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Big Tent

Big tent

In politics, a big tent party or catch-all party is a political party seeking to attract people with diverse viewpoints. The party does not require adherence to some ideology as a criterion for membership. This is in contrast to political parties that promote only a specific ideology. Advocates of a big tent believe that people with a broad variety of political ideologies and viewpoints can unite within a single party to advance shared core issues they agree on, even if they disagree on other issues. This way the party can attract a large base of support at the polls. Big tent parties are far more common in first past the post systems with only a few large parties. In the United States, a very good example of this approach was the New Deal coalition which formed in support of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies. This coalition brought together labor unions, southern Dixiecrats, progressives, and others in support of FDR's economic program, even though these groups strongly disagreed on other issues. In Canada, the Liberal Party of Canada is not strongly ideological or regional, but is instead open to members with a wide range of views. While some criticize the party for lacking in conviction, supporters argue that compromise is an essential feature of democracy. In most western democracies, two or three major political parties profess some sort of ideological leaning (for example, social democracy, Christian democracy, liberal democracy, conservative, labour) but in practice follow a big tent approach. Political parties which allow only a narrow ideology, in general do not perform well at the polls and so remain minor parties. Canada provides two examples of how the adoption of a big tent approach has helped propel a formerly marginal party into broader electoral success, in the Green Party of Ontario and the (now-defunct) Social Credit Party of Canada. In the United States, the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party had its only electoral success to date by allowing a popular figure who did not support the party's secessionist agenda to run for Governor of Alaska on their ballot line. In the United States, the big tent concept is practiced today (in reality if not in name) within the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, and the Reform Party. This is in contrast to such political parties as the Libertarian Party, the Constitution Party, the Socialist Party, and various small Communist parties, which seek to advance a single ideology. Historically in the United States, political parties adopting a big tent approach have performed well at the polls. Parties promoting only one narrow ideology have attracted marginal support at best, or have seen their issues adopted by one or both of the major parties in a big tent effort, effectively co-opting the issues and putting an end to the minor party; this happened to the Prohibition Party and the Populist Party. However even the Democratic, Republican, and Reform parties have vocal factions which advocate that those parties take on a more ideologically rigid character. There are factions in the Democratic Party which would like to make the party purely left-wing or progressive, excluding more conservative constituencies such as the Democratic Leadership Council, Blue Dog Democrats, and social conservatives. There are factions within the Republican Party which likewise seek to make the Republicans strictly an ideologically right-wing or conservative party, and expel those they deem Republicans In Name Only, those socially too liberal, and those holding isolationist foreign policy views (who therefore oppose the Bush administration's foreign policy) such as libertarians and paleoconservatives. There are also those within each party who would like to make certain issues litmus tests for party membership even though there is substantial disagreement on those issues within the parties themselves. Abortion and gun policy are two examples. The big tent approach argues against any sort of single-issue litmus tests or ideological rigidity, and advocates a Democratic Party with room for conservative as well as liberal Democrats, and a Republican Party with room for liberal as well as conservative Republicans. The Democratic Party and the Republican Party in the United States have liberal and conservative wings and support bases to such an extent that some supporters from each party align themselves with a particular politician or group within the other. Republican President of the United States Ronald Reagan gained support from conservative Democrats, who came to be called Reagan Democrats. Other famous examples of Catch all parties include the Republic of Ireland's Fianna Fáil, which has variously been categorised as socialist (according to former deputy leader Brian Lenihan) and neo-Thatcherite/neo-Reaganite, a description applied to the economic policies and politics of current Minister for Finance Charles McCreevy. Fianna Fáil served in coalition from 1989 to 1992 with the right wing liberal Progressive Democrats, then with the socialist Irish Labour Party and is again in government with the Progressive Democrats, Fianna Fáil tailoring its policies accordingly. India's Congress Party and Italy's now defunct Christian Democrats both attracted such a broad range of support as to make them Catch all parties. Critics of Catch all parties accuse them of populism, adopting whatever policies they need to win without any ideological conviction or clear policy goal. Category:Politics

Politics

Politics is the process by which decisions are made for a given society. The method of making decisions for groups varies, but the act of decision making is the key component that characterises politics. Although it is generally applied to governments, politics is also observed in all human group interactions, including corporate, academic, and religious institutions. Political science is the study of political behavior and examines the acquisition and application of power, i.e. the ability to impose one's will on another. One theorist, Harold Lasswell, has defined politics as "who gets what, when, and how." Another definition of 'politics' is: "how power is distributed within a group or system".

A natural state

In 1651, Thomas Hobbes published his most famous work, Leviathan, in which he proposed a model of early human development to justify the creation of human associations. Hobbes described an ideal state of nature wherein every person had equal right to every resource in nature and was free to use any means to acquire those resources. He noted that such an arrangement created a “war of all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes). Further, he noted that men would enter into a social contract and would give up absolute rights for certain protections. While it appears that social cooperation and dominance hierarchies predate human societies, Hobbes’s model illustrates a rationale for the creation of societies (polities).

Early history

V.G. Childe describes the transformation of human society that took place around 6000 BCE as an urban revolution. Among the features of this new type of civilization were the institutionalization of social stratification, non-agricultural specialised crafts (including priests and lawyers), taxation, and writing. All of which require clusters of densely populated settlements - city-states. The word "Politics" is derived from the Greek word for city-state, "Polis". Corporate, religious, academic and every other polity, especially those constrained by limited resources, contain dominance hierarchy and therefore politics. Politics is most often studied in relation to the administration of governments. The oldest form of government was tribal organization. Rule by elders was supplanted by monarchy, and a system of Feudalism as an arrangement where a single family dominated the political affairs of a community. Monarchies have existed in one form or another for the past 5000 years of human history.

Definitions

- Power is the ability to impose one's will on another. It implies a capacity for force, i.e violence.
- Authority is the power to enforce laws, to exact obedience, to command, to determine, or to judge.
- Legitimacy is an attribute of government gained through the acquisition and application of power in accordance with recognized or accepted standards or principles.
- A government is the body that has the authority to make and enforce rules or laws.

Political power

Samuel Gompers’ often paraphrased maxim,"Reward your friends and punish your enemies," hints at two of the five types of power recognized by social psychologists: incentive power (the power to reward) and coercive power (the power to punish). Arguably the other three grow out of these two. Legitimate power, the power of the policeman or the referee, is the power given to an individual by a recognized authority to enforce standards of behavior. Legitimate power is similar to coercive power in that unacceptable behavior is punished by fine or penalty. Referent power is bestowed upon individuals by virtue of accomplishment or attitude. Fulfillment of the desire to feel similar to a celebrity or a hero is the reward for obedience. Expert power springs from education or experience. Following the lead of an experienced coach is often rewarded with success. Expert power is conditional to the circumstances. A brain surgeon is no help when your pipes are leaking.

Authority and legitimacy

Max Weber identified three sources of legitimacy for authority known as (tripartite classification of authority). He proposed three reasons why people followed the orders of those who gave them:

Traditional

Traditional authorities receive loyalty because they continue and support the preservation of existing values, the status quo. Traditional authority has the longest history. Patriarchal (and more rarely Matriarchal) societies gave rise to hereditary monarchies where authority was given to descendants of previous leaders. Followers submit to this authority because "we've always done it that way." Examples of traditional authoritarians include kings and queens.

Charismatic

Charismatic authority grows out of the personal charm or the strength of an individual personality (see cult of personality for the most extreme version). Charismatic regimes are often short lived, seldom outliving the charismatic figure that leads them. Examples include Hitler, Napoleon, and Mao.

