The Emergence of Political Parties in the US

Hi there. I'm Mark McLay.

I'm a lecturer in American history at the University of Glasgow.

And today we're gonna be talking about the U.

S party system in the United States, the Founding Fathers,

which is the name given to the group of men who created the U.

S. Constitution in the late 17 hundreds.

The Founding Fathers are widely revered across American society for creating

a democracy that is largely flourished for nearly 250 years.

And while the Constitution they created was most definitely flawed,

for instance is tolerated even supported the existence of slavery,

there was a different failing that the Constitution had that

would have upset the founding fathers themselves even more.

Many of them

abhorred political parties.

They believe political parties encourage corruption

and that they would divide the young country against itself, leading to democracy.

That wouldn't flourish into the to the

country that the United States has since become

almost immediately this hope that the country would have could do

without these nefarious groupings that we know as political parties.

Almost immediately, that hope was dashed within a few years.

The federalists and the Democratic Republicans as the first two political

parties were called had formed each already screaming at each other,

burning each other in effigy

and had even formed their own newspapers,

which were already spreading sort of nonsense about the other side.

And while the names of the parties would change in the years since,

the United States has,

throughout most of its history had a two party system with

two opposing camps locked in fierce battle against one another.

In the contemporary United States, those two parties of the Democratic Party

and the Republican Party

and their loathing of one another is perhaps

the defining feature of American political life.

Indeed, many voters

currently site dislike of the other party as their main motivation

for voting rather than feelings of fondness towards their own.

So a typical Democrat might turn out to vote for a Democrat,

even though with the main motivation being that they just don't

want the Republican to get in office and vice versa.

I'm really kind of think about that.

How healthy is that for a democracy when voters

are driven not to support their own agenda,

but just to stop another one?

And the answer is that it's not healthy and

we'll see how sustainable it is going forward.

The United States is currently in the grip of what we call partisan polarisation,

whereby it's too political parties.

And indeed,

the voters who support those parties have moved further and further apart

to the point where each side questions not just the ideas,

the policies of the other party.

But they question the values.

You know,

a Republican might look at a Democrat and think that they're bad

person purely because they've of the Democratic Party and vice versa.

And such as the fierceness of this contest,

that majority of Republican officials and voters refused to accept that the 2020 U.

S presidential election had been legitimately won by the Democratic candidate.

Now President Joe Biden.

Believing this falsehood, many Republican voters egg,

egged on by the defeated Republican candidate Donald Trump, rioted in the U.

S. Capitol stormed into the U. S.

Congress leading too much violence and eventually for death.

Thus, it makes a timely moment for us to discuss the U. S.

Party system and what got us to this place now and so in today's lecture, um,

I'm going to take you through the sort of history and the current makeup of

both the Democratic and Republican parties will

then talk about the voters thinking about how

different characteristics lead to different

people voting for different parties.

And then, finally, it will touch on the U. S. Congress,

which is often overlooked in American politics as people tend

to focus on the bright lights of the presidency.

The sort of key point that I want you to take away

from this lecture is that American political parties are shifting coalitions.

They're not static. You have your various group.

As you'll see,

the Democratic parties and Republican parties that formed in

the 18 hundreds are unrecognisable from the modern incarnations

as voters change preferences throughout as the years and decades go by.

And just to give you an example of this

in 2016, when Donald Trump ran as the Republican candidate,

he brought in a whole new group of white,

often working class voters who had either previously voted for.

The Democrats are just not voted at all,

and in the process of bringing them into the Republican coalition,

a lot of middle class voters who were put off by the

sort of anti immigrant rhetoric of Trump and some of his.

Now his new supporters fled to the Democratic Party,

thus changing that parties composition.

So that's the sort of key takeaway. These are fluid coalitions.

If I was giving this lecture in 2030 years,

I would likely be describing different parties than I will now.