Politicians are polarized. Public opinion is volatile. Government
is gridlocked. Or so journalists and pundits constantly report. But
where are we, really, in modern American politics, and how did we
get there? Those are the questions that Byron E. Shafer aims to
answer in The American Political Pattern. Looking at the state of
American politics at diverse points over the past eighty years, the
book draws a picture, broad in scope yet precise in detail, of our
political system in the modern era. It is a picture of stretches of
political stability, but also, even more, of political change, one
that goes a long way toward explaining how shifting factors alter
the content of public policy and the character of American
politicking. Shafer divides the modern world into four distinct
periods: the High New Deal (1932-1938), the Late New Deal
(1939-1968), the Era of Divided Government (1969-1992), and the Era
of Partisan Volatility (1993-2016). Each period is characterized by
a different arrangement of the same key factors: party balance,
ideological polarization, issue conflict, and the policy-making
process that goes with them. The American Political Pattern shows
how these factors are in turn shaped by permanent aspects of the US
Constitution, most especially the separation of powers and
federalism, while their alignment is simultaneously influenced by
the external demands for governmental action that arise in each
period, including those derived from economic currents, major wars,
and social movements. Analyzing these periods, Shafer sets the
terms for understanding the structure and dynamics of politics in
our own turbulent time. Placing the current political world in its
historical and evolutionary framework, while illuminating major
influences on American politics over time, his book explains where
this modern world came from, why it endures, and how it might
change yet again.
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