Can someone explain in simple terms the 'party systems' of the US?

Factual Questions
1

Mods, sorry if this is in the wrong forum.

I’ve heard the term ‘first/second/third etc. party system’ to do with American politics, but it doesn’t seem to be terribly straightforward to me.

The first was Federalist/Democratic-Republican, the Second was the Democrats and the Whigs and so on, but what happened to make them change and can someone briefly explain what the ‘spectrum’ was? Left and right wing, and so on.

Also: is it just me, or did the Democrats start out as the American conservative party, and the Republicans as the radicals? If so, what happened to make them switch over? I know Teddy Roosevelt took a large number of radical with him in the 1910s, but what happened to them?

Thanks :slight_smile:

2

The Federalists fell apart because they opposed the War of 1812. The Whigs fell apart over the issue of slavery and expansion of slavery. There were strong pro and anti-slavery factions, and ultimately the party split, with the anti-slavery Whigs mostly joining the Republicans and the pro-slavery Whigs becoming Democrats.

3

Attempts to assign “wings” to American politics before the late Nineteenth Century are close to worthless. Was it left-wing or right-wing to favor the War of 1812, or the Bank of the United States, or the annexation of Texas? For that matter, was it left-wing or right-wing to oppose slavery? (Before you knee-jerk answer “left wing”, be aware that poor Irish immigrants were among the staunchest supporters of pro-slavery Democrats, and that wealthy, snobby New Englanders were among the first Republicans.) Force-fitting old quarrels into a modern template is best avoided.

4

Parties have always been divided along the lines of rural vs urban and farming vs manufacturing. Most of the debates in the 19th century not involving slavery had to do with tariffs which were the principal way the government raised money. The agricultural south wanted low tariffs and relatively free trade because cotton was in demand in Europe and they wanted to buy European goods as cheaply as possible. The more urban north was where the manufacturing took place and they wanted high tariffs to protect their market share from European manufactured goods. For the most part the Whigs were the high tariff party and the Democrats were the low tariff party. When the issue of the expansion of slavery heated up the Whig party was not able to keep both factions in the party and blew up. Most Whigs became Republicans which kept the high tariffs advocacy and added being anti-slavery.
After the Civil War the party’s region bases were solidified. The Republican party had some good years in the south during reconstruction, but the end of reconstruction meant that the GOP had its base in the North and the Democrats had their base in the south and the midwest was a swing district. The tariffs were still the biggest issue along with Free silver. Rural, agricultural districts thought that the money supply was too low and advocated the use of silver as a currency along with gold. Urban districts had more wealth and thus more to lose from the inflation that would have occured if bimetallism passed. The Republicans were the party of high tariffs and sound money and the Democrats were the party of low tariffs and weak money.
Progessivism affected both parties, TR was elected as a Republican progessive and Wilson as a Democrat progressive. It affected the Democrats party more because of WW1 which gave Wilson much more power than the average president. Thus when the Great Depression happened under a Republican, FDR was able to apply the war time progressivism to peacetime and to do a realignment. He was able to graft together ethnic urbanites, with the traditional southern base of the Democrat party. This alliance fell apart in the 1960’s over civil rights, and the Vietnam war. With the Civil right movement removing race as the most salient aspect of southern politics, the ethnic urbanites took over as the base of the Democrat party, moving it to the left. This alienated the suburban and rural electorate who took over the Republican party. Thus we still have an urban and a rural party just as we did in the 19th century they have switched affiliations so now the Democrat pary is the party of city dwellers and the Republican party is the party of non-city dwellers.

5

“Third party” refers to any party that isn’t Democrat or Republican. Those two parties have been the dominant parties for so long that all other parties are on the fringe of power. “third party” is not a successor to some previous first or second party.

6

Kunilou, I beleive the OP is referring to the history of the party system in the US, which is commonly divided into the “First party system, the second party system, the third party system” and so on. See this wiki entry, which states that there have been five distinct party systems in US history, with some speculating that we are currently seeing the development of a sixth system:

7

The U.S. has never officially been a “two party” system. It just turns out that usually two parties tend to dominate. Sometimes though those two parties don’t dominate, things get chaotic for a while, and you have different parties gaining power. So far, it has always settled back down to two major parties once the dust settles.

To add to Northern Piper’s post, the Federalists fell apart after the War of 1812. The Democratic-Republicans split over internal disagreements (slavery, trade tariffs, basically all of the stuff that set the groundwork for the U.S. Civil War) forming the Democratic party. The Whig party grew out of opposition to the Democrats, and as Northern Piper’s post said, these two parties dominated until the mid 1800s.

