America’s political system has been described by Loren Goldner ((Goldner, Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne and the Antemosaic Cosmic Man, Queequeg Publications, New York, NY, 2006)) and others as a Tudor Polity. The jury is still out on whether this was a positive or negative development.
The United States’ System Compared to Great Britain and Europe
Samuel Huntington explains the meaning of America’s Tudor polity in more detail. ((Huntington, Samuel P. “The Change to Change: Modernization, Development, and Politics.” Comparative Politics, vol. 3, no. 3, 1971, pp. 283–322. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/421470. Accessed 20 Oct. 2020.)) Writing in 1966, Huntington praises the American system. But perhaps he would have a different opinion of it today. In fact, it’s possible he had reservations in 1966. On page 412 he says:
Mass participation goes hand-in-hand with authoritarian control.
But Huntington is not referring to the United States in the previous quote.
As in Guinea and Ghana, [authoritarian control] is the twentieth-century weapon of modernizing centralizers against traditional pluralism.
Instead, Huntington’s article contrasts the evolution of British and European systems, which represent two patterns of modernization, with that of the United States. He seems to think the United States is the superior system.
There was a process of political modernization in Europe and Great Britain that involved “rationalized authority, differentiated structure, and mass participation…” But the American system did not undergo any revolutionary changes; it kept the main elements of the English sixteenth-century constitution.
The Americans did take the step of increasing participation in politics by social groups throughout society. They also developed new political institutions–such as political parties and interest associations–to organize this participation. Unfortunately, mass participation doesn’t necessarily result in equality of political power. According to Huntington,
Broadened participation in politics may increase control of the people by the government, as in totalitarian states, or it may increase control of the government by the people, as in some democratic ones. (p. 378)
Mass Participation Versus Direct Democracy
Huntington doesn’t explain what he means by ‘mass politics’ but an article by Yoram Gat argues the United States’ system is one of mass politics. I cite this article because he elaborates on one possible meaning of mass politics.
Due to the symmetry of its decision making process, mass politics has superficial similarity to democracy – a political system in which political power is distributed equally among the members – since both terms describe situations of equality. The difference is that mass politics is defined in terms of formal equality while democracy is defined in terms of equality of actual political power.
This seems to describe our present system more accurately, however Huntington’s approach is important because it focuses on the historical process of modernization.
The American Colonies Fought Modernization
According to Huntington, late medieval and Tudor political ideas, practices, and institutions arrived in the New World with English colonists in the first half of the seventeenth century. The conflict between the colonists and the British government in the middle of the eighteenth century only reinforced the colonists’ adherence to these ‘traditional’ patterns.
The breach between colonists and mother country was largely a mutual misunderstanding based, in great part, on the fact of this retention of older ideas in the colonies after parliamentary sovereignty had driven them out in the mother country ((Charles Howard McIlwain, The High Court of Parliament and Its Supremacy, New Haven 1910, p. 386. As quoted by Huntington, p. 382)).
Huntington concludes that America’s political modernization has been ineffectual and incomplete.
European and English Monarchs of the Sixteenth Century
The absolute monarchs of sixteenth century Europe were not reactionaries. They were actually modernizers who oversaw the transition between medieval and modern politics. (p. 385) There were many political theorists at that time who tried to provide more ‘rational’ justifications of absolute sovereignty based on the nature of man and the nature of society. Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, 1651, was a more extreme doctrine of sovereignty than that of Bodin and the Politiques on the Continent. Bodin and the Politiques looked to the creation of a supreme royal power which would maintain order and constitute a centralized public authority above parties, sects, and groups.
Hobbes and Filmer represent both the secular and religious versions of the doctrine of sovereignty. They argued that it was the subject’s absolute duty to obey his king. Both of them helped political modernization by giving permission for the concentration of authority and the breakdown of the medieval pluralistic political orders.
Mass participation came much later. Since the twentieth century authority has been concentrated in either a political party or a popular charismatic leader. Either one is capable of arousing the masses and challenging traditional sources of authority.
In terms of modernization, the seventeenth century’s absolute monarch was the functional equivalent of the twentieth century’s monolithic party. (p. 386)
Parliamentary Sovereignty
This process also occurred in England with an important difference. James I tried to follow the Continental pattern of the absolutist monarch but Conservatives disagreed. They argued against James I in terms of fundamental law and the traditional diffusion of authority. However their ideas were already out of date in England. Their claims for royal absolutism generated counterclaims for parliamentary supremacy. For example, Hobbes’s and Filmer’s theories of sovereignty provoked Milton’s argument that parliament is above all positive law, whether civil or common. In short, fundamental law suffered the same fate in England as it had on the Continent but it was replaced by an omnipotent legislature rather than by an absolute monarchy.
America
Meanwhile America clung to the old patterns of fundamental law and diffused authority. Huntington makes a statement here that might seem contradictory given our current political situation.
The persistence of fundamental-law doctrines went hand in hand with the rejection of sovereignty. The older ideas of the interplay of society and government and the harmonious balance of the elements of the constitution continued to dominate American political thought. In England, the ideas of the great Tudor political writers, Smith, Hooker, Coke, ‘were on the way to becoming anachronisms even as they were set down.’ In America, on the other hand, their doctrines prospered, and Hobbes remained irrelevant…The eighteenth-century argument of the colonists with the home country was essentially an argument against the legislative sovereignty of Parliament.
American Popular Sovereignty is Latent and Passive
After stating that in America sovereignty was to be lodged in the people, Huntington admits that popular sovereignty is a vague concept. “The voice of the people is as readily identified as is the voice of God. It is thus a latent, passive, and ultimate authority, not a positive and active one.”
The Courts
America’s continuation of the belief in the supremacy of law, as well as its rejection of legislative sovereignty, explains the power of the judicial branch of government in the United States. In England, the supremacy of the law ended in the civil wars of the seventeenth century. The result was that English judges could not oppose any points of sovereignty. However in America, the mixture of judicial and political function remained.
The judicial power to declare what the law is became the mixed judicial-legislative power to tell the legislature what the law cannot be…The legislative functions of courts in America, as McIlwain argues, are far greater than those in England, ‘because the like tendency was there checked by the growth in the seventeenth century of a new doctrine of parliamentary supremacy.’
By contrast, American courts are still ‘guided by questions of policy and expediency.’ (p. 394) This explains the prominent role of lawyers in American politics.
Conclusion
Perhaps the most interesting idea brought up by Huntington is that political modernization in Europe and England was driven by the need for change. Modernization began when the needs of the time met the simultaneous impossibility of change. It can be argued that today in the United States there is an urgent need for change, including the need to combat climate change and preserve arable land and clean water. Yet reactionary forces are cooperating with each other to make change impossible. This is a strong argument for modernization.