The United States was able to maintain a stable
democracy in the past decades while other countries found this so difficult to
achieve due greatly to various main factors such as the absence of
any significant military threat, no history of religion wars, no history of
aristocratic past needing to overthrown by conflictual violence and rather
bigger land, resourceful and less population comparing to those cities in
London and Paris. Geographically, the U.S. is surrounded by two peaceful
neighboring countries which are significantly weak in terms of politics,
economics and military. More, the other sides of the U.S. border are two big
oceans, Pacific and Atlantic, which allow the U.S. to navigate freely and
without any threats from outside world. As a lot of migrations, the U.S. was a
very newly states comparing to other civilized empire and kingdoms. It has no
history of wars between the rulers (kings) and the followers (citizens). It has
no history divine war as well as intractable conflicts. Those who come to live
in the U.S. were business person, investors, resource finders, job finders and
political refugees etc. They came together as one, regardless of backgrounds. No
one dared to own everything since most of them were all new comers. For these
reasons, more and more culture of compromise took place and that peaceful
society happened to them most of the times.
Important than that, as
the founders of the U.S. constitution knew exactly that they were all migrants
from different races, beliefs, culture, status, background and identity they
designed a political system that may carry out everything together and that it
was the Presidential liberal democracy. Since very often fractions between
groups of people would arise, the constitution has served as a symbol as well
as real Leviathan to keep Americans united. And it was true for hundreds of
years, though went through many big, small or fragile crises, the U.S. kept stable
and even leads the world. Truth is told. It precisely exists in the U.S.
political system, where controversies more than alignments happened between the
top three institutions or intra-institution such as a divided congress. As
argued earlier, these divisions sound good to the founders and voters since
they hold that easily mobilization between institutions will highly likely
result in dictatorship or tyranny. Consequently, culture of compromise exists,
but not culture of monopolization.
Again, is there governance
crisis in the U.S. political system largely and in the Congress specifically? Till
dates, my findings are greatly divided. On the one hand, the Congress produces
less and less bills/laws and receives low trust from the general American; on
the other hand, individual congressmen and women remain possess popular
supports from their constituencies. While some commentators say low performance
in terms of law adoption, American citizens and the founders are cheering for
these few in amount since more laws will lessen their rights and freedoms. Now
we can see that there are two distinctive claims whether there is a governance
crisis or not in the U.S. political system. As a researcher, I really wanted to
have a consolidated answer to verify my hypothesis in early section but I
cannot ignore another part of the responses I found, too. I, therefore, draw my
answer as in the following.
According to the findings,
there have been ideological polarizations since the past in the U.S. Congress
as well as among American public. People in the House and Senate are lined up
into two main ideologies–liberal and conservative. The proportion of this
polarization went up and down in accordance with confronting issues. When it
comes to internal issues such as tax-raising/cut or adopting public health
care, Congressman tends to side in one way more fractious and when it comes to international
issues such as war on terror, the Congress tends to persuasively stand unified.
So far, the research suggests that even though there are polarizations, they
are not deadly different. They finally found ways to re-embrace team spirits,
after all.
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