It's My Party Read Online Free PDF

marginal. In the words of the historian Richard Hofstadter, “Third parties are like bees:
     Once they have stung, they die.”
    The second institution that endows the number two with special magic is the presidency. The founders gave us a system of government
     in which a single prize, the office of chief executive, dwarfs the rest.
    In theory at least, many local two-party systems instead of one national two-party system might have emerged during the early
     days of the republic. Virginia might have had two parties, Massachusetts two completely different parties, Rhode Island two
     parties of its own, and so on. A few local parties did originally exist. Yet voting patterns converged on the Federalist and
     Democratic-Republican parties so quickly that by 1796, when the Federalist John Adams defeated the Democratic-Republican Thomas
     Jefferson for president, the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans had already become the dominant parties throughout the
     country. Why?
    Lying outside the national two-party system, local parties faced a choice. Either they signed on with one of the two major
     parties and got the chance to participate in presidential politics, which was the big game even then, or they remained independent
     and had to observe presidential politics as outsiders. They signed on.
    * * *
    Fragmented power, plurality elections, and presidential politics. Look in the history books, and those are the explanations
     for the two-party system that you’ll find. Yet as I worked in the library, another explanation kept coming to me: human nature
     itself. I found my mind occupied by the Blues and the Greens.
    The Blues and the Greens were political parties in ancient Constantinople. As far as historians can tell they first took shape
     as groups of sports fans—two of the colors under which chariot teams raced at the Hippodrome were blue and green. The Blues
     and the Greens each marched through the city, staging demonstrations. They rioted in each other’s neighborhoods. They defended
     their own sections of the city walls when Constantinople fell under attack. From time to time one party or the other even
     proclaimed an emperor.
    What did the two parties stand for? Did the Blues want lower taxes? Did the Greens support more social spending? Did one accuse
     the other of being soft on the Turks? Who knows? All we can see as we peer back across the centuries is the two parties themselves.
     And the Blues and the Greens represent just one of dozens of instances throughout history in which people have grouped themselves
     into two opposing parties. The Blues and the Greens in ancient Constantinople. The Guelphs and the Ghibellines in medieval
     Italy. The Roundheads and the Cavaliers in seventeenth-century England. The Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans in
     eighteenth-century America.
    Partisanship. The very word suggests shallow-mindedness. Yet partisanship runs deep.
VERSIONS ONE AND TWO
    Journal entry:
    Reading about the founding of the Republican Party today, I thought back to the plaster bust of Abraham Lincoln that my father
     kept out in the garage. The bust was too ugly to go inside the house, but my father was too much of a Republican to throw
     it out
.
    The GOP, the party of Lincoln. And then again, I’ve learned, it isn’t
.
    Ignorant as I was, I was prepared to learn a lot when I looked into the GOP’s origins. I was unprepared to learn that there
     are two completely different versions of the way the GOP came into existence.
    Version One: In 1854 the Republican Party emerged
ex nihilo
, out of nothing, a popular movement of ordinary Americans in the upper Midwest, far from the centers of wealth, power, or
     sophistication. The GOP amounted to a spontaneous moral crusade with a single, noble purpose: cleansing the nation of slavery.
    Version Two: When it appeared in 1854, the Republican Party drew much of its support from the same regions, economic classes,
     and ethnic and religious