th century. Wall Street is definitely not risk averse or shy of maximising profits, is it? Galbraith in some senses explained and even celebrated a system of corporate power that was soon to shift to Wall Street.

Galbraith sees the victory of a system of democratic capitalism by contrast to the alternatives in the world at that time — communism, fascism, dictatorship and mass poverty. But at the same time he was concerned about the technostructure. He wanted to make sure that it was accountable and responsible. Your third book is the second volume in a trilogy entitled Civilization and Capitalism, 15thth Century. Tell us why you chose this book. Civilization and Capitalism is a monumental undertaking.

In these three volumes, Braudel did what no one else had attempted before and he did it more successfully than anyone I know of, that is to try to understand the beginning of capitalism — particularly the kind of capitalism that has now become dominant in the world, the capitalism that started in Europe between the 15th and 18th centuries. What I like about the second volume, The Wheels of Commerce, is that he understood that the banking and the trading systems that evolved in Europe between the 15th and 18th centuries were run, dominated, and designed by a different group entirely from the actual people who developed the goods and services that would be traded within this emerging system — the merchants, the craftsmen, the farmers.

They were all part of capitalism, but the actual organisation of capitalism was through this ever more complex banking and trading system and the evolution of credit. Braudel recognises that credit is the key. He understands that between the 15th and 18th centuries, the invention of banking and of a system of credit and fundamentally a system of trust among a people who understood that they had every selfish reason to trust one another, was the essence and the genius of the development of capitalism.

Another thing I love about the book is the detail — the abundance of data, the charts, the information about social and political life interwoven in the development of capitalism and also the extraordinary illustrations. You get it all. You see the relationships. Braudel argues, does he not, that capitalists are at heart monopolists and not advocates of free and competitive markets and that the state had to ensure that the market system worked correctly. Braudel illustrates that point beautifully. Again and again, capitalism reached points where, if the state did not intervene in such ways as to induce more competitiveness, it would collapse under its own weight.

In other words, what Braudel saw was this continuing evolutionary balance between the state and capitalism, in which the state needed to support capitalism but at the same time needed to guard against its excesses. Braudel in this sense is part of the same tradition as Herbert Croly and Galbraith.

Why is Democracy in America still so important? Tocqueville probably understood America better than anyone else at the time or since. He was not only a brilliant sociologist, but he also saw the connections between American society and the budding American capitalism of the s. For example, Tocqueville, as he wandered up and down the east coast of the United States, saw something that puzzled him a great deal at first. He saw Americans who were among the wealthiest in their communities investing in public schools and improving highways and being community leaders.

But he could not find these motivations in the economic leaders of these various American communities. There may have been some motivation of honour, duty and patriotism, but that was not what primarily motivated them. They understood that if the people around them were more productive they themselves would do better. They understood that by investing in their communities — in the education of the children and in the transportation system and even in public parks — everyone would do better. This was a remarkable insight. It was undoubtedly true in the United States for a long time.

Whatever happened to enlightened self-interest? They would also benefit from a society that, instead of being one overwhelmed by anger and cynicism as it is now, was a society in which people had a great deal of hope about the future and expectation that their children could live better than they do. All they are looking at is their own bottom lines. And as a result the tide is rising, but at a very slow rate. This is the most anaemic economic recovery on record. And part of the reason is that so much income and wealth is now at the top, that the vast middle class in the United States does not have enough purchasing power to keep the economy going.

People are also scared and angry.

They are worried about losing their jobs, their houses, their health care, of falling backwards. Most Americans today, according to polls, believe their children will live worse than they live.

Tocqueville also made a clear connection between equality and a healthy democracy. And remember this is the s in the United States, this is long before anyone had really connected the dots and seen the danger of inequality to a robust democracy. You had a relatively small number of white men who were full participants in the incipient democracy of the s, and yet Tocqueville saw one of the threats to the future of American democracy was widening inequality. Your final book, The Theory of the Leisure Class , which was published in , is regarded as one of the first critiques of consumerism.

Please tell us more. It was a critique of consumerism, but it was particularly a critique of consumerism by the very wealthy. Veblen saw the importance of social status as a motivator in capitalism. He was the first to understand that one of the reasons that people desperately wanted to become rich was not simply to consume but to consume in such a way that they established themselves as being superior to others. He saw capitalism as a form of primitive barbarism dating back to prehistoric times.

Veblen was very much an anthropologist as well as an economist. He looked back on tribal society and saw much the same thing as he saw in the Gilded Age of the last decades of the 19th century in the United States. He saw people in early tribal society establishing their social dominance through displaying power by what they had accumulated and their ability to essentially do nothing while everyone else worked. Veblen was a great humorist.

In fact, he wrote with his tongue firmly in his cheek, pointing out the foibles of the Gilded Age. I like Veblen as a stylist. I also like the fact that he combines anthropology and sociology with economic observation. He views the accumulation of wealth as a social act, rather than as a mere personal, familial objective. Veblen writing in was, of course, a precursor to the reforms that Herbert Croly and others had called for in the early years of the 20th century.

And yet America today bears a striking resemblance to the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. Read Veblen today and you can almost see contemporary America.

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