America's Three Regimes: A New Political History (review)

This brisk and informative book offers a sweeping new perspective that organizes the United States' political past into three “regimes” encompassing the colonial period to the present. This framework allows Keller to emphasize long stretches of continuity and the survival of earlier political forms disrupted by powerful hammer blows of successive events. It took the Revolution and subsequent developments through the War of 1812 for the polity to depart from the colonial era's “deferential-republican” regime and, by the 1830s, to assume the form of a “party-democratic” regime that lasted to the 1930s. From that point to the present, Keller proposes, political life has been governed by a “populist-bureaucratic” regime.

Keller devotes about a dozen pages to the colonial regime that was influenced both by Old World attitudes to power (deference) and the New World colonists' inexorable movement to self-government. The Revolution, independence, and the Constitution then fixed republican governance on the new nation. Subsequently, the “torrents of change that swept over America from the 1770s to the 1830s created a new regime, party-dominated in form, democratic in culture. This regime persisted in ‘deeply embedded permanence’ for a century, in the face of the Civil War, the rise of the world's largest industrial economy, and profound transformations of American society and culture” (67).

Applying the term regime to colonial politics seems slightly incongruous as an umbrella to capture the diversity of colonial societies. Regime suggests a controlling overlord, a central authority of some kind. Later in the book, Keller uses the term political culture in reference to his second and third regimes, and it could easily, and more appropriately, be applied to the first phase of his story as well.

Our current regime is populist because “public affairs are defined increasingly by voices outside the party-political apparatus—the media, advocacy groups, experts, bureaucrats, judges—who claim to speak for particular social interests or for the people at large.” Its bureaucratic character derives from a reliance “on government agencies and the courts to define and enforce public policy. . . . More, and more powerful, administrative agencies are a major part of the new bureaucratic regime.” Just as the populist impulse vies with and displaces political parties as the “primary definers of public policy, so have bureaucrats and judges sought to displace politicians as the primary dispensers of public power” (202).

Readers of this journal will appreciate the use that Keller makes of political-science scholarship, though his narrative is grounded mostly in the work of historians. Keller differs with many historians, however, in rejecting the party-systems approach to nineteenth-century politics. It holds that significant voter and party realignments took place during the 1850s and 1890s. As noted earlier, Keller argues for a 100-year “party-democratic regime” that extended from the 1830s to the 1930s. Yet his bird's-eye view of American politics is not necessarily incompatible with the realignment concept that disaggregates his trinity of regimes.

America's Three Regimes is entertaining reading, written in a clear and lively style and packed with fresh insights, along with fruitful comparisons with English (and to a lesser extent European) politics. But a brief tour of our political past from colonial settlement to the present is bound to gloss over many subjects. Moreover, Keller's accounts of events occasionally reflect a lack of acquaintance with recent literature or conflict with it. This reviewer would have a long list of such disagreements in areas of his familiarity, from the description of traditional agrarian populist movements of the 1780s and 1790s to the linking of urban riots in African-American ghettoes to federal action on school desegregation (36, 41, 58, 59 for the populist movements, 268 for the riots). The urban discontent began in 1964, and desegregation not seriously until 1969/70.

To be fair, much of Keller's loose treatment of specific events results from his decision to condense and concentrate on his larger thesis. Given [End Page 601...