Great Decisions, the Foreign Policy Association, and the Triumph of Elitism in the U.S. Foreign Policy Community

Abstract

Who decides the national interest in a mass democracy? This article combines international, political, and intellectual history to demonstrate that a significant theoretical and practical debate about the relative power of experts and publics continued within the U.S. foreign policy community well into the Cold War. Arguing that ‘public opinion’ and related concepts should be treated as constructions rather than innate realities, it uses the history of the Foreign Policy Association to show how the rise of a radical ‘elitist theory of democracy’ among political scientists was contested by those in the foreign policy community who believed that broad participation in the making of U.S. foreign policy was both possible and desirable. Great Decisions, an expansive, enduring program that began in Portland, Oregon, in 1955, was the Association’s attempt to prove elitist theory wrong, but its attempt to contest the new political science at scale faltered precisely because it conceived of participation in ways that tended to appeal to white, educated, usually wealthy citizens. With the failure of Great Decisions, the foreign policy community gave up on participation, the assumption becoming widespread that foreign policy was, and could only be, the domain of experts and elites.