Legal-rational

Legal-Rational authorities receive their ability to compel behavior by virtue of the office that they hold. It is the authority that demands obedience to the office rather than the office holder. Modern democracies are examples of legal-rational regimes.

References

GOMPERS,SAMUEL; “Men of Labor! Be Up and Doing,” editorial, American Federationist, May 1906, p. 319

Ideology

An ideology is a collection of ideas. The word ideology was coined by Count Destutt de Tracy in the late 18th century to define a "science of ideas." An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things (compare Weltanschauung), as in common sense (see Ideology in everyday society) and several philosophical tendencies (see Political ideologies), or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to all members of this society (for the Marxist definition of ideology - see Ideology as an instrument of social reproduction).

Ideology in everyday society

Every society has an ideology that forms the basis of the "public opinion" or common sense, a basis that usually remains invisible to most people within the society. This dominant ideology appears as "neutral", while all others that differ from the norm are often seen as radical, no matter what the actual vision may be. The philosopher Michel Foucault wrote about this concept of apparent ideological neutrality. Organisations that strive for power influence the ideology of a society to become what they want it to be. Political organisations (governments included) and other groups (e.g. lobbyists) try to influence people by broadcasting their opinions, which is the reason why so often many people in a society seem to "think alike". When most people in a society think alike about certain matters, or even forget that there are alternatives to the current state of affairs, we arrive at the concept of Hegemony, about which the philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote. The much smaller scale concept of groupthink also owes something to his work. Modern linguists study the mechanism of conceptual metaphor, by which this 'thinking alike' is thought to be transmitted. There are many different kinds of ideology: political, social, epistemological, ethical, and so on. Meta-ideology is the study of the structure, form, and manifestation of ideologies. Meta-ideology posits that ideology is a system of ideas and thoughts bound by an internal logic and a few basic assumptions about reality that have no real factual basis, but are arbitrary choices that serve as the seed around which ideologies grow. According to this train of thought, ideologies are neither right nor wrong, but only a relativistic intellectual strategy for categorizing the world.

Political ideologies

In social studies, a political ideology is a certain ethical, set of ideals, principles, doctrines, myths or symbols of a social movement, institution, class, or large group that explain how society should work, and offer some political and cultural blueprint for a certain social order. A political ideology largely concerns itself with how to allocate power and to what ends it should be used. It can be a construct of political thought, often defining political parties and their policy. Studies of the concept of ideology itself (rather than specific ideologies) have been carried out under the name of systematic ideology. Political ideologies regard policies of many different aspects of a society, the most central of which are: economy, education, criminal law, management of criminals, minors, animals, environment, immigration, eugenics, race, use of the military, forced nationalism, forced religion

List of political ideologies

There are many proposed methods for the classification of political ideologies. See the political spectrum article for a more in-depth discussion of these different methods (each of whom generates a specific political spectrum). The following list attempts to divide ideologies into a number of groups; each group contains ideologies that have a certain theme or idea in common. Note that one ideology can belong to several groups, and there is sometimes considerable overlap between related ideologies.

Epistemological ideologies

Even when the challenging of existing beliefs is encouraged, as in science, the dominant paradigm or mindset can prevent certain challenges, theories or experiments from being advanced. The philosophy of science mostly concerns itself with reducing the impact of these prior ideologies so that science can proceed with its primary task, which is (according to science) to create knowledge. There are critics who view science as an ideology in itself, or being an effective ideology, called scientism. Some scientists respond that, while the scientific method is itself an ideology, as it is a collection of ideas, there is nothing particularly wrong or bad about it. Other critics point out that while science itself is not a misleading ideology, there are some fields of study within science that are misleading. Two examples discussed here are in the fields of ecology and economics. A special case of science adopted as ideology is that of ecology, which studies the relationships between living things on Earth. Perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson believed that human perception of ecological relationships was the basis of self-awareness and cognition itself. Linguist George Lakoff has proposed a cognitive science of mathematics wherein even the most fundamental ideas of arithmetic would be seen as consequences or products of human perception - which is itself necessarily evolved within an ecology. Deep ecology and the modern ecology movement (and, to a lesser degree, Green parties) appear to have adopted ecological sciences as a positive ideology. Some accuse ecological economics of likewise turning scientific theory into political economy, although theses in that science can often be tested. The modern practice of green economics fuses both approaches and seems to be part science, part ideology. This is far from the only theory of economics to be raised to ideology status - some notable economically-based ideologies include mercantilism, social darwinism, communism, laissez-faire economics, and "free trade". There are also current theories of safe trade and fair trade which can be seen as ideologies.

History of the concept of ideology

Perhaps the most accessible source for the original meaning of "ideology" is Hippolyte Taine's work on the Ancien Regime (first volume of "Origins of Contemporary France"). He describes ideology as rather like teaching philosophy by the Socratic method, but without extending the vocabulary beyond what the general reader already possessed, and without the examples from observation which practical science would require. Taine identifies it not just with Destutt de Tracy, but with his milieu, and includes Condillac as one of its precursors. The word "ideology" was coined long before the Russians coined "intelligentsia", or before the adjective "intellectual" referred to a sort of person (a substantive). Thus these words were not around when the hard-headed, driven Napoleon Bonaparte took the word "ideologues" to ridicule his intellectual opponents.

Ideology as an instrument of social reproduction

Karl Marx proposed a base/superstructure model of society. The base refers to the means of production of society. The superstructure is formed on top of the base, and comprises that society's ideology, as well as its legal system, political system, and religions. For Marx, the base determines the superstructure. Because the ruling class controls the society's means of production, the superstructure of society, including its ideology, will be determined according to what is in the ruling class's best interests. Critics of the Marxist approach feel that it attributes too much importance to economic factors in influencing society. The ideologies of the dominant class of a society are proposed to all members of that society in order to make the ruling class' interests appear to be the interests of all. György Lukács describes this as a projection of the class consciousness of the ruling class, while Antonio Gramsci advances the theory of cultural hegemony to explain why people in the working-class can have a false conception of their own interests. Louis Althusser proposed that ideology makes use of a special type of discourse: the lacunar discourse. A number of propositions, which are never untrue, suggest a number of other propositions, which are. In this way, the essence of the lacunar discourse is what is not told (but is suggested). For example, the statement 'All are equal before the law', which is a theory behind current legal systems, suggests that all people may be of equal worth or have equal 'opportunities'. This is not true, because the concept of private property over the means of production results in some people being able to own more (much more) than others, and their property brings power and influence (the rich can afford better lawyers, among other things, and this puts in question the principle of equality before the law). The dominant forms of ideology in capitalism are (in chronological order): #classical liberalism #social democracy #neo-liberalism and they correspond to the stages of development of capitalism: #extensive stage #intensive stage #contemporary capitalism (or late capitalism, or current crisis) Other dominant forms of capitalist ideology such as social darwinism cannot be related to a specific phase. The Marxist view of ideology as an instrument of social reproduction has been an important touchstone for the sociology of knowledge and theorists such as Karl Mannheim, Daniel Bell and Jürgen Habermas amongst many others.

Feminism as critique of ideology

Naturalizing socially constructed patterns of behavior has always been an important mechanism in the production and reproduction of ideologies. Feminist theorists have paid close attention to these mechanisms. Adrienne Rich e.g. has shown how to understand motherhood as a social institution. ko:이데올로기

External Links

- [http://www.tamilnation.org/ideology/ The Strength of an Idea]

United States

:For alternative meanings, see the disambiguation page for US, USA, United States, or American. The United States of America is a federal democratic republic situated primarily in central North America. It comprises 50 states and one federal district, and has several territories. It is also referred to, with varying formality, as the United States, the U.S., the U.S.A., the States, or simply and most commonly, America. The official founding date of the United States is July 4, 1776, when the Second Continental Congress—representing thirteen British colonies—adopted the Declaration of Independence. However, the structure of the government was profoundly changed in 1788, when the states replaced the Articles of Confederation with the United States Constitution. The date on which each of the fifty states adopted the Constitution is typically regarded as the date that state "entered the Union" (became part of the United States). Since the mid-20th century, following World War II, the United States has emerged as a dominant global influence in economic, political, military, scientific, technological, and cultural affairs.

