It's from this board's essay archives:Author Comment Tony Evans
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(2/3/02 7:27:12 pm )
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U.S. Political Parties A very brief and not at all comprehensive primer on U.S. political party realignment:
The original political parties in the United States were the Hamiltonian Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans. The former were for active and powerful government, dominated by the executive. The latter were for a minimal government, dominated by the legislative branch. The Federalists lost out to the Republicans over time, largely because the Republicans gradually became more activist in their policies. After a time, the Republican party was the only one left on the national scene. (The last eight years of this period was the "Era of Good Feelings" of the Monroe administration.)
Beginning in 1824, the first major political realignment occurred. This coincided with and was driven by the Market Revolution of the 1820's & 30's. (The American Industrial Revolution started in the 1840's.) The Republicans gradually broke up into the Democrats, who were Jacksonian populist supporters of states' rights and rugged individualism, and the Whigs, a coalition of Federalist heirs and supporters of expansive government involvement in national economic initiatives. The ever present issue of slavery also solidified along party lines, with moderate abolitionists settling in the Whig camp and the pro-slavery forces finding a home in what soon came to be known as "The Democracy". Note that in the beginning neither party had--or even wanted--a particularly regional character.
During the 1840's and 50's the Whigs and Democrats solidified as the two great national parties. They also started to regionalize, though not to the degree that many now imagine. The Democracy was strong among the Northern middle class and poor, while the Whigs had a considerable constituency in Southern urban centers. This was also the era of the single-issue third party, such as the anti-immigrant Know Nothings. But, just as in previous decades, the parties failed to represent a growing demographic driven by new issues.
This of course led to the rise of a new Republican party, dedicated to Manifest Destiny and halting the expansion of slavery. (Abolition was still very much a radical movement right up to the middle of the Civil War.) This party almost exclusively represented the interests of Northern free labor and Western (by the lights of times--we're talking about the modern Midwest here) expansionist interests, thus solidifying the regionalization of national politics. Because this party made some very astute policy decisions early on, it gathered in large number of disaffected Whigs, while at the same time cleaving to platform points that the Whig elite would never have signed up for. IOW, the Republicans were not the Whigs reformed, but a force for a new and much expanded national agenda that attracted the Whigs' base.
The Civil War and Reconstruction led to Republican domination of the second half of the 19th Century and the first decade of the 20th. It didn't hurt that a Republican candidate could always "wave the bloody flag" of the party that led the country through its supreme test. The South stayed loyal to the Democrats and eschewed the "Black" Republicans, perpetuating, to some degree, the regionalization of politics. The only exception to this trend were the two Cleveland administrations. But Cleveland is a case of the exception that proves the rule, as he had been a Northern War Democrat.
But a strange thing happened to the Republicans around the turn of the century. The initial party coalition of Western expansionists and business friendly Whigs had to come to philosophical blows at some point. It was not enough anymore that the party had won the war and put down slavery. These forces came together in the person of Theodore Roosevelt, a scion of New York money who had lived and worked as a (more or less) common man in the new West. This background helped him adapt the Republicans to the two great political challenges of the day--the social changes brought about by the greatly expanded industrial economy and America's new international role. To show just how much these new issues differed from the old, and how much change Roosevelt brought to the Republicans, he found it necessary to make a third party run in 1912 when his successor's administration backslid on what had come to be known as "Progressive" programs.
This "Bull Moose" run on the Progressive ticket split the Republicans right down the middle, guaranteeing the election of Wilson. This election marks one of the great sea changes in American politics. The Republicans, who as progressives had championed the "Little Man" in the form of the rugged--but middle class--individualist, had totally passed on the growing labor movement. They had also lost a lot of the the farm vote over the years to the Democrats, who built on the solid base of their Southern rural constituency. The rump of the Republican party returned to a business friendly, isolationist agenda. The Progressives, always a minority movement in Americam politics, gravitated to the Democrats, joining the urban and rural poor. The great Democratic coalition had solidified.
