Michael Kazin had this information in The Wall Street Journal. Here is an excerpt:
The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780-1840
By Richard Hofstadter (1969):
1. Richard Hofstadter was one of America’s wisest, most eloquent historians. In this book—the last to be published in his lifetime—he made sense of a transformation central to our political life: the one that saw a nation founded by leaders who despised “factions” evolve, 50 years later, into a republic in which Democrats and Whigs wooed voters with florid promises, vicious and witty attacks on their rivals, torchlight parades, and lots of free food and drink. A booming population made the demand to enfranchise all white men hard to resist. As the voters, rather than state legislatures, came to decide presidential contests, it was left to the parties to construct the machinery of mass persuasion and mobilization if they hoped to triumph. Hofstadter gives a masterly account of the early republic’s fierce debates about the virtues and flaws of partisanship. But he firmly sided with those who argued that democracy could not work without the institutions that competed for the public’s favor. The United States, he reflected, “gave the world its first example of the peaceful transit of a government from the control of one popular party to another.” He would be appalled to learn that there would come a time when many supporters of a president defeated at the polls sympathized with an invasion of the Capitol bent on violating that tradition.
Continue reading here to find out the others. Also, Democracy Chronicles has put together an in-depth review of the majority of America’s third parties in a handy overview where all the country’s political parties, other than the two big parties, are separated into categories and contextualized. Links to their websites and party platforms are included too. See the overview of all American political parties at Democracy Chronicles Third Party Central.
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