Geography and climate

The United States shares land borders with Canada (to the north) and Mexico (to the south), and territorial water boundaries with Canada, Russia, the Bahamas, and numerous smaller nations. It is otherwise bounded by the Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea, in the west; the Arctic Ocean, in the northernmost areas; and the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean Sea, in the eastern and southeastern areas. Forty-eight of the states are in the single region between Canada and Mexico; this group is referred to, with varying precision and formality, as the continental or contiguous United States, sometimes abbreviated CONUS, and as the Lower 48. Alaska, which is not included in the term contiguous United States, is at the northwestern end of North America, separated from the Lower 48 by Canada. The archipelago of Hawaii is in the Pacific Ocean. The capital city, Washington, District of Columbia is a federal district located on land donated by the state of Maryland. (Virginia also donated land, but it was returned in 1847.) The United States also has overseas territories with varying levels of independence and organization. When inland water is included in the total area, only Russia and Canada are larger than the United States; if inland water is excluded, China ranks third and the U.S. ranks fourth. The United States' total area is 3,718,711 square miles (9,631,418 km²), of which land makes up 3,537,438 square miles (9,161,923 km²) and water makes up 181,273 square miles (469,495 km²). The United States' landscape is one of the most varied among those of the world's nations: among its many features are temperate forestland and rolling hills, on the east coast; mangrove, in Florida; the Great Plains, in the center of the country; the Mississippi–Missouri river system; the Great Lakes, four of the five of which are shared with Canada; the Rocky Mountains, west of the Great Plains; deserts and temperate coastal zones, west of the Rocky Mountains; and temperate rain forests, in the Pacific northwest. Alaska's tundra, and the volcanic, tropical islands of Hawaii add to the geographic diversity. Hawaii The climate varies along with the landscape, from tropical in Hawaii and southern Florida to tundra in Alaska and atop some of the highest mountains. Most of the North and East experience a temperate continental climate, with warm summers and cold winters. Most of the South experiences a subtropical humid climate with mild winters and long, hot, humid summers. Rainfall decreases markedly from the humid forests of the Eastern Great Plains to the semi-arid shortgrass prairies on the high plains abutting the Rocky Mountains. Arid deserts, including the Mojave, extend through the lowlands and valleys of the southwest, from westernmost Texas to California and northward throughout much of Nevada. Some parts of California have a Mediterranean climate. Rainforests line the windward mountains of the Pacific Northwest from Oregon to Alaska.

History

American history started with the migration of people from Asia across the Bering land bridge approximately 12,000 years ago following large animals that they hunted into the Americas. These Native Americans left evidence of their presence in petroglyphs, burial mounds, and other artifacts. It is estimated that 2-9 million people lived in the territory now occupied by the U.S. before European contact, and the subsequent introduction of foreign diseases such as small pox that greatly diminished the native populations. Some advanced societies were the Anasazi of the southwest, who inhabited Chaco Canyon, and the Woodland Indians, who built Cahokia, located near present-day St Louis, a city with a population of 40,000 at its peak in AD 1200. Vikings first visited North America around 1000, but did not settle permanently. Following the discovery voyages of Christopher Columbus around 1492, other Europeans began to explore and settle there. During the 1500s and 1600s, the Spanish settled parts of the present-day Southwest and Florida, founding St. Augustine, Florida in 1565 and Santa Fe (in what is now New Mexico) in 1607. The first successful English settlement was at Jamestown, Virginia, also in 1607. Within the next two decades, several Dutch settlements, including New Amsterdam (the predecessor to New York City), were established in what are now the states of New York and New Jersey. In 1637, Sweden established a colony at Fort Christina (in what is now Delaware), but lost the settlement to the Dutch in 1655. This was followed by extensive British settlement of the east coast. The British colonists remained relatively undisturbed by their home country until after the French and Indian War, when France ceded Canada and the Great Lakes region to Britain. Britain then imposed taxes on the 13 colonies, widely regarded by the colonists as unfair because they were denied representation in the British Parliament. Tensions between Britain and the colonists increased, and the thirteen colonies eventually rebelled against British rule. British Parliament, George Washington (1789-1797).]] In 1776, the 13 colonies split from Great Britain and formed the United States, the world's first constitutional and democratic federal republic, after their Declaration of Independence of that year, and the Revolutionary War (1775 to 1783). The original political structure was a confederation in 1777, ratified in 1781 as the Articles of Confederation. After long debate, this was supplanted by the Constitution in 1789, forming a more centralized federal government. Prior to all these was the Albany Congress in 1754, in which a union was first seriously proposed. From early colonial times, there was a shortage of labor, which encouraged unfree labor, particularly indentured servitude and slavery. In the mid-19th century, a major division occurred in the United States over the issue of states' rights and the expansion of slavery. The northern states had become opposed to slavery, while the southern states saw it as necessary for the continued success of southern agriculture and wanted it expanded to the territories. Several federal laws were passed in an attempt to settle the dispute, including the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850. The dispute reached a crisis in 1861, when seven southern states seceded¹ from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America, leading to the Civil War. Soon after the war began, four more southern states seceded. During the war, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, mandating the freedom of all slaves in states in rebellion, though full emancipation did not take place until after the end of the war in 1865, the dissolution of the Confederacy, and the Thirteenth Amendment took effect. The Civil War effectively ended the question of a state's right to secede, and is widely accepted as a major turning point after which the federal government became more powerful than state governments. Thirteenth Amendment). The title of the painting, from a 1726 poem by Bishop Berkeley, was a phrase often quoted in the era of Manifest Destiny, expressing a widely held belief that civilization had steadily moved westward throughout history. [http://americanart.si.edu/t2go/1lw/1931.6.1.html (more)] ]] During the 19th century, many new states were added to the original 13 as the nation expanded across the continent. Manifest Destiny was a philosophy that encouraged westward expansion in the United States. As the population of the Eastern states grew and as a steady increase of immigrants entered the country, settlers moved steadily westward across North America. In the process, the U.S. displaced most American Indian nations. This displacement of American Indians continues to be a matter of contention in the U.S. with many tribes attempting to assert their original claims to various lands. In some areas American Indian populations were reduced by foreign diseases contracted through contact with European settlers, and US settlers acquired those emptied lands. In other instances American Indians were removed from their traditional lands by force. Though some would say the U.S. was not a colonial power until the Spanish-American War when it acquired Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, the dominion exercised over land in North America the United States claimed is essentially colonial. The Philippines became independent in 1946. During this period, the nation also became an industrial power. This continued into the 20th century, which has been termed "the American Century" because of the nation's overriding influence on the world. The US became a center for innovation and technological development; major technologies that America either developed or was greatly involved in improving include the telephone, television, computer, the Internet, nuclear weapons, nuclear power, aviation, and aeronautics. In addition to the Civil War, another major traumatic experience for the nation was the Great Depression (1929 to 1939). The nation has also taken part in several major foreign wars, including World War I and World War II (in both of which the US later joined the Allies). During the Cold War, the US was a major player in the Korean War and Vietnam War, and, along with the Soviet Union, was considered one of the world's two "superpowers". With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US emerged as the world's leading economic and military power. Beginning in the 1990s, the United States became very involved in police actions and peacekeeping, including actions in Kosovo, Haiti, Somalia and Liberia, and the first Persian Gulf War driving Iraq out of Kuwait. After attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the United States and other allied nations found themselves involved in what has come to be called the "War on Terrorism," which has primarily encompassed military actions in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Government

Iraq of the United States.]]

