Word: majoritarian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Imperial Presidency may have faded, but now an Imperial Judiciary has the Republic in its clutches. The fear, as Constitutional Scholar Alexander Bickel once expressed it, is that too many federal judges view themselves as holding "roving commissions as problem solvers, charged with a duty to act when majoritarian institutions do not." Given license by a vague Constitution and malleable laws, and armed with their own rigorous sense of right and wrong, judges have been roving all over the lot: into school desegregation, voting rights, sex, mental health, the environment-the list goes...
...decline of the parties is part of the atomizing process of American culture. "The individualistic instincts in this society," writes Washington Post Columnist David Broder, "have now become much more powerful in our politics than the majoritarian impulse. It is easier and more appealing for all of us leaders as well as followers-to separate ourselves from the mass than to seek out the alliances that can make us part of a majority." Voters seem to have lost the psychological need to feel themselves part of a large political cause; the Viet Nam War, Watergate and other scandals have left...
...mind. It is safe to predict that a McGovern Administration would have a few embarrassments in its wake as well. Not that scandals are morally defendable, but experience suggests that they are politically inevitable. Old-fashioned graft at least distributes its burdens more equitably and less destructively than certain majoritarian programs which are quite legal and above-board...