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talkpoliticsThe United States, for all that we think of the two-party system as a continuous, stable pattern, has had a track record at least in its earlier years of seeing entire party systems collapse without trace.
The only one of the two Big Parties to last in a straight line pattern into the 21st Century is the Democrats, which originated as the Jeffersonian-era Democratic-Republicans, who ultimately dropped the second term from their name. The Dems, however, originated as the party of the countryside and the party of immigrants from the first. The Dems were always more willing to open their arms for more radical causes, as Andrew Jackson illustrated quite well when he created the Jacksonian Democracy with its first consolidated universal suffrage for all white people regardless of class in the 1830s, when this was actually unique in the world at the time.
The Dems, however, never had a consistently organized opposition until the rise of the Republicans. Their first opposition was the Federalists, who backed many of the same causes and people as the later Republicans, namely the establishment of a centralized Union with a consolidated financial system and backing commercial/industrial special interests instead of agriculture. The Federalists collapsed due to opposing the War of 1812, and were succeeded by the Whigs, who again backed commerce and industry instead of agriculture/slavery and immigrants. The Whigs lasted into the mid-19th Century, when they disintegrated over the slavery question. What made this crucial was that the disintegration was timed with the rise of both the North and the industrial sector of the US economy, which enabled the rise of the next opposition: the GOP.
The Republicans first appeared in Wisconsin, and consolidated the Northern Whigs with the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings, a combination that means GOP anti-immigrant rhetoric was *always* a component of the Republican Party, not an aberration. The GOP managed to exploit the disintegration of the previous party system to run as its first candidate one John C. Fremont, in its second try it actually elected its first President, Abraham Lincoln, and the Southern Democrats decided to skeedaddle because having ensured Lincoln was not on the ballot and refused to vote for him to deliberately ensure his election, he was elected, and so they discovered that an elected Lincoln was a threat.
So in the first half of the 19th Century the USA had three Party systems that rose and fell with regularity.
The reasons for this are simple: the United States electoral system of the time had both a smaller electorate and the US economic and political systems were in a strong state of flux. Since that time the only Third Party to really go anywhere was in the 1912 election and running purely on Teddy Roosevelt's charisma. Third Parties in the United States, under a flexible system together with the electoral college do not really have a chance to go anywhere.
Does this mean that votes for them are wasted? Technically no, it's a sign that people really do like other alternatives, though just because it's other doesn't mean it's any better. See, Constitution Party and most of the Libertarian Party candidates. However the problem that people who want those other alternatives to work have is simple: the US system was very efficiently designed to work against any kind of democratic choice on the part of the masses, and it was designed this way because its Founders loathed the concept of giving the People the right to decide for themselves.
While as the GOP showed it is possible for a Third Party to take over from the other two, this in turn does not work any more efficiently than elsewhere. However I'd note while I'm at it that the idea that parliamentary regimes avoid the two-party basis is not entirely truthful. Parliamentary regimes in Europe tend to have either Christian Democracy or a more conservative movement as the most powerful single force in the parliament and to regularly send these parties to Parliament with the highest slates of any single movement. When these systems deadlock, as in Belgium, or they have elections that are extremely close between the big parties, what happens is not any great spirit of amity or good will that is magically more extant in Europe than in the United States, but rather the little parties that are extremely fringe become the subject of suitors and decide things in themselves. This is not because the system favors little parties, it's because of the inability of the bigger ones to work together.
The grass is never greener on the other side, and the concept of building a representative assembly accountable to the people as oppose to special interests is a process that is really never-ending. However I do think that the idea that adopting a parliamentary system leads to greater accountability on the part of the parties to the people is itself a conceit of European devising that has been invalidated by phenomena such as Belgium's marathon without a government, and the last British election where nobody won because everybody hated everyone running.
Ultimately if societies want to fix their problems in this sense of accountability, they have to work on their own problems instead of mindlessly copying the systems of other societies and expecting difference to magically hand-wave all of the prior issues. Instead the new system will rapidly come complete with its own problems, and then the utopians wake up to the reality that the pigs that overthrew the farmer are now just as human as the farmer was.