Republic and suffrage

The United States is an example of a constitutional republic, with a government composed of and operating through a set of limited powers imposed by its design and enumerated in the United States Constitution. Specifically, the nation operates as a presidential democracy. There are three levels of government: federal, state, and local. Officials of each of these levels are either elected by eligible voters via secret ballot or appointed by other elected officials. Americans enjoy almost universal suffrage from the age of 18 regardless of race, sex, or wealth. There are some limits, however: felons are disenfranchised and in some states former felons are likewise. Furthermore, the national representation of territories and the federal district of Washington, DC in Congress is limited: residents of the District of Columbia are subject to federal laws and federal taxes but their only Congressional representative is a non-voting delegate.

Federal government

The federal government is the national government, comprising the Legislative Branch (led by Congress), the Executive Branch (led by the President), and the Judicial Branch (led by the Supreme Court). These three branches were designed to apply checks and balances on each other. The Constitution limits the powers of the federal government to defense, foreign affairs, the issuing and management of currency, the management of trade and relations between the states, and the protection of human rights. In addition to these explicitly stated powers, the federal government—with the assistance of the Supreme Court—has gradually extended these powers into such areas as welfare and education, on the basis of the "necessary and proper" clause of the Constitution.

The Congress

necessary and proper The Congress of the United States is the legislative branch of the federal government of the United States. It is bicameral, comprising the House of Representatives and the Senate. The House of Representatives consists of 435 members, each of whom represents a congressional district and serves for a two-year term. House seats are apportioned among the states by population; in contrast, each state has two Senators, regardless of population. There are a total of 100 senators, who serve six-year terms. The powers of Congress are limited to those enumerated in the Constitution; all other powers are reserved to the states and the people. The Constitution also includes the necessary-and-proper clause, which grants Congress the power to "make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers."

The President

necessary-and-proper clause At the top level of the executive branch is the President of the United States. The President and Vice-President are elected as 'running mates' for four-year terms by the Electoral College, for which each state, as well as the District of Columbia, is allocated a number of seats based on its representation (or ostensible representation, in the case of D. C.) in both houses of Congress (see U.S. Electoral College). The relationship between the President and the Congress reflects that between the English monarchy and parliament at the time of the framing of the United States Constitution. Congress can legislate to constrain the President's executive power, even with respect to his or her command of the armed forces; however, this power is used only very rarely—a notable example was the constraint placed on President Richard Nixon's strategy of bombing Cambodia during the Vietnam War. The President cannot directly propose legislation, and must rely on supporters in Congress to promote his or her legislative agenda. The President's signature is required to turn congressional bills into law; in this respect, the President has the power—only occasionally used—to veto congressional legislation. Congress can override a presidential veto with a two-thirds majority vote in both houses. The ultimate power of Congress over the President is that of impeachment or removal of the elected President through a House vote, a Senate trial, and a Senate vote. The threat of using this power has had major political ramifications in the cases of Presidents Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton. The President makes around 2,000 executive appointments, including members of the Cabinet and ambassadors, which must be approved by the Senate; the President can also issue executive orders and pardons, and has other Constitutional duties, among them the requirement to give a State of the Union address to Congress once a year. Although the President's constitutional role may appear to be constrained, in practice, the office carries enormous prestige that typically eclipses the power of Congress: the Presidency has justifiably been referred to as 'the most powerful office in the world'. The Vice President is first in the line of succession, and is the President of the Senate ex officio, with the ability to cast a tie-breaking vote. The members of the President's Cabinet are responsible for administering the various departments of state, including the Department of Defense, the Justice Department, and the State Department. These departments and department heads have considerable regulatory and political power, and it is they who are responsible for executing federal laws and regulations. George W. Bush is the 43rd President, currently serving his second term.

The Courts

George W. Bush The highest court is the Supreme Court, which consists of nine justices. The court deals with federal and constitutional matters, and can declare legislation made at any level of the government as unconstitutional, nullifying the law and creating precedent for future law and decisions. Below the Supreme Court are the courts of appeals, and below them in turn are the district courts, which are the general trial courts for federal law. Separate from, but not entirely independent of, this federal court system are the individual court systems of each state, each dealing with its own laws and having its own judicial rules and procedures. A case may be appealed from a state court to a federal court only if there is a federal question; the supreme court of each state is the final authority on the interpretation of that state's laws and constitution.

State and local governments

supreme court of each state. Note that Alaska and Hawaii are shown at different scales, and that the Aleutian Islands and the uninhabited Northwestern Hawaiian Islands are omitted from this map.]] The state governments have the greatest influence over people's daily lives. Each state has its own written constitution and has different laws. There are sometimes great differences in law and procedure between the different states, concerning issues such as property, crime, health, and education. The highest elected official of each state is the Governor. Each state also has an elected legislature (bicameral in every state except Nebraska), whose members represent the different parts of the state. Of note is the New Hampshire legislature, which is the third-largest legislative body in the English-speaking world, and has one representative for every 3,000 people. Each state maintains its own judiciary, with the lowest level typically being county courts, and culminating in each state supreme court, though sometimes named differently. In some states, supreme and lower court justices are elected by the people; in others, they are appointed, as they are in the federal system. The institutions that are responsible for local government are typically town, city, or county boards, making laws that affect their particular area. These laws concern issues such as traffic, the sale of alcohol, and keeping animals. The highest elected official of a town or city is usually the mayor. In New England, towns operate directly democratically, and in some states, such as Rhode Island and Connecticut, counties have little or no power, existing only as geographic distinctions. In other areas, county governments have more power, such as to collect taxes and maintain law enforcement agencies.

Political divisions

With the Declaration of Independence, the thirteen colonies proclaimed themselves to be nation states modeled after the European states of the time. Although considered as sovereigns initially, under the Articles of Confederation of 1781 they entered into a "Perpetual Union" and created a fully sovereign federal state, delegating certain powers to the national Congress, including the right to engage in diplomatic relations and to levy war, while each retaining their individual sovereignty, freedom and independence. But the national government proved too ineffective, so the administrative structure of the government was vastly reorganized with the United States Constitution of 1789. Under this new union, the continued status of the individual states as sovereign nation states fell into dispute in 1861, as several states attempted to secede from the union; in response, then-President Abraham Lincoln claimed that such secession was illegal, and the result was the American Civil War. Since the Union victory in 1865, the independent status of the individual states has not been broached again by any state, and the status of each state within the union has been deemed by mainstream officials and academics to be settled as being subordinate to the union as a whole. In subsequent years, the number of states grew steadily due to western expansion, the purchase of lands by the national government from other nation states, and the subdivision of existing states, resulting in the current total of 50. The states are generally divided into smaller administrative regions, including counties, cities and townships. The United States–Canadian border is the longest undefended political boundary in the world. The U.S. is divided into three distinct sections:
- the "continental United States," also known as "the Lower 48" and more accurately termed the conterminous, coterminous or contiguous United States
- Alaska, which is physically connected only to Canada
- the archipelago of Hawaii, in the central Pacific Ocean. The United States also holds several other territories, districts, and possessions, notably the federal district of the District of Columbia, which is the nation's capital, and several overseas insular areas, the most significant of which are American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the United States Virgin Islands. The Palmyra Atoll is the United States' only incorporated territory; it is unorganized and uninhabited. The United States Navy has held a base at a portion of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, since 1898. The United States government possesses a lease to this land, which only mutual agreement or United States abandonment of the area can terminate. The present Cuban government of Fidel Castro disputes this arrangement, claiming Cuba was not truly sovereign at the time of the signing. The United States argues this point moot because Cuba apparently ratified the lease post-revolution, and with full sovereignty, when it cashed one rent check in accordance with the disputed treaty.

