The Yale Review’s Political Archive

The Yale Review is the oldest literary journal in the United States. But while literature and the arts are, and always have been, central to the magazine’s mission, over the course of its history The Yale Review has also published a surprisingly wide range of political essays. These include big-picture think pieces on subjects like American identity and the nature of democracy and also detailed, granular interrogations of the workings of the American political system. The authors we have published are equally varied, from historians and political scientists to secretaries of state and even a former president. So, with the presidential election imminently upon us, we have delved into our archives and pulled out a series of essays that collectively shed light on the history of American politics in the twentieth century, while also offering some compelling insights into the strange world of American politics in the twenty-first.

What stands out when reading these pieces is the way in which certain problems and themes recur in American political discourse, and how many of the conflicts at the heart of our political divisions today have persisted, in various guises, for decades. Take the earliest essay in this collection, the 1914 piece “The Powers of the President,” which President William Howard Taft wrote only a year after he left the White House. While the piece is devoted, as the title suggests, to an analysis of the theoretical and practical limits to the president’s power, it also extols the virtues of having career civil servants, rather than political appointees, fill government roles (including relatively high executive offices). The problem with a system in which executive officers are replaced every four years, Taft argued, is that it deprives the country of experienced employees and encourages government workers to act for political ends rather than out of “disinterested devotion to the public service.”

That may sound naïve. But Taft’s argument was a product of his Progressive faith in expertise. As he wrote, “If popular government is to be a success, the success will be measured by the ability of the government to use the service of experts in carrying it on.” And these tributes to bureaucrats and nonpartisan expertise are striking to read today, at a time when government experts have become public enemies in the minds of many Republican voters, and when Republican thought leaders like Vivek Ramaswamy and vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance are pushing for an evisceration of the civil service and a return to a highly politicized bureaucracy. As Vance put it in a podcast appearance, he wants to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, [and] replace them with our people.”

Similarly, Richard J. Barnet’s bleak “The Future of Democracy,” which appeared in October 1982, unmistakably resonates with the pessimism and anger that so many American voters seem to feel at the moment (if not always for obvious reasons). Barnet, who co-founded the Institute for Policy Studies, felt the industrial West was beset by a sense that things were no longer under control, with citizens preoccupied “more by fears of scarcity than by dreams of abundance.” His diagnosis of “feelings of public powerlessness,” “mounting racial tension,” a need to identify “foreign threats” as the source of domestic woes, and “a widespread disillusionment with big institutions, both public and private” could plausibly be applied to much of the American polity today.

Finally, the historian Carl Becker’s two pieces on democracy and constitutions, as well as the historian Arthur Schlesinger’s essay on cycles in American politics, are especially intriguing to read at this particular historical moment. Becker’s essays are about the chastening of our Enlightenment hopes for shaping “the world of social relations to humane ends by rational means,” and the fragility of what he calls “democratic virtues.” But both his essays and Schlesinger’s are ultimately tributes to the experimental, pragmatic, and nonradical nature of American democracy, which historically has made it easy for politicians to accept defeat at the polls and give up power peacefully because they know doing so isn’t “a permanent or a fatal surrender of their vital interests.” And one can say the same about former Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s piece on the balance of power between the legislative and executive branches of government, which depicts a system in which Cabinet members are in constant dialogue with members of Congress, including those of the opposing party. At a time when Donald Trump, who refused to accept defeat at the polls in 2020, imbues his speeches with apocalyptic language about how America won’t be here anymore if he loses, these essays are a welcome reminder of a better and more resilient vision of American politics and, indeed, of the country itself.