B. The Evolution of American Political Democracy
In understanding the evolution of American political democracy, we must not posit an inevitable march of democracy and progress -- or an equally invalid American fall from grace and innocence. The paradox of American political democracy is that, while America (both as British colonies and later as an independent nation) was by far the freest part of the Western world in whatever period, American democracy was at the same time deeply, agonizingly inconsistent. To cite two examples, the nation barred African-Americans from citizenship and suffrage (constitutionally, until Reconstruction; legally and practically, until the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s, if then) and excluded women (from suffrage, until 1920; from full equality under the law, to the present day).
American political development encompasses a variety of institutional frameworks and intellectual assumptions. The range of institutional frameworks includes the various Indian political systems, to the Spanish and British colonial empires, to the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution of 1787. The constitutional system itself changed character even within the nineteenth century, going from the antebellum Constitution of limited federal power, to the Civil War ordeal of the Constitution, to the activist Constitution of the Reconstruction era, to the late nineteenth-century Constitution of a permanent Union, subordinate states, and restrained federal power. Then, in the twentieth century, the constitutional system experienced the rise, first during the Progressive era and then in the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt, of the activist state; then endured an agonizing reappraisal and curtailment of activist government in the 1970s and 1980s; and, in the early 1990s, attempted a tentative revival of activist government -- only to confront renewed challenges to that idea in the second half of the decade.
Ideas about government -- its appropriate sphere of activity and its appropriate limits -- have mutated throughout American history. Although we address this subject more fully in the next subsection, we can understand the history of American political democracy as a succession of readjustments to such balances as:
No matter what specific, time-based variations we may discern in the development of American political democracy, the American political system is a collection of ever-shifting balances held in delicate equipoise.
The evolution of American political democracy also entails the gradual expansion of what the historian Henry Adams called the "political population" -- that is, those who had the power to take part in governing themselves. Beginning in the colonial period and persisting into the early Republic, the political population encompassed (with a few local exceptions) white Christian males with a sufficient amount of property to establish their political independence. In the early and middle 1800s, the abolition of property qualifications and all but the broadest religious tests dramatically expanded the political population -- but barriers of race and sex still barred African-Americans and women from direct participation in politics. The Civil War and the Fifteenth Amendment broadened the political population further to include African-American men and men from other racial minorities (in theory). The desire for statehood drove many Western territories to recognize women as members of the political population, and in 1920 decades of struggle by women led to the Nineteenth Amendment, which brought women within the political population. Other reforms eliminated such bars to political participation as the poll tax (the last vestige of property requirements) and lowered the voting age to eighteen. This succession of hard-won reforms, most of which took the form of amendments to the Constitution, looks good on paper -- but students ought to consider whether these achievements are true victories for expanding democracy or only paper triumphs.