Ideological trends within the main parties

                Both main parties have undergone something of a transformation in terms of ideology. Beginning with the Democrats, the party appealed to a number of disparate groups under the New Deal. African-Americans, Latinos, Jews, white liberals and white southern conservatives all gained in some way from the New Deal. The collapse of the New Deal hurt the party badly, to the extent that they won just one presidential election from 1968 to 1992. During the 1980s, the party engaged in a prolonged period of soul-searching that led to a change of emphasis under new Democrats such as Gore and Clinton. They offered a clear prescription to the problems afflicting the party, and identified a practical path towards power. Whilst this approach could never win over all sections of the party, it certainly provided electoral success. It must however be noted that Clinton was helped considerably by the spoiler effect attributed to Ross Perot.

                Perhaps Clinton’s lasting achievement was that he managed to hold together what Jesse Jackson once called the rainbow coalition and secure a second-term; the first Democrat to do so since FDR. Amongst the electorate, Clinton showed that the Democrats could govern effectively and rise above internal divisions. However, splits within the party would resurface during the 2004 campaign; when Howard Dean caught the spirit of the time with his incendiary claim to represent “the Democratic wing of the Democratic party.” Dean captured the sense of disappointment shared by those on the left of the party had felt under the Clinton/Gore years.

By 2008, the various ideological elements of the party were once again on full show. Obama however has managed to skillfully avoid the pitfalls presented by ideological conflict within the party by pleasing both new Democrats and liberal Democrats. Like Clinton, Obama intuitively understands that a political party will usually hold together and present a united front when it either has power or has the prospect of gaining power. In opposition, ideological tensions can become more visceral as the various groups seek to direct the party in their preferred direction. On this point, the party is barely recognizable from the one cast into the electoral wilderness during the late-1960s.

                The ideological trend within the Republican Party is easier to identify, as the party has clearly shifted to the right since the 1970s. Under the Nixon presidency, social conservatives became disenchanted by the spread of a permissive society, the failure of Nixon’s war on drugs and by a number of liberal judgments reached by the Supreme Court. For their part, fiscal conservatives were disappointed at the Keynesianism adopted by the Nixon administration. As such, conservatives within the party sought to reassert their influence, and by the start of the 1980s; they had found their heroic cowboy. Ronald Reagan's administration was unmistakably conservative on a wide variety of issues, although as with any administration some compromise was inevitable.

                By the early-1990s, there was growing unrest amongst social conservatives at the patrician policies of Bush senior and a failure to tackle a variety of social issues such as teenage pregnancy, welfare dependency, gang violence and so on. Social conservatives sought to place religion at the center of the GOP’s strategy, and over time they succeeded in moving the party towards the right. Although more of a pragmatist than sometimes portrayed by his opponents, George W. Bush was plainly a social conservative and one who thought religion offered a righteous path towards strengthening American families and our sense of individual responsibility. However, he disappointed fiscal conservatives due to an increase in government spending. 

                In the post-Bush era, the Tea Party has sought to move the GOP still further to the right on economic matters. As a measure of how much the party has changed, it is worth noting that Richard Nixon would no longer be a mainstream figure within the modern Republican Party; such has been the shift in the party towards the right. Policies that were very much at the margins of the GOP during the Nixon era (such as privatization of social security, staunch opposition to abortion, de-regulation and opposition to federal funding for stem-cell research) are now very much part of the Republican mainstream.