Abstract
This chapter provides a rich, historical study of the evolution of the political party system in the United States over time and the rise of centripetal political forces that threatened the “Cold War consensus” model of bipartisan foreign policy development. Building on these historical divisions, it charts the evolution of the most important factions in U.S. politics today: the Tea Party and Freedom Caucus, and the Progressive Caucus. This chapter develops critical foundations for the case studies that follow over the next four chapters.
The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society.
—James Madison (1787)
The internal divisions within our political parties are deeper than they’ve been in at least two decades. The Democrats are divided between the Hillary types and the Bernie camp. The Republicans between Trump and Never Trump. This is beginning to harken back to the old days, when our parties were amalgams of factions that were sometimes harshly at odds with each other.
—Caldwell et al. (2018)
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Notes
- 1.
At the party’s 1840 national convention, the name was formally changed to the Democratic Party.
- 2.
McGovern won votes in the Electoral College from only one state, Massachusetts.
- 3.
Notably, one reason for the dearth of scholarship in this subject area this might be professional: The study of factions effectively straddles the division between the subfields of American/Comparative Politics and International Relations/Foreign Policy Analysis.
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Homan, P., Lantis, J.S. (2020). “We the People?” Historical Foundations of Factionalism. In: The Battle for U.S. Foreign Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30171-2_3
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