Foreign relations and military

sovereign] The immense military and economic dominance of the United States has made foreign relations an especially important topic in its politics, with considerable concern about the image of the United States throughout the world. Reactions towards the United States by other nationalities are often strong, ranging from uninhibited admiration and mimicking of all things American to anti-Americanism. US foreign policy has swung about several times over the course of its history between the poles of strict isolationism and imperialism and everywhere in between. Three of the nation's four military branches are administered by the Department of Defense: the Army, the Navy (including the Marine Corps), and the Air Force. The Coast Guard falls under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security in peacetime, but is placed under the Department of the Navy in time of war. The combined United States armed forces consist of 1.4 million active duty personnel, along with several hundred thousand each in the Reserves and the National Guard. Military conscription ended in 1973. The United States Armed forces are considered to be the most powerful military (of any sort) on Earth and their force projection capabilities are unrivaled by any other nation. The 2005 defense budget amounted to $401.7 billion, which is an increase of 4% over 2004 and of 35% since 2001. Over 50% of that number is spent in research & development. (For comparison, in 2004 the European Union (considered as the second-largest military force) had a combined total of 1.6 million troops, and a defense budget of €160 billion, with less than 10% of that being spent on R&D.)

Largest cities

The United States has dozens of major cities, including 11 of the 55 global cities of all types — with three "alpha" global cities: New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago. The figures expressed below are for populations within city limits. A different ranking is evident when considering U.S. metro area populations, although the top three would be unchanged. Note that some cities not listed (such as Atlanta, Boston, Las Vegas, Miami, Nashville, New Orleans, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.) are still considered important on the basis of other factors and issues, including culture, economics, heritage, and politics. The twenty largest cities, based on the United States Census Bureau's 2004 estimates, are as follows:

Economy

The United States has the largest single-country economy in the world, with a per-capita gross domestic product of $40,100. In this market-oriented economy, private individuals and business firms make most of the decisions, and the federal and state governments buy needed goods and services predominantly in the private marketplace. gross domestic product The largest industry of the U.S. is now service, which employs roughly three quarters of the U.S. work force. The United States has many natural resources, including oil and gas, metals, and such minerals as gold, soda ash, and zinc. In agriculture, the U.S. is a top producer of, among other crops, corn, soy beans, and wheat; the United States is a net exporter of food. The U.S. manufacturing sector produces goods such as, cars, airplanes, steel, and electronics, among many others. Economic activity varies greatly from one part of the country to another, with many industries being largely dependent on a certain city or region; New York City is the center of the American financial, publishing, broadcasting, and advertising industries; Silicon Valley is the country’s primary location for high-technology companies, while Los Angeles is the most important center for film production. The Midwest is known for its reliance on manufacturing and heavy industry, with Detroit, Michigan, serving as the center of the American automotive industry; the Great Plains are known as the "breadbasket" of America for their tremendous agricultural output; the intermountain region serves as a mining hub and natural gas resource; the Pacific Northwest for fish and timber, while Texas is largely associated with the oil industry; the Southeast is a major hub for both medical research and the textiles industry. Several countries continue to link their currency to the dollar or even use it as a currency (such as Ecuador), although this practice has subsided since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system. Many markets are also quoted in dollars, such as those of oil and gold. The dollar is also the predominant reserve currency in the world, and more than half of global reserves are in dollars. The largest trading partner of the United States is Canada (19%), followed by China (12%), Mexico (11%), and Japan (8%). More than 50% of total trade is with these four countries. In 2003, the United States was ranked as the third most visited tourist destination in the world; its 40,400,000 visitors ranked behind France's 75,000,000 and Spain's 52,500,000. Labor unions have existed since the 19th century, and grew large and powerful from the 1930s to the 1950s. See Labor history of the United States. Since 1970 they have shrunk in the private sector and now cover fewer than 8% of the workers. However union membership has grown rapidly in the public sector, especially among teachers, nurses, police, postal workers, and municipal clerks. There have been few strikes in recent years. The United States' imports exceed exports by 80%, leading to an annual trade deficit of $700,000,000,000, or 6% of gross domestic product. It is the largest debtor nation in the world, with total gross foreign debt of over $13,000,000,000,000 (2005 estimate); and it absorbs more than 50% of global savings annually. Since the 1980s, the U.S. has increased the use of neoliberal economic policies that reduce government intervention and reduce the size of the welfare state, backing away from the more interventionist Keynsian economic policies that had been in favor since the Great Depression. As a result, the United States provides fewer government-delivered social welfare services than most industrialized nations, choosing instead to keep its tax burden lower and relying more heavily on the free market and private charities. Sixteen states and the District of Columbia have minimum wages higher than the national level ($5.15 per-hour), including the highest, Washington State at $7.35. Twenty-six states are the same as the federal level; two--Ohio and Kansas--are below; and six do not have state laws. America's wealth is relatively highly concentrated. The average C.E.O. earns 500 times the typical amount a worker grosses, this is up from 25 times in the late 1970s. In terms of wealth the top 1% of Americans own 40% of all assets and 50.1% of the country's income goes to the top twenty percent of households. Average wages for the majority of employees have been largely stagnating since the 1970s. America's poverty line defined as a family of four earning less than $19,157 is at 12.7% of the general population. Approximately one out of every five children in the United States grows up below the official poverty line. Among racial groups; African Americans have the lowest median income while Asians had the highest. Regionally, the southern states had the lowest median incomes while the West Coast and New England had the highest. The current Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan remarked that the U.S.’s growing income inequality since the 1970s is, "not the type of thing which a democratic society - a capitalist democratic society - can really accept without addressing."[http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0614/p01s03-usec.html?s=itm] However, Greenspan also noted, "...you can look at the system and say it's got a lot of problems to it, and sure it does. It always has. But you can't get around the fact that this is the most extraordinarily successful economy in history."

Transportation

Alan Greenspan ]] Because the United States is a relatively young nation, most of the development of U.S. cities has taken place since the invention of the automobile. To link its vast territory, the United States built a network of high-capacity, high-speed highways, of which the most important element is the Interstate Highway system, commissioned in the 1950s by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and modeled after the German Autobahn. The United States also has a transcontinental rail system, which is used for moving freight across the lower forty-eight states. Passenger rail service is provided by Amtrak, which serves forty-six of the lower forty-eight states. Many cities in the United States have extensive mass-transit systems. New York City operates one of the world's largest and most heavily used subway systems. The regional rail and bus networks that extend into Long Island, New Jersey, Upstate New York, and Connecticut are among the most heavily used in the world. Air travel is often preferred for destinations over 300 miles (500 kilometers) away. In terms of passengers, seventeen of the world's thirty busiest airports in 2004 were in the U.S., including the world's busiest, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport; in terms of cargo, in the same year, twelve of the world's thirty busiest airports were in the U.S., including the world's busiest, Memphis International Airport. There are several major seaports in the United States; the three busiest are the Port of Los Angeles, California; the Port of Long Beach, California; and the Port of New York and New Jersey. Others include Houston, Texas; Charleston, South Carolina; Savannah, Georgia; Miami, Florida; Portland, Oregon; San Francisco, California; Boston, Massachusetts; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Seattle, Washington; plus, outside the contiguous forty-eight states, Anchorage, Alaska, and Honolulu, Hawaii.

