This analysis explores why a farmers-led social movement mobilized against federal government policy in the late twentieth century. It also explores where that revolt may lead and whether it was different from previous farm protests. Was it, as populist rhetoric of the 1980s charged, a reflection of structural changes in farmers' own agricultural production systems? Or was it simply a case of farmers wanting more federal income support? The distinction is important because the answer determines producer commitment to the central agricultural development premises of U.S. public policy. Farmers always have promoted the agrarian value of hardworking independence. Yet they also have been caught, especially since midcentury, in a cycle of farm industrialization. Technical innovation and federal agricultural policy have combined to make industrialization unavoidable for individual farm operators who want to remain as full-time, commercial growers. Has there been a link between the dissenting politics of farm protest and industrialized agricultural change? This linkage is the subject of concern in the following pages. Why industrialization might well have caused policy dissent is examined first.

Theoretical and descriptive studies of the Supreme Court exhibit a curious parallel. Both usually begin from the premise that judicial review is “a deviant institution in a democratic society.” Much normative work claims that independent judicial policymaking is rarely legitimate in a democracy because, with few exceptions, elected officials rather than appointed judges should resolve social controversies. In a frequently cited passage, Alexander Bickel asserts that the Supreme Court is “a counter-majoritarian force” in our system of government. Much empirical work, by comparison, insists that independent judicial policymaking seldom takes place in a democracy because, with few exceptions, judges appointed and confirmed by elected officials sustain whatever social policies are enacted by the dominant national coalition. Robert Dahl observes that it is “unrealistic to suppose that a Court whose members are recruited in the fashion of Supreme Court justices would long hold to norms of Right or Justice substantially at odds with the rest of the political elite.”

This essay stems from a prolonged study of Adolf A. Berle's drafts for the address “On Progressive Government” which Franklin Roosevelt gave in San Francisco during the 1932 presidential campaign. The essay compares Dewey's Individualism Old and New (Part I below) with the Commonwealth Club Address (Part II). The need for such a sustained comparison and commentary became clear only when I began to wonder whether Roosevelt's pragmatism—or rather the pragmatist teaching Berle formulated in responding to Roosevelt—was really idiosyncratic and philosophically derivative, as students of my generation had been taught to suppose. Like most journeymen, I had heard Justice Holmes's characterization of Roosevelt: “a first class temperament but a second class mind.” Coming from the oracle of pragmatist jurisprudence, that remark deflected my attention from Roosevelt's executive character and delayed my study of its effect on younger, more impressionable pragmatists like Berle. I also shared the common opinion of New Deal pragmatism as an encore for reform or a revanche for interventionism. I did not foresee that it might present an occasion for theoretical advance.

Since the late nineteenth century, dissatisfaction with the U.S. party system has led political scientists to look across the Atlantic for ”responsible parties,” cohesive teams with leaders who articulate and promote distinctive programs for public policy. Yet U.S. political scientists have been misguided when they have searched for a different, superior set of parties in the United Kingdom. British parties have never possessed the internal cohesion characteristic of the responsible-parties model. Nor have they, for that matter, empowered their leaders to pursue change. When parties prove significant, influence operates in the British environment much as it does in the U.S. context—as a commodity bargained for among groups within the two major parties.