For organizers, it can allow for better strategic decision-making, yielding new insights into influencing other groups, building coalitions - and winning real power. This way of looking at political factions is more than an interesting thought experiment. Instead of simply classifying voters as Democrats or Republicans and treating the identity of these parties as static, we can examine the shifting factions that have contentiously vied for control within each party. politics might align if we were in, say, Germany, Spain or New Zealand.
But it can still be valuable to examine how the voting blocs that exist in U.S. Whether we like it or not, America’s established two-party order shows little sign of being replaced in the near future. Since Burns’s time, a plethora of columnists and commentators have followed in the historian’s footsteps, dividing the electorate into rival blocs and asking the provocative question: What if America did not have two political parties, but three? Or four? Or six? What if this were not a hypothetical scenario, but rather a reflection of our current reality? In creating such a classification, Packer stands in a crowded field. For example, in 2021, author and journalist George Packer published a book arguing that the nation’s politics are not driven by division between two groups - liberals and conservatives - but rather by conflict between four tribes: a libertarian “Free America,” a nationalistic “Real America,” a technocratic “Smart America,” and a progressive-minded “Just America.” But his approach of surveying American politics by dividing it up into factions more nuanced than “Democrat” and “Republican” has been much more resilient. Today, the specific division that Burns highlighted has been largely forgotten by history. In Burns’s formulation, each of the major parties was split into two branches - a “congressional wing” and a “presidential wing” - and there could be significant tensions between the two. America did not have two political parties, he argued, but four. Ever since the Civil War era, when the election of Abraham Lincoln helped to consolidate the dominance of two major political parties, Republicans and Democrats had ruled with relatively little outside contestation. Then as now, most academics agreed that America’s party system was an unusually stable one. In his 1963 book The Deadlock of Democracy, political historian James MacGregor Burns offered a novel suggestion.
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