The belief that local public discussion would strengthen national democracy has had a long history in the United States. The New England town meeting cast a long shadow over modern American democracy. In the twentieth century, democratic reformers have repeatedly struggled to invent or reinvent the social forms that would help revive public conversation, often with little knowledge of the tradition in which they worked. In seeking a “talking cure” for their democracy, these reformers have sought to affirm that democracy is not just the sum of private acts of deciding and voting, that the ability of citizens to talk civilly in public would be a crucial sign of its vitality.

Article I, Section 5, Clause 1 of the United States Constitution states: “Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns, and Qualifications of its own Members. . . .” With this simple statement, each chamber of Congress is granted complete authority over how its membership will be comprised. Thus, when a given election is contested, that is, when there is a dispute over who is the rightful occupant of a given seat after the ballots have been collected and tallied, each chamber acts as the sole arbiter without external constraint. This constitutional guarantee was an artifact of English and colonial rule, as fear of executive authority led the House of Commons and nearly every colonial legislature to adopt similar protections.

At a Democratic Leadership Council meeting in the summer of 2002, centrist leaders of the Democratic Party took Al Gore to task for his use of populist rhetoric during the 2000 presidential campaign. Ed Rendell, the current governor of Pennsylvania and the former Democratic National Committee Chairman, bemoaned: “We wish Al had refined the message and not used the ‘poor people versus the rich’.” Striking a similar note, Joseph Lieberman charged that Gore's populist language made it difficult for the Democratic ticket to gain the support of middle-class, independent voters who did not see America as “us versus them,” and that these verbal attacks were to blame for Gore's failure to win the popular vote by a more convincing margin. The apparent backlash against Gore's use of populism is the latest manifestation of a transformation that has characterized presidential rhetoric over the past several decades. Put simply, the language of populism, which in the nineteenth century constituted one of the most formidable rhetorical weapons in the arsenal of Democratic presidents, has faded and been displaced by a more consensual language. This trend contrasts with the striking, though limited, embrace of populism by such Republicans as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

A federal role in funding and constructing internal improvements – building roads, canals, and railroads, river and harbor projects, and erecting lighthouses and other aids to navigation – was one of the most persistent and contentious issues of antebellum American politics. Elites based in the various regional economies of the American coastal plain shared an interest in developing the transportation infrastructure of the country: They were isolated from one another by poor inland transportation links and the legacy of colonial trading patterns; furthermore, they were separated from the interior by formidable geographic obstacles. Many Americans also shared the belief that increased interregional communications would strengthen the fragile union by fostering shared economic interests. The case for federally funded internal improvements was thus strong – the program could serve both local and national economic interests as well as a critical nation-building role. Further, promoters made a convincing case that only the federal government could effect the desired projects – the federal budget typically operated in surplus while the states lacked adequate resources, and the states faced difficult coordination problems best solved through national political institutions (see, for example, Albert Gallatin's 1808 plan). Despite all of this, a significant and sustained federal internal improvements program was not achieved, although appropriations did increase long enough for us to identify a short-lived “era of internal improvements” extending from about 1825 to 1837 (18th through 25th Congress). In short, the study of internal improvements is a study of political failure, which we can define as the prolonged failure of a majority to establish its favored policy.

Roughly twenty years after passage of Germany's—the world's first—national system of social insurance, Henry Axel Bueck, the chief executive of its most powerful capitalist organization, the Central Association of German Industrialists, remarked that the accident, health, and pension laws of the 1880s had failed to turn the working class away from the socialist labor movement. Bueck had correctly predicted that Kaiser Wilhelm I and chancellor Otto von Bismarck were in for disappointment in thinking that the laws could “conciliate the masses.” Nevertheless, Bueck supported the legislation then and through the following two decades. Looking back, he said,

[w]ith worker insurance the German Reich has accomplished, with incomparable boldness and most tenacious endurance, a work of civilization (Kulturarbeit) of the highest order, which will for all time . . . bring it renown. The edifice erected has proved worthy of its founders, the great Kaiser and his trusted advisor, the first imperial chancellor.