Society

Demographics

Hawaii The mean center of the U.S. population continues to drift farther west and south. The fastest growing region is the western United States followed by the southern portion. According to Census 2000, the states that saw the greatest increases from 1990 were: Nevada (66.3%), Arizona (40%), Colorado (30.6%), Utah (29.6%), Idaho (28.5%), Georgia (26.4%), Florida (23.5%), Texas (22.8%), North Carolina (21.4%), and Washington (21.1%). [http://www.census.gov/population/cen2000/phc-t2/tab03.pdf]

Ethnicity and race

:Main article: Racial demographics of the United States The United States is a very racially diverse country. According to the 2000 census, it has 31 ethnic groups with at least one million members each, and numerous others represented in smaller amounts. The majority of Americans descend from white European immigrants who arrived at the establishment of the first colonies (most after Reconstruction). This majority--69.1% in 2000--decreases each year, and is expected to become a plurality within a few decades. The most frequently stated European ancestries are German (15.2%), Irish (10.8%), English (8.7%), Italian (5.6%) and Scandinavian (3.7%). Many immigrants also hail from Slavic countries such as Poland and Russia. Other significant immigrant populations came from eastern and southern Europe and French Canada. Russia Hispanics from Mexico and South and Central America are the largest minority group in the country, comprising 12.5% of the population (2000 census). People of Mexican descent made up 7.3% of the population in the 2000 census, and this proportion is expected to increase significantly in the coming decades. About 12.3% (2000 census) of the American people are African Americans (Blacks). African Americans are spread throughout the country, but their presence is largest in the South. Asian Americans--including Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders--are a third significant minority (3.7% of the population in 2000). Most Asian Americans are concentrated on the West Coast and Hawaii. The largest groups are immigrants or descendants of emigrants from the Philippines, China, India, Vietnam, South Korea, and Japan. Indigenous peoples in the United States, such as American Indians and Inuit, make up 0.9% of the population (2000 census). About 35% live on Indian reservations.

Religion

Polls estimate that just under 80 percent of Americans are Christians of various denominations. The other 20 percent comprises other religions such as Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism, other various faiths, and those without a specific religion. The United States is noteworthy among developed nations for its relatively high level of religiosity. According to a 2004 Gallup poll, about 44% of Americans attend a religious service at least once a week. However, this rate is not uniform across the country; attendance is more common in the Bible Belt—composed largely of Southern and Midwestern states—than in the Northeast and West Coast. In the Southern states, Baptists are the largest group, followed by Methodists; Roman Catholics are dominant in the Northeast and in large parts of the Midwest due to their being settled by descendants of Catholic immigrants from Europe (such as Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Poland) or other parts of North America (mainly Quebec and Puerto Rico). The rest of the country for the most part has a complex mixture of various Christian groups.

Education

West Coast's home at Monticello and the University of Virginia (library building shown above, and designed by Jefferson), the only collegiate campus on the list. Both sites are located in Charlottesville, Virginia.]] In the United States, education is a state, not federal, responsibility, and the laws and standards vary considerably. However, the federal government, through the Department of Education, is involved with funding of some programs and exerts some influence through its ability to control funding. In most states, all students must attend mandatory schooling starting with kindergarten, which children normally enter at age 5, and following through 12th grade, which is normally completed at age 18

New Deal coalition

The New Deal coalition was the informal alignment of interest groups and voting blocs who supported the New Deal and voted for United States Democratic Party presidential candidates from 1932 until approximately 1966, and which made the Democratic Party the majority party during that time. Roosevelt created a coalition that included the Democratic party, big city machines, labor unions, European and African-American minorities or ethnics, and farm groups. The 1932 election brought about a major realignment in political party affiliation, and is widely considered to be a realigning election. Franklin D. Roosevelt set up his New Deal and was able to forge a coalition of labor unions, liberals, minorities (especially African Americans), and southern Whites and Blacks. These disparate voting blocs together formed a majority of voters and handed the Democratic Party seven victories out of nine presidential elections, as well as control of both houses of Congress during much of this time. Starting in the 1930s, the term liberal was used to indicate supporters of the coaltion, and conservative denoted its opponents. The coalition was never formally organized, and the constituent members often disagreed with each other.

End of New Deal Coalition

The coalition fell apart in many ways. The first cause was lack of a leader of the stature of Roosevelt. The closest was perhaps Lyndon Johnson, who deliberately tried to reinvigorate the old coalition, but in fact drove its consituents apart. New issues such as civil rights, the Vietnam War, abortion, gay rights and affirmative action tended to split the coalition and drive many members away. Meanwhile the Republican party made major gains by promising lower taxes. The Big City machines faded away in the 1940s, with a few exceptions such as Chicago and Albany. The New Deal made them heavily dependent on the WPA for patronage, and when Congress shut down the WPA the cities could not find a substitute. Furethermore World War Two brought such a surge or prosperity that the relief mechanism of the WPA, CCC, etc. was no longer useful as a political tool. Labor unions crested in size and power in the 1950s, then went into steady decline. They continue into the 21st century as major backers of the Democratic party, but with so few members they have lost much of their influence. The European ethnic groups came of age after the 1960s. Ronald Reagan pulled many of the working class social conservatives into the Republican party as Reagan Democrats. Many middle class ethnics saw the Democratic party as a working class party and preferred the GOP as the middle class party. African Americans grew stronger in their Democratic loyalties and in their numbers. By the 1960s they were a much more important part of the coalition than in the 1930s. Their Democratic loyalties cut across all income and geographic lines to form the single most unified bloc of voters in the country. White Southerners abandoned cotton and tobacco farming, and moved to the cities where the New Deal programs had much less impact. Beginning in the 1950s the southern cities and suburbs started voting Republican. The white South saw the support northern Democrats gave to the Civil Rights Movement as a direct political assault and opened the way to protest votes for Barry Goldwater, who in 1964 was the first Republican to carry the deep south. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton lured many of the southern whites back, but by 2000 white males in the South were 2-1 Republican and, indeed, formed a major part of the Republican coalition. Intellectuals gave increasing support to Democrats since 1932. The Vietnam War caused a serious split, with the New Left reluctant to support most Democratic presidential candidates. In many ways, it was the civil rights movement that ultimately heralded the demise of the coalition. Democrats had traditionally solid support in southern states (the "Solid South"), but this electoral dominance began eroding in 1960, when thanks to JFK's desire to end segregation Richard Nixon became the first Republican presidential candidate to win electoral votes in the region despite losing nationwide. In the 1964 election, many southern voters threw their support to Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, who had opposed civil rights legislation. Goldwater won almost all of his electoral votes in the five southern states he carried. In the 1968 election, the south once again abandoned its traditional support for the Democrats by supporting Nixon and segregationist third-party candidate George C. Wallace. These events, coupled with Nixon's southern strategy aimed at attracting these voters, ultimately led to increased support for Republicans by southern whites. Since 1968, the south has generally voted for Republicans in presidential elections. Exceptions came in the elections of 1976, when the southern states voted for native southerner Jimmy Carter, and 1992 and 1996, when the Democratic ticket of two southerners (Bill Clinton and Al Gore) achieved a split of the region's electoral votes. In more recent years, support for the Democrats has become the strongest in the northeast and on the west coast, with Republicans showing more strength in the midwest, south, and southwest. The division between the two parties is virtually even in both houses of Congress, as of 2002, and no party has established the kind of dominance that the Democrats were able to exert during the period of the New Deal coalition.

