AMERICAN PARTY POLITICS

American Party Politics

American Party Politics

The present Congress-the 111th-is the most ideologically polarized in modern annals. In both the dwelling and the council, the most conservative Democrat is more liberal than is the most liberal Republican. If one characterizes the congressional “center” as the overlap between the two parties, the center has disappeared.

The American Party System

Judged by parliamentary standards, the American party system is bound to appear defective. But despite the undeniable strengths of parliamentary systems, that's not the right metric. The real question is how well our parties function in a system of horizontal and vertical dispersion of power. The challenge is to develop standards of systemic health that don't simply encode one's own political preferences.

In retrospect, it's clear that the famous mid-century report of the Committee on Political Parties of the APSA, Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System,1 reflected not just the professional judgments of political scientists, let alone the profession's long-standing admiration for parliamentary government, but also the pent-up frustrations of progressive New Dealers. regardless of his full of energy efforts, FDR had not succeeded in welding popular factions into a solidly liberal party. On the opposing, after the early signal of progressive Kolb's model, the alliance between northern urban and southern country Democrats had yielded arithmetic majorities without ideological or programmatic coherence. And when liberals endeavored to push ahead, cautious Democrats often defected and made widespread origin with Republicans. Between 1938 and 1950, as Leon Epstein points out, liberals had had little achievement enacting their agenda. By the time the APSA report was made a draft, liberal Democrats had adopted the widely-held assumption that they could “mobilize an electoral majority, mainly in the northern states, for a party pledged to a liberal program.” Numerous thoughtful Republicans shared this assumption. But for them, it was a source of worry rather than hope. In a lecture at Princeton that makes for extraordinary reading in lightweight of what was to arrive, Thomas Dewey criticized conservative theorists who liked to “drive all moderates and liberals out of the Republican Party and then have the remainder connect forces with the cautious groups of the South. Then they would have everything precisely organised, indeed. The popular Party would be the liberal-to-radical party. The Republican Party would be the conservative-to-reactionary party. The outcomes would be precisely arranged, too. The Republicans would lose every election and the Democrats would win every election.” 3The 1964 election seemed to bear out Dewey's gloomy prophecy. But he could hardly have anticipated the liberal crack-up that came soon thereafter, let alone the changing racial politics that drove so many southerners into the arms of the Republican Party. By 1980 it was no longer the case that an ideologically conservative party was bound to lose. neither has it been ever since.

In the fall of 2000, the APSA convened a panel of distinguished political scientists to assess the 1950 report. They found that the party system had evolved in the direction the report had ...