REFLECTIONS ON THE CENTRALITY OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR ON AMERICAN CHARACTER

Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (New York & Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1980) ("History teaches few easy lessons, but it should assist us to think creatively about ourselves. By looking again at the age of the Civil War, we may gain insights into the choices facing our own time and enable history to become, in place of a collection of assorted facts, once again a mode of collective self-evaluation." Id. at 12. From "Politics, Ideology, and the Origins of the American Civil War": "It has been an axiom of political science that political parties help to hold together diverse, heterogeneous societies like our own. Since most major parties in American history have tried, in Seymour Lipset's phrase, to 'appear as plausible representatives of the whole society,' they have been broad coalitions cutting across lines of class, race, religion, and section. And though party competition requires that there be differences between the major parties, these differences usually have not been along sharp ideological lines. In fact, the very diversity of American society has inhibited the formation of a ideological parties, for such parties assume the existence of a single line of social division along which a majority of the electorate can be mobilized. In a large, heterogeneous society, such a line rarely exists. There are, therefore, strong reasons why, in a two-party system, a major party--or a party aspiring to become 'major'--will eschew ideology, for the statement of a coherent ideology will set limits to the groups in the electorate to which the party can hope to appeal. Under most circumstances, in other words, the party's role as a carrier of a coherent ideology will conflict with its role as an electoral machine bent on wining the largest possible number of votes. Id. at 34, 34-35. This "axiom" broke down in the period leading up to the Civil War, and the existing and emerging parties were increasingly defined by various competing ideologies. Whether these ideologies were coherent is a separate question. Query: Over the last fifty years, are the two major parties, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, defined by competing ideologies, that is to say, by a failure to eschew ideology? If so, are we on the brink of (or in the midst of) another American civil war? In short, are the two major parties each appealing to two quite different Americas, rather than both attempting to appeal--by developing "broad coalitions cutting across lines of class, race, religion, and section"--to one large, heterogeneous society as a whole?).