Most Important New Deal programs

New Deal The New Deal was composed of countless programs, labeled an "alphabet soup" by its detractors. Among the New Deal acts were the following, most of them passed within the first 100 days of FDR's administration. Most were abolished around 1943, others remain in operation in 2005: Reconstruction Finance Corporation a Hoover agency exapanded under Jesse Jones to make large loans to big business. Ended in 1954. Federal Emergency Relief Agency (FERA) a Hoover program to create unskilled jobs for relief; replaced by WPA in 1935.
- United States bank holiday, 1933: closed all banks until they became certified by federal reviewers
- Abandonment of gold standard, 1933: gold reserves no longer backed currency; still exists
- Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), 1933: employed young men to perform unskilled work in rural areas; under Army supervision; separate program for Native Americans
- Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 1933: effort to modernize very poor region (most of Tennessee), centered on dams that generated electricity on the Tennessee River; still exists
- Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), 1933: raised fame prices by cutting total farm output of major crops (and hogs)
- National Recovery Act (NRA), 1933: industries set up codes to reduce unfair competition, raise wages and prices;
- Public Works Administration (PWA), 1933: built large public works projects; used private contractors (did not directly hire unemployed)
- Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) / Glass-Steagall Act: insures deposits in banks in order to restore public confidence in banks; still exists
- Securities Act of 1933, created the SEC, 1933: codified standards for sale and purchase of stock, required risk of investments to be accurately disclosed; still exists
- Civil Works Administration (CWA), 1933-34: provided temporary jobs to millions of unemployed
- Indian Reorganization Act, 1934 moved away from assimilation
- Social Security Act (SSA), 1935: provided financial assistance to: elderly, handicapped, paid for by employee and employer payroll contributions; required years contributions, so first payouts were 1942; still exists
- Works Progress Administration (WPA), 1935: a national labor program for 2+ million unemployed; created useful construction work for unskilled men; also sewing projects for women and arts projects for unemployed artists, musicians and writers.
- National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) / Wagner Act, 1935: set up National Labor Relations Board to supervise labor-management relations; In 1930s it strongly favored labor unions. Modified by Taft-Hartley (1947); still exists
- Judicial Reorganization Bill, 1937: gave President power to appoint a new Supreme Court judge for every judge 70 years or older; failed to pass Congress
- Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), 1938: established a maximum normal work week of 40 hours, and a minimum pay of 40 cents/hour; still exists

New Deal

:Alternative meaning: New Deal (United Kingdom) The New Deal is the name given to the series of programs used by Franklin Delano Roosevelt with the goal of stabilizing, reforming and stimulating the United States economy in the Great Depression.

Relief, recovery and reform

The New Deal had three components: relief, recovery and reform. Relief was the immediate effort to help the one-third of the population that was hardest hit by the depression. Roosevelt expanded Hoover's FERA work relief program, and added the CCC, PWA, and (starting in 1935) the WPA. In 1935 the Social Security and unemployment insurance programs were added. Separate programs were set up for relief in rural America, such as the RA and FSA. Recovery was the goal of restoring the economy to pre-depression levels. It involved "pump priming" (deficit spending), dropping the gold standard, efforts to re-inflate farm prices that were too low, and efforts to increase foreign trade. Much of the New Deal's efforts to help corporate America was channelled through a Hoover program, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC). Reform was based on the assumption that the depression was caused by the inherent instability of the market and that government intervention was necessary to rationalize and stabilize the economy, and to balance the interests of farmers, business and labor. It included the NRA (1933), regulation of Wall Street (SEC, 1933), the AAA farm programs (1933 and later), insurance of bank deposits (FDIC 1933) and the Wagner Act encouraging labor unions (1935). Despite urgings by some New Dealers, there was no major anti-trust program. Roosevelt said that he opposed socialism (in the sense of state ownership of the means of production), and only one major program, the TVA (1933), involved government ownership of the means of production. Whether the New Deal was successful in achieving the three Rs, and whether the program had a beneficial or deleterious effect, remains a topic of heated debate. The New Deal is also used to describe the New Deal Coalition that Roosevelt created to support his programs, including the Democratic party, big city machines, labor unions, European and African-American minorities or ethnics, and farm groups. By 1934, the Supreme Court began declaring significant parts of the New Deal unconstitutional. This led Roosevelt to propose the Court-packing Bill in 1937. Although the bill failed, the Lochner era soon ended when Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts switched his vote in several critical New Deal cases, and Roosevelt soon had the opportunity to appoint new Justices as the old Lochner court retired. By 1942, the Supreme Court had almost completely abandoned its attempts to second-guess Congress's economic policy, ruling in Wickard v. Filburn that the Commerce Clause covered almost all such regulation.

The Origins of the New Deal

On October 29, 1929, the crash of the U.S. stock market—known as "Black Tuesday"—reflected a trend of a worldwide economic crisis. In 1929-1933, unemployment in the U.S. soared from 3 percent of the workforce to 25 percent, while manufacturing output collapsed by one-third. Prices declined, especially for farm products. Heavy industry, mining, lumbering and agriculture were badly hit. The impact was much less severe in white collar and service sectors, but every city and state was hit hard. Upon accepting Democratic nomination for president on July 2, 1932, Roosevelt promised "a new deal for the American people," a phrase borrowed from the title of Stuart Chase's book A New Deal published earlier that year, and which has endured as a label for his administration and its many domestic changes. Meanwhile, other governments worldwide exacerbated economic recovery by continuing protectionist policies (high tariffs, import quotas, and barter agreements)—the very cause of the collapse of world trade in the late 1920s with its resultant job loss. Britain led by the Labour party, was unable to adopt major programs to stop its depression. That led to collapse of Labour and replacement in 1931 by a National coaltion (predominantly Conservative). As a result there was no "new deal" in Britain. In Nazi Germany, economic recovery was pursued through wage controls, suppression of unions, and spending programs such as public works; large-scale rearmament came later in the 1930s. In Mussolini's Italy, the economic controls of his corporate state were tightened. In the Soviet Union, Stalin continued his massive program of economic planning and state ownership. The apparent failure of capitalism led many Americans to flirt with communist or fascist ideology. Roosevelt entered office with no single ideology or plan for dealing with the depression. He was willing to try anything, and indeed in the "First New Deal" (1933-34) virtually every organized group (except Socialists) gained much of what they demanded. This "First New Deal" thus was self-contradictory, pragmatic, and experimental. The economy eventually recovered from the deep pit of 1932, and started heading upward again until 1937. Whether the New Deal was responsible for the recovery, or whether it even slowed the recovery, is a subject of debate. The New Deal drew heavily on the experiences of its leaders; it reflected the ideas of, and was influenced by, the programs that Roosevelt and most of his original associates had absorbed in the progressive era, while serving in the Wilson administration, especially the emergency of World War I. Some New Dealers, led by Louis Brandeis and Thurmond Arnold tried to revive the Progressive crusade against monopolies, but made little headway. Other New Dealers, such as Hugh Johnson of the NRA harked back to the wartime controls and spending of 1917-1918. Roosevelt brought together the Brain Trust of academic advisors.

The First Hundred Days

Brain Trust Having won a decisive victory in the 1932 presidential election, and with his party having decisively swept Congressional elections across the nation, the new president entered office with unprecedented political capital. Furthermore, many Congressmen had their favorite projects, like the TVA plan of Senator George Norris, which the administration adopted and treated as its own. Finally there were numerous Hoover plans that the discredited Hoover could not get passed but were ready to go, such as the emergency banking laws. Americans of all political persuasions were demanding immediate action, and Washington responded with a remarkable series of new programs in the “first hundred days” of the administration.

