The poverty of American politics

the long version

In this classic analysis, H. Mark Roelofs challenges America's complacency about its political system. Maintaining that the American political system is not working well enough to inspire confidence that it can meet the challenges of our time, he attributes that failure not to its practitioners but to its very design. He sees the system as split between its legitimizing self-image, social democracy, and its operational element, liberal democracy. Based on this novel understanding of the American political system, Roelofs presents a devastating and closely reasoned critique that traces our nation's political ills to fundamental flaws in the very design of its founding principles, the character of its major institutions, and the basic pattern of its processes.