Charles Lane muses over whether we’re reaching one of those highly fragmented moments in American history:
If anything’s constant in American political life, it’s the stable two-party system, jostled occasionally by third-party presidential challengers such as Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996 or Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.
Yet, more rarely, at times of extreme political flux, this society has broken up into four parties.
In 1948, the first post-World War II presidential election year, Republicans ran against three Democratic party factions: Harry Truman’s pro-New Deal, anti-Communist majority wing (which won in November), a Southern-based segregationist offshoot led by Strom Thurmond, and pro-Communist bolters headed by former vice president Henry Wallace. The latter two polled more than 1.1 million votes each out of 48 million cast; Thurmond got 39 electoral votes.
In 1860, as the country and its political parties came apart over slavery, the Republicans, northern and southern Democrats and a residual Whig body called the Constitutional Unionists fielded candidates for the White House. All four captured electoral votes; Abe Lincoln’s victory gave way to the Civil War.
If he’s trying to cheer me up, he’s not succeeding. Within a year or so of each of those “four party moments” we were at war.
Did you catch the article about NATO and Russia actively preparing for war with each other? Some think tank in Europe was behind that one, and though they didn’t put it this way, mostly they were concerned that the two sides would manage to stumble into war with each other.
Ain’t these grand old times?