American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony

Huntington argues that American politics is structured by a permanent gap between the nation's democratic creed and the realities of governing. The creed—liberty, equality, individualism, and hostility to authority—sets standards that no government can fully meet. This 'IvI gap' between ideals and institutions is not a correctable flaw but a constitutive feature of American political life. Periodically, when this dissonance becomes intolerable, Americans erupt in 'creedal passion': moralistic upheavals aimed at remaking institutions to match ideals. Huntington identifies four such periods and predicts the tension is likely to increase in the future .

The 'IvI gap'—ideals versus institutions—is Huntington's term for the discrepancy between what Americans believe government should be and what government can actually do. He argues the gap is ineradicable because the American creed demands that government be egalitarian, participatory, open, non-coercive, and responsive, yet 'no government can be all these things and still remain a government' . Power, hierarchy, and coercion are necessary for governance, but the creed rejects them in principle. The gap is therefore built into the American political DNA, not a temporary failure to be overcome.

Creedal passion periods are episodes when the IvI gap becomes acutely manifest and Americans mobilize to close it. Huntington identifies four: the American Revolution (against the crown), the Jacksonian era (against the bank), the Progressive era (against the interests and the system), and the 1960s (against the military-industrial complex) . Each period shares characteristics including widespread discontent, moral indignation over the gap, intense hostility to power, expanded political participation, and attempts to reform institutions to align with ideals. He argues these periods recur at roughly sixty-year intervals and are essential to American stability because they bring institutions closer to values .

Huntington argues the 1960s were not a rejection of American values but a reaffirmation of them. Student activists, in his reading, were demanding that America live up to the creed it professed. He opens the book with a Harvard commencement speech by student Melvin Levine, who insisted protesters were 'not conspiring to destroy America' but 'reaffirming the values which you instilled in us' . The civil rights movement, student protests, and antiwar activism are framed as creedal passion: moralistic attempts to purge institutions of hypocrisy and close the IvI gap. The ideological challenge to American government, Huntington concludes, 'comes not from abroad but from home' .

A major critique, articulated in the Journal of American History, was that Huntington's fourfold scheme of responses to the gap—denial, toleration, moralism, and hypocrisy—was too restrictive and eliminated the possibility of demanding reform rather than absolute purity. Critics argued he reduced 'effective' protest to psychological release and treated social issues as abstractions, amounting to a 'serious and complex defence of the status quo' . Others noted that Huntington's selection of creedal passion periods differed contentiously from other accounts, which typically include the 1850s, 1890s, and New Deal . The Harvard Crimson review similarly criticized his Vietnam-era claims as 'tortured' and 'absurd' .

Commentators including Carlos Lozada of the Washington Post and Yuval Levin of the New York Times have argued that American Politics speaks more directly to the present moment than Huntington's famous Clash of Civilizations. Lozada wrote in 2017 that Huntington's focus on the gap between creedal values and governmental performance captures 'the central tension of national life' . The 2020 protests against racial inequality seemed to fit Huntington's prediction that the tension would increase . Readers on Amazon in 2025 described it as 'VERY VERY timely' for understanding contemporary American politics .