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For most of US history the parties were ideologically and geographically mixed and mostly competing over political patronage rather than ideology with one party

For most of US history the parties were ideologically and geographically mixed and mostly competing over political patronage rather than ideology with one party typically having a northern conservative and southern liberal wing and the other party the opposite. This continued until the progressive era with the brief exception of the 1854-1860 period. With various progressive reforms around the turn of the 20th century pork became much less of an issue but the parties still remained very ideologically mixed and that only started to change in the 1970s with Nixon's "Southern Strategy" and the rise of open primaries. Since then Republicans and Democrats have become more and more ideologically distinct with the most conservative Democrat being more liberal than the most liberal Republican, a situation the US has never experienced before for any length of time. Given that the US is a big outlier in how long we've managed to keep a presidential system (as opposed to parliamentary) without a breakdown of democracy this is a somewhat worrying development. EDIT: I use "liberal" and "conservative" above but Back In the Day it was the party that thought that all white people were equal versus the party that thought that all protestants were equal most of the time so that gets a little blurred.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> For most of US history the parties were ideologically and geographically mixed This is simply false. For most of US history there was, with brief interruptions, both a stark ideological divide on the salient political issues between the two parties (even as the identities of one of the two major parties changed a couple times) and a sharp geographical divide between where the parties were dominant (both on the level of states and on the level of substate geography.) The big (in terms of a continuous block of time) exception is the long period of realignment between the 1930s and about the 1990s when the New Deal and then, before the effects of that had fully settled out, Johnson's support for Civil Rights shook up both the ideological and the geographic bases of the parties. (There are several shorter periods of realignment, especially around the transitions between the identities of the second major party, and even a short period where there was effectively only one major party, but all of those were shorter in aggregate than the 20th Century realignment.) > with one party typically having a northern conservative and southern liberal wing and the other party the opposite That's really not true, at least in terms of the salient issues of the day, outside of the long 20th century realignment (an aberration that lots of people have thought of as normal because it spanned much of their personal experience)—while parties did have distinct regional and even state characters, the local parties would be ideologically separated by the same axis as the national parties, but offset by local concerns and also divided over issues of local salience that lacked national salience—and it was particularly common for only one of the major parties to be remotely viable in most states (and sometimes, where that locally dominant party had viable competition, it wasn't from the other major national party.)

dragonwriter 4y ago

> For most of US history the parties were ideologically and geographically mixed This is simply false. For most of US history there was, with brief interruptions, both a stark ideological divide on the salient political issues between the two parties (even as the identities of one of the two major parties changed a couple times) and a sharp geographical divide between where the parties were dominant (both on the level of states and on the level of substate geography.) The big (in terms of a continuous block of time) exception is the long period of realignment between the 1930s and about the 1990s when the New Deal and then, before the effects of that had fully settled out, Johnson's support for Civil Rights shook up both the ideological and the geographic bases of the parties. (There are several shorter periods of realignment, especially around the transitions between the identities of the second major party, and even a short period where there was effectively only one major party, but all of those were shorter in aggregate than the 20th Century realignment.) > with one party typically having a northern conservative and southern liberal wing and the other party the opposite That's really not true, at least in terms of the salient issues of the day, outside of the long 20th century realignment (an aberration that lots of people have thought of as normal because it spanned much of their personal experience)—while parties did have distinct regional and even state characters, the local parties would be ideologically separated by the same axis as the national parties, but offset by local concerns and also divided over issues of local salience that lacked national salience—and it was particularly common for only one of the major parties to be remotely viable in most states (and sometimes, where that locally dominant party had viable competition, it wasn't from the other major national party.)