Unit 3 - Political Parties - MID

Us Political Parties ~ An Introductory Overview

Two empty bottles with different labels?

On 28^th April 2009, Senator Arien Spectre of Pennsylvania announced that he was leaving the Republican Party and joining the Democratic Party because ‘the Republican Party has moved too far to the right’.

Many in the party he had just deserted were not sorry to see him go. A leading conservative in the Republican Party, Newt Gingrich, argued that a welcome consequence of fewer moderates in the party would be to ‘make clearer the profound difference between the democratic Party and big government, big bureaucracy, high taxes and big unions and the Republican Party of low taxes, less bureaucracy and small business, with its emphasis on the work ethic, civil society and local control back home’.

In1973, just thirty-six years earlier, David Broder won the most prestigious literary prize in the USA for his book The Party’s Over, in which he argued that political parties in America had become such broad coalitions, with party leaders having such little control over their supporters, that they had little ideological identity and were becoming almost irrelevant in US politics.

A key aspect of study, when studying US political parties (especially the two main parties), is for you to understand the extent to which they do provide different alternatives for US voter (as Gingrich claims), or whether they continue to have vague ideological identities as Broder claimed in the 1970s.