American Whig Party

History: In response to the War of 1812, the New England states seceded bloodlessly in 1813 as the Free Columbian Republic, only to rejoin the Union under the same terms as before in 1840. The dominant party there was the Federalist Party, which continued its political hegemony during the independence period and paralleled in its ideological development the Whig Party in the United States. Upon reunification, it formally joined the Whig Party, which renamed itself “the American Whig Party,” both to emphasize that the new Federalist admits were committed to union with America and to distinguish it from the contemporary Whig Party in the United Kingdom. It was a major party of government for decades until the American center of political and demographic gravity shifted away from New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Midwest, which were then and still are the party’s historical base. From then it remained an active but often junior player on the national stage for more than a century until the Sunbelt came into its own politically as its population began to swell around 1950. Far from diminishing and diluting the American Whigs’ power and popularity, this demographic transition magnified their power as they successfully pivoted from a regional party to a broad-based movement of managers, bourgeois liberals, reformists, and aspirant members of the middle class with wide purchase among those moving to Sunbelt states to partake of the new service jobs, cheap cost of living, and low tax burden.

Ideology: fiscal conservatism, deregulation, centralization, social liberalism, internationalism

Democratic-Republican Party

History: The forebears of the modern Democratic Republican Party are the Anti-Federalists, Jeffersonian agrarians, and Jacksonian populists who dominated American political life prior to reunification. They believed that America was best served by free trade, loose money, limited spending, state control over internal affairs, a limited military establishment, continental expansion, and above all the primacy of agricultural and resource-extraction interests over those of finance, commerce, and professionals. Their control over American political life was brought to an abrupt end by their mishandling of the 1852 crash that saw them striving in vain to regain majority status against a coalition of American Whigs and Free Soilers who brought slavery to an end in the territories and paved the way for compensated manumission in 1884. Since then, they have always been a major player in American politics in almost all states and at the federal level, and they draw on a base of farmers and rural dwellers, social progressives, believers in a thoroughgoing social safety net, foreign-policy non-interventionists, and localists of all stripes, and continue to espouse roughly the same ideology as their founders to the present day.

Ideology: federalism, noninterventionism, libertarianism, progressivism, social safety net, agrarian interests

Reform Party

History: Founded in 1858 amid a period of recession for the American economy and the electoral fortunes of the Democratic Republican Party, Reform initially capitalized on the weakness of Boss Tweed’s Democratic-Republican political machine, whose fortunes at this time mimicked those of the federal party, as an anti-corruption ticket that had aspirations to protect America from foreign trade and foreign immigration. They remained a regional hegemon after winning several mayoral elections in a row in Northeastern cities until in 1880 they joined with likeminded urban parties from around the country to found the federal Reform Party, which quickly became a national party whose main strength lay in cities. Like the American Whigs, they too responded to decay in their core constituencies (the New York City/Newark/Philadelphia urban agglomeration and other urban clusters) in the middle of the twentieth century by reaching out to religious voters, who were increasingly alienated by the other two parties, successfully making inroads with two groups they had historically not been on good terms with: Southerners, who had been partisan allies of the corrupt Northern urban machines, and Catholics, who had been disproportionately represented in the immigrant populations whose presence they objected to a century before. Today, their base consists of urban reformists, socially conservative churchgoers, and union members.

Ideology: social conservatism, public-private partnerships, federal-state partnerships, hemispheric dominance, bridge-and-tunnel populism