ABSTRACT
The Democratic party leadership, with the support of grassroots leaders, must take a long hard look at the political system they hope to make operative for the long haul. A sound analysis of the American political system must necessarily be two-tiered. Far too little has been written about the contribution of the structural imbalances within local and state governments to the larger inequities of American politics. The old distinction between apples and apples, as opposed to apples and oranges, is useful to an understanding of the biases that characterize not only political structures but also the interactions between citizens and their governments. If the balance of private-to-public domains in any political system is one of the keys to democratic governance, the cycles of America’s politics clearly reveal a pattern of alternating conservative-to-liberal biases for private and public domains. Even the more self-sustaining members of the population cannot utilize an aggregative form of representation that would include them in governmental considerations.
