What Must be Done: Sustaining New Political Science After America’s Decades of Decline

Abstract

This analysis provisionally outlines a critical analysis of the American presidential elections of 1912 and 2016. While the 1912 contest is not identical to 2016, Wilson’s victory introduced a Progressive politics into government after pitting the Democratic Party against strong candidates from the Progressive, Republican, and Socialist Parties. Taking ideas from his challengers, Wilson during WWI developed a more centralized administrative state grounded on professional expertise and progressive activism. By the 1930s, this state anchored a bi-partisan government more supportive of professional expert elites running the two major parties, which Hillary Clinton seemed to typify in 2016, and less interested in helping ordinary working Americans. Donald Trump in 2016 attacked this habitus of progressivism, using it against Clinton to delegitimize the administrative. By questioning the Democratic and GOP establishments, Trump won 2016 as “an outsider,” who defends forgotten silent Americans. In keeping with the radical critique made by the Caucus for a New Political Science since 1967, this analysis re-examines how progressive experts fostered these self-defeating practices for “popular government,” which have enhanced elite control over “the people” rather than enabling open democratic rule by “the people” in the twenty-first century.