The Civil War shook things up again. Leading up to the Civil War, the Democratic party split into a northern and southern faction. In the 1860 election, the recently formed Republicans (led by Lincoln) won carrying 18 states. The Southern Democrats came in second, with 11 states. The Constitutional Union party carried 3 states and the northern Democrats only carried 1 (Illinois). And because Lincoln won, the Civil War was off and running (all of the things that factored into the Civil War are a few dozen threads worth of stuff on their own, way beyond the scope of this thread).

In the aftermath of the Civil War (the fourth party system in Northern Piper’s post) there was the Progressive movement, which died out around the end of the1890s. The Progressive party allied themselves with the Democrats, and pretty much fell apart after that. The Republicans and Democrats have dominated politics since then, though exactly what the parties have stood for has tended to drift a bit over time.

Personally, I’m not seeing a clear dividing line between what wiki is calling the fourth, fifth, and sixth party systems. There have been some rather dramatic social and political changes in the U.S. since then, but the Republican and Democratic part have continued to dominate the political landscape. As I recall, the only major challenge to the dominance of these two parties came in the election of 1992, when Ross Perot took an early lead in the election polls (his campaign later self-destructed and he ended up not carrying a single state). I suppose you could make the claim that smaller parties (Libertarians, Constitution Party, Green Party, etc) have been a bit more influential in elections in the past few decades, but I personally wouldn’t separate this into a different political era.

The earlier dividing lines (chaos following the War of 1812, chaos leading up to the Civil War, and the aftermath of the Civil War) all resulted in major political restructuring with different parties coming to the forefront and dominating. Since then, though, it’s just been the Democrats and Republicans.

8

Yes, but to be a Democrat in the North meant something different than being a Southern Democrat. The reasons for the former voting (D) are myriad, but for the majority, pro-slavery sentiment was very low on the list. The Democrats in places like NYC and Boston was much more for immigration, and was set up to be the default party for the recently arrived.

9

One thing that sort of confuses the issue is that during the period roughly from the end of Reconstruction through World War I or so, the party system existed almost independently of what we would see as the major political and ideological questions of the age. The real substance of late 19th-century party politics was virtually 100% concerned with influence peddling and the distribution of government spoils to your supporters. Even the “big issues” of the day like the tariff and bimetallism had only the flimsiest ideological basis and were fairly obvious attempts to enrich one group of people at the expense of another.

Consider for example the Compromise of 1877 where what broke the deadlock over a too-close-to-call presidential election was that the Republicans let the Democrats have the Postmaster General position (in addition to ending Reconstruction, which Hayes was probably going to do anyways). The Postmaster General post was important because it was the cabinet position that had the greatest ability to dole out plum government jobs all the way to the local level, in order to reward the lower level party members who could deliver big blocks of voters. Even though the Democrat Tilden probably did win the election (Hayes would have had to win all three disputed states to overcome his electoral deficit) control of the spoils was more important than actually having policy-making power.

There were big social and ideological issues during this time, but they were largely pursued outside of or parallel to the party system. The Populists and Progressives both had their own third parties, but found it impossible to compete with the power-mongering party juggernauts and so formed factions within both parties. The Populists tended slightly more Democratic because both tended to be slightly more rural, but the Progressives were all over the place. The parties themselves initially didn’t particularly care about Progressive agendas and merely saw Progressive politicians and rhetoric as another path to getting votes and thus spoils. Eventually the Progressives turned to reforming the party system itself and introduced things like primary elections and civil service reform, but it wasn’t really until the election of 1912 that the Democrats emerged as the more-Progressive aligned party and the Republicans as the party that opposed them and there was at last a real ideological difference between the parties again. Even then, the process wasn’t complete until FDR’s election or even arguably the 1964 election where the “solid south” finally broke with the Democrats and we ended up with roughly the political map we have today.

10

**Can someone explain in simple terms the ‘party systems’ of the US? **

I don’t think it’s that easy to explain using complicated terms, so I’ll say no.

11

Basically, the political structure we have is such that anything but two dominant parties, plus a smattering of insignificant third parties, is an unstable situation. Occasionally, you get some major event that’s big enough to knock us out of one equilibrium, and then after a cycle or two we settle into some new equilibrium of two new major parties and a new smattering of minor thirds.