Keller, Morton. America's Three Regimes: A New Political History.

• Author: Linantud, John L.
• Position: Book review

Keller, Morton. America's Three Regimes: A New Political History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. 319 pages. Paper $19.95

Morton Keller's America's Three Regimes divides U.S. history into three distinct arrangements of party politics, government, and law. First is a Deferential-Republican system, defined by internal hierarchy and the external struggle against Great Britain from the colonial era through the 1820s. Second is a Party-Democratic configuration, which lasted from the 1830s to the 1930s, in which old elites and state governments lost power to politicos, public opinion, and the federal government. Third is the current Populist-Bureaucratic era, that started in the 1930s, wherein the power to set and frame the political agenda has shifted away from parties to the media and interest groups that press federal authorities--especially the courts--to recognize their claims to fundamental rights.

The scope and content of America 's Three Regimes will appeal to historians, political scientists, sociologists, and anyone else interested in the nature of democratic power. Keller's thesis, which stresses continuity, persistence, and evolution over change, transformation, and revolution, is especially provocative following the election of Barack Obama. Is Obama a revolutionary? Or do we manufacture hyperbole without reason? These are important questions.

For Keller, what seems novel is often old wine in a new bottle. To borrow a metaphor from Singapore not used by Keller: in terms of political stability, the United States is an aircraft carrier, not a canoe. It is much safer to jump up and down on the deck of an aircraft carrier, even if public opinion becomes polarized over key issues, while it is advisable to remain seated in a canoe. By Keller's reckoning, only the first American regime was in danger of tipping over, mostly from the threat of British power that dissipated after the War of 1812. But without real instability, revolutionary change is unlikely, despite the screeching that often accompanies U.S. elections.

Keller's balanced defense of American democracy fits historian Gordon S. Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992) and political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset's American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (1996). Furthermore, Keller's reservations about the capacity of U.S. political culture to understand its own evolution swell the recent wave of skepticism about Western democracy recapitulated in...