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1 The Constitutional Underpinnings of the US Political System I am pleased to be able to speak to you on the constitutional underpinnings of the American

political system. However, it might be more accurate to entitle my talk, "Cultural underpinnings of the US constitution." As Dean Dessouki indicated in his own remarks, the institutions of the US can only be understood in terms of their cultural context. The United States lies somewhere between the United Kingdom and France, in terms of its constitution. The former lacks a single constitutional document, whereas the latter possesses a long and detailed constitution (90 articles). But while the American republic has lasted 200 years with one constitution, France has had five republics, two empires and two republics during the same time. The American constitution is flexible but incomplete; many key points are still being worked out. Some authors cite a distinctive set of American political values, reflected in the Constitution. These include: a. Individualism: the individual is the basic unit of politics, and the political system is erected for the benefit of the individual; b. The "natural rights" of the individual, the rights to life, liberty, property; the right to participate in the decisions of government; the right to individual treatment before the law: c. Limited government: the government's sphere of action is defined by both the limited scope of the powers granted to it and the inviolability of the rights of the individual; d. Materialism and the business ethic. Others would add racism and sexism. [Dolbeare, 1985 #9]

2 Without denying that these valus are widely held, I find it more useful to conceputlize the culturlal uderpinnings of the system in terms of several competing sets of values. [Stevens, 1995 #1238; Smith, 1993 #1115] Kelley, for example, maintains that in the beginning there were four modes of American republicanism, corresponding to the ethnic backgrounds of the regions of the country [Kelley, 1978 #1237; Kelley, 1981 #1260; see also Fischer, 1991 #506]: a. pious and moralistic republicanism of New England, favoring an activist government; b. libertarian republicanism of white southerners, according whom government should be locally controlled and small; c. nationalist republicans of the elites of the Middle Atlantic states, who wanted to open the continent's vast resources to commerce by a vigorous use of the central government; d) egalitarian republicanism of the non-elite ethnic groups of the Middle Atlantic (Dutch, German, Scotch-Irish) The party system (unmentioned in the Constitution) represents coalitions among the four regional versions of nationalism. The Federalists of Hamilton were a coalition of New England and the Middle Atlantic elites, based on a common belief in activist government. The Jeffersonian (ancestors of the Democrats) were a coalition of Southerners and non-elites of the Mid-Atlantic. That twoparty framework continues to dominate American politics, even though the membership of the coalitions has changed. The Constitution reflects a series of compromises among these groups, especially the first three i.e., regional elites of the northern, central and southern states. A number of key questions were left unresolved. These include:

3 a. the extent to which states had surrendered sovereignty to the federal government; b. the hierarchy of values, and in particular the contradiction between liberty and slavery (justified in terms of locally controlled government and property rights); c. whether freedom of speech and freedom of association permit the dominant role of money in politics today, or whether these rights must be balanced against the rights of equal protection and equal participation.

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