ABSTRACT
Seven times between 1900 and 1980 the cycle of elections dominated by themes of conflict, conscience, and conciliation beat through American Presidential politics. The pulse of politics is a mythic pulse. Political life shares in the national mythology, grows in the wider culture, draws its strength from the human passion for discovering, in our short span of life on this peripheral planet, the drama of human significance. The conflict theme may trace all the way back to preliterate hunting stories, recounted by survivors returning to the fireside to report the frantic search and kill and escape, the origin of the "Embroidered Exploit", one writer thinks. The American war story, from which the theme of politics as conflict derives its very language, reflects our peculiar experience. The politics of conscience bites deep in the American experience. From the Old Testament on, the tense drama of the making and breaking of the covenant between God and His people has electrified Western civilization.