The Republicans regained power after the Great War and kept it until the Great Depression called into question their policies. The Democrats, in what could be described as almost a centennial celebration of Jacksonian Democracy, surged into power on promises of a better, fairer America. But this was a changed Democracy. While trumpeting the rights of the individual, the practical party program was one of government action on a national scale and of a scope that the most reactionary Whig would have shrunk from in horror. Furthermore, rather than attempting to kill big business, as Jackson would have had them do, they opted to regulate and coopt it. This would come back to haunt the Democrats in another generation, as their best and brightest jumped ship for a reinvigorated Republican party.
The Republicans, conservative by default, but unable to rest their program on a solid philosophical base, floundered through the 1930's and 40's, playing the loyal opposition through the Second World War and the into the beginnings of the Cold War. They managed to hold the legislative branch for a time, but it almost looked as if they would go the way of their 19th Century namesake. Then the Democrats' own excesses intervened.
The Democrat Truman made a good start on the Cold War, but his presence in office was entirely fortuitous. He had been included on the ticket to bolster support from the shrinking but still important philosophical conservative wing of the Democratic party. His boss's predicatable but (from the point of view of the Democratic elite) unexpected early demise put this most unDemocratic of Democrats in the Oval Office. He held on for a second term, but his own party's consituency was a natural attractor of Communist activism and infiltration. By the end of his second term it had become clear that Soviet agents were in the highest levels of the Democratic party, especially in the offices of the executive branch. Much hysteria surrounded this period, but a housecleaning was clearly in order.
It was at this time that the philosophical conservatives, one of them a labor leader and future president, started leaving the Democratic party. Their quite correct analysis of the problem was that they had not changed, but that the party had changed around them.
This period also saw the opening of the great civil rights struggle. Strange seeming to many today, just a half a century later, many of the great champions of the movement were initially Republican. The Democrats, hamstrung by their white rural Southern wing, were benignly disinterested at best, oftentimes hostile.
Then another great shift took place. With the exit of the philosophical conservatives, many of whom were allies of the "Dixiecrats", the urban wing of the party took hold and put forward Kennedy. He, like T. Roosevelt before him, embodied many of the contradictions of his party. He was a rich man who spoke for minorities and the poor, an American populist who also believed in strong international action. His running mate and eventual successor was also a man of contradiction--a Southern democrat who had supported both civil rights and the welfare state. The Kennedy-Johnson administration redefined the coalition from the white man's populist club back to its roots, adding a multi-racial demographic imperitive and re-embracing the New Deal as a roadmap.
During the same period, the Republicans stayed their anti-Communist course, gaining great strength from disaffected Democrats who finally gave the party a philosophical base. Remember our labor leader destined to be POTUS? Ronald Reagan finally began explaining to the public what Republican conservatism meant, besides being not Democratic.
And this brings us almost to today. The Democratic Party has evloved from the populist anti-business party of the rural American West, through the party of the slaveowning south, the party farm and labor, the party of progressivism and internationalism, the party of divided loyalty and increasing government control, the party against civil rights, to a domestically oriented, hypergovernment, all-inclusive coalition of whoever can be thrown a bone. The Republicans have been everything from isolationists to internationalists, progressives to conservatives, radicals to reactionaries, and now sits as the party philosophically of individualism and reduced government, but saddled with the biggest and quickest growin federal government ever, reluctantly internationalist in the wake of Democratic internationalism's continuing commitments. Finally, it is instructive to note that the Southern United States has embraced the Republicans, while the Northeast and West Coast have gone Democratic--massive shifts away from both parties' traditional power bases.
U.S. party realignment unlikely? It's about the only thing constant enough in American politics to be called a law.
Dirk Mothaar
Reformed SIGINTer
Posts: 2314
(2/5/02 7:34:37 pm )
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Re: Tony, that was very well done - one quibble though I think you ought to mention Barry Goldwater. I am not sure that Reagan could have done what he did had Goldwater not already changed the Republican Party. I think the work Goldwater did had to be done and Goldwater himself didn't do it, the next big Republican (Reagan) would have had to.
http://pub82.ezboard.com/bhistorypoliti ... fairs68862
- But viewing is only by registration these days, so I'm grabbing it with the appropriate references for those who might be interested in figuring out just how are Two Party System works. It's actually quite a malleable thing, as you have just read.
