And so while the revolution under Jefferson and
Jackson produced the patronage which made the two party system, which
created a substitute for the rule of the gentry, and a discipline for
governing the deadlock of the checks and balances, all that happened,
as it were, invisibly.
Thus, rotation in office might be the ostensible theory, in practice
the offices oscillated between the henchmen. Tenure might not be a
permanent monopoly, but the professional politician was permanent.
Government might be, as President Harding once said, a simple thing,
but winning elections was a sophisticated performance. The salaries in
office might be as ostentatiously frugal as Jefferson's home-spun, but
the expenses of party organization and the fruits of victory were in
the grand manner. The stereotype of democracy controlled the visible
government; the corrections, the exceptions and adaptations of the
American people to the real facts of their environment have had to be
invisible, even when everybody knew all about them. It was only the
words of the law, the speeches of politicians, the platforms, and the
formal machinery of administration that have had to conform to the
pristine image of democracy.
5
If one had asked a philosophical democrat how these self-contained
communities were to cooperate, when their public opinions were so
self-centered, he would have pointed to representative government
embodied in the Congress.
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