The only one of the two Big Parties to last in a straight line pattern into the 21st Century is the Democrats, which originated as the Jeffersonian-era Democratic-Republicans, who ultimately dropped the second term from their name. The Dems, however, originated as the party of the countryside and the party of immigrants from the first. The Dems were always more willing to open their arms for more radical causes, as Andrew Jackson illustrated quite well when he created the Jacksonian Democracy with its first consolidated universal suffrage for all white people regardless of class in the 1830s, when this was actually unique in the world at the time.
The Dems, however, never had a consistently organized opposition until the rise of the Republicans. Their first opposition was the Federalists, who backed many of the same causes and people as the later Republicans, namely the establishment of a centralized Union with a consolidated financial system and backing commercial/industrial special interests instead of agriculture. The Federalists collapsed due to opposing the War of 1812, and were succeeded by the Whigs, who again backed commerce and industry instead of agriculture/slavery and immigrants. The Whigs lasted into the mid-19th Century, when they disintegrated over the slavery question. What made this crucial was that the disintegration was timed with the rise of both the North and the industrial sector of the US economy, which enabled the rise of the next opposition: the GOP.
The Republicans first appeared in Wisconsin, and consolidated the Northern Whigs with the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings, a combination that means GOP anti-immigrant rhetoric was *always* a component of the Republican Party, not an aberration. The GOP managed to exploit the disintegration of the previous party system to run as its first candidate one John C. Fremont, in its second try it actually elected its first President, Abraham Lincoln, and the Southern Democrats decided to skeedaddle because having ensured Lincoln was not on the ballot and refused to vote for him to deliberately ensure his election, he was elected, and so they discovered that an elected Lincoln was a threat.
So in the first half of the 19th Century the USA had three Party systems that rose and fell with regularity.
The reasons for this are simple: the United States electoral system of the time had both a smaller electorate and the US economic and political systems were in a strong state of flux. Since that time the only Third Party to really go anywhere was in the 1912 election and running purely on Teddy Roosevelt's charisma. Third Parties in the United States, under a flexible system together with the electoral college do not really have a chance to go anywhere.
Does this mean that votes for them are wasted? Technically no, it's a sign that people really do like other alternatives, though just because it's other doesn't mean it's any better. See, Constitution Party and most of the Libertarian Party candidates. However the problem that people who want those other alternatives to work have is simple: the US system was very efficiently designed to work against any kind of democratic choice on the part of the masses, and it was designed this way because its Founders loathed the concept of giving the People the right to decide for themselves.
While as the GOP showed it is possible for a Third Party to take over from the other two, this in turn does not work any more efficiently than elsewhere. However I'd note while I'm at it that the idea that parliamentary regimes avoid the two-party basis is not entirely truthful. Parliamentary regimes in Europe tend to have either Christian Democracy or a more conservative movement as the most powerful single force in the parliament and to regularly send these parties to Parliament with the highest slates of any single movement. When these systems deadlock, as in Belgium, or they have elections that are extremely close between the big parties, what happens is not any great spirit of amity or good will that is magically more extant in Europe than in the United States, but rather the little parties that are extremely fringe become the subject of suitors and decide things in themselves. This is not because the system favors little parties, it's because of the inability of the bigger ones to work together.
The grass is never greener on the other side, and the concept of building a representative assembly accountable to the people as oppose to special interests is a process that is really never-ending. However I do think that the idea that adopting a parliamentary system leads to greater accountability on the part of the parties to the people is itself a conceit of European devising that has been invalidated by phenomena such as Belgium's marathon without a government, and the last British election where nobody won because everybody hated everyone running.
Ultimately if societies want to fix their problems in this sense of accountability, they have to work on their own problems instead of mindlessly copying the systems of other societies and expecting difference to magically hand-wave all of the prior issues. Instead the new system will rapidly come complete with its own problems, and then the utopians wake up to the reality that the pigs that overthrew the farmer are now just as human as the farmer was.
