Syllabus: PS 3000 Fight Club Politics

Fight Club Politics? First Rule of Fight Club Politics—There is No Fight Club. Just ask our Founding Fathers. They wrote how the extended republic of America dispersed and diluted factional differences, thus preventing any majority faction from gaining power and allowing governmental powers to be used in the service of the public interest. As late as the 1950s, prominent scholars of American politics wrote about the relative tranquility of American politics, that America was free from the ideological turmoil that embroiled most European nations. American politics was more bound than that of other democratic republics. The political parties overlapped to the point that they were sometimes cynically characterized as the Alice-in- Wonderland characters, Tweedledum and Tweedledee.