Where We Are as a Nation
There are few books whose contents have had as big an impact on my view of politics and government as American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony by Samuel P. Huntington. During graduate studies at SIU-Carbondale in the late 1960s, I used Huntington's book on political development, Political Order in Changing Societies , to guide my master's thesis. Later, teaching at Austin Community College (ACC), I was drawn to American Politics: T he Promise of Disharmony . In teaching, I've always believed that students need a compelling framework or theory on which to hang the concepts they learn in studying politics and government. Huntington provides such a framework. I've written about this framework previously on this blog. In this post, I want to demonstrate how a large portion of the nation has adopted a radical revision of what Huntington described as the American Creed: five ideas that formed the promise and goal of American politics and government. Three of the five