The "bank holiday" and the Emergency Banking Act

Upon taking office the administration moved readily to take a series of measures to restore a banking system that was frozen and almost in collapse. On March 6, the president issued an order closing all U.S. banks for four days until Congress could meet in a special session. By demonstrating that the federal government was stepping in to stop the alarming pattern of bank failures, the action created a general sense of relief. (Earlier, many states had already closed down the banks before March 6.) Three days later, Roosevelt sent to Congress the Emergency Banking Act, drafted in large part by officials appointed by the Hoover administration. The bill provided for Treasury Department to initiate reserve requirements and a federal bailout to large failing institutions. Congress passed the bill within four hours of its introduction. Three-quarters of the banks in the Federal Reserve System reopened within the next three days, and billions of dollars in "hoarded" currency and gold flowed back into them within a month, thus stabilizing the banking system. Economic indicators show the economy reached nadir in the first days of March, then began a steady, sharp upward recovery that persisted until 1937.

The Economy Act

The Economy Act, drafted by Budget Director Lewis Douglas passed on March 20, 1933. The act proposed to balance the "regular" (non-emergency) federal budget by cutting the salaries of government employees and cutting pensions to veterans by as much as 15 percent. It saved $500 million a year and reassured deficit hawks like Douglas that the new president was as fiscally conservative. Roosevelt argued there were two budgets: the "regular" federal budget which he balanced, and the "emergency budget" needed to defeat the depression. It was imbalanced on a temporary basis. Roosevelt thus reflected the classical Democratic party position, dating back to Grover Cleveland, Andrew Jackson, and Thomas Jefferson, that federal deficit spending was economically unwise and morally repugnant, and he redeemed his campaign promises in favor of a balanced budget. Douglas, however, rejecting the distinction between a regular and emergency budget, resigned in 1934, and became an outspoken critic of the New Deal. Roosevevelt strenuously opposed the Bonus Bill that would give World War One veterans a cash bonus. Finally [http://books.google.com/books?ie=ISO-8859-1&hl=en&id=pjg46RxOdZUC&pg=PA296&lpg=PA296&dq=bonus+bill+fdr&prev=http://books.google.com/books%3Fq%3Dbonus%2Bbill%2Bfdr%26lr%3D%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26start%3D10&sig=TbXyOMTh3rdX9i_niVW2oNHUxYs Congress passed it over his veto in 1936], and the Treasury distributed $1.5 billion in cash to 4 million veterans just before the election.

The Farm Programs

Roosevelt was keenly interested in farm issues, and emphasized that true prosperity would not return until farming was prosperous. Many different programs were directed at farmers. The first hundred days produced a federal program to protect commercial farmers from the uncertainties of the depression through subsidies and production controls. This program began with the Agricultural Adjustment Act, creating the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), which Congress passed in May 1933. The Act reflected the desires of leaders of major farm organizations, especially the Farm Bureau, and reflected debates among Roosevelt's farm advisors such as Henry A. Wallace, Rex Tugwell, and George Peek. The AAA implemented a provision for crop reductions known as the "domestic allotment" system of the act. Under this system producers of corn, cotton, dairy products, hogs, rice, tobacco, and wheat would decide on production limits for their crops. The AAA would then pay land owners subsidies for leaving some of their land idle with funds provided by a new tax on food processing. Farm prices were to be subsidized up to the point of parity. Some crops were ordered to be destroyed and some livestock slaughtered to maintain prices. The idea was that the less produced, the higher the price, and the farmer would benefit. The government created shortage led to smaller supplies so farm incomes increased significantly in the first three years of the New Deal. The AAA established an important and long-lasting federal role in the planning on the entire agricultural sector of the economy. The AAA did not provide for any sharecroppers or tenants or farm laborers who might become unemployed, but there were other New Deal programs especially for them. Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, and many New Dealers were highly sympathetic to the marginal farmers who lived on the land in severe poverty, especially in the South. Major programs addressed to their needs included the Resettlement Administration (RA), the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and rural welfare projects sponsored by the WPA, NYA, Forest Service and CCC, including school lunches, building new schools, opening roads in remote areas, reforestation, and purchase of marginal lands to enlarge national forests. In 1936 the Supreme Court declared the AAA to be unconstitutional, stating that "a statutory plan to regulate and control agricultural production, [is] a matter beyond the powers delegated to the federal government..."

Other initiatives

Also early in Roosevelt's first term, the administration launched a new federal regulatory agency to oversee the stock market dubbed the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Another agency, the FDIC Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation set out to reform of the banking system by setting up a system of insurance for deposits. The administration launched a series of relief measures and welfare agencies to give meaningful jobs to the unemployed, especially unskilled laborers. The largest programs were the Civilian Conservation Corps(CCC), the Civil Works Administration(CWA), the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the National Youth Administration(NYA), and above all, the Works Progress Administration(WPA). All these emergency programs were terminated in 1942-43, when unemployment had vanished due to World War II related employment offers. In 1933 the administration launched the Tennessee Valley Authority TVA, a project involving planning on an unprecedented scale in order to curb flooding, generate electricity, and modernize the very poor farms in the Tennessee Valley region of the Southern United States. In a measure that garnered substantial popular support, Roosevelt in his first days supported and signed a bill to legalize the manufacture and sale of beer, an interim measure pending the repeal of Prohibition, for which a constitutional amendment (the Twenty-first) was already in process. A separate set of programs operated in Puerto Rico, headed by the [http://books.google.com/books?ie=UTF-8&hl=en&id=tml-hBBfBw4C&dq=puerto+rico+jones+act&prev=http://books.google.com/books%3Fq%3Dpuerto%2Brico%2Bjones%2Bact%26lr%3D%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26start%3D40&lpg=PA124&pg=PA126&sig=Z-X29WatmB72daB9PAYIhYYG0Ik Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration]. It promoted land reform and helped small farms; it set up farm cooperatives, promoted crop diversification, and helped local industry. It was directed by Ernest Gruening.

The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA)

Business, labor, and government cooperation

Ernest Gruening Besides programs for immediate 'relief' the New Deal started quickly on an agenda of long-term 'reform' so that another depression would not happen. Falling prices hurt the economy; the New Dealers responded to demands to inflate the currency by a variety of means. Another group of reformers sought to build consumer and farmer co-ops as a counterweight to big business. The consumer co-ops did not take off, but the Rural Electrification Administration used co-ops to bring electricity to rural areas. (As of 2005, many still operate.) The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), was the most publicized reform of the first Hundred Days; it passed in June, 1933. It guaranteed to workers of the right of collective bargaining and helped spur union organizing drives in major industries. (Much faster growth of union membership came after the 1935 Wagner Act.) Responding to business clamor for anti-deflationary trade associate agreements, the NIRA established the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which attempted to stabilize prices and wages through cooperative "code authorities" involving government, business, and labor. The new program was hailed at its inception as a miracle. Indeed, it had something for everyone. Just as business leaders hailed it as the beginning of a new era of cooperation between government and industry, labor leaders hailed it as a "Magna Carta" for trade unions. To prime the pump and cut unemployment, the NIRA created the Public Works Administration (PWA), a major program of public works. PWA spent $6 billion with private companies to build 34,500 projects, many of them quite large.

The NRA "Blue Eagle" campaign

Public Works Administration At the center of the NIRA was the National Recovery Administration (NRA), headed by former general Hugh Johnson. Johnson called on every business establishment in the nation to accept a stopgap "blanket code": a minimum wage of between 20 and 40 cents an hour, a maximum workweek of 35 to 40 hours, and the abolition of child labor. Johnson and Roosevelt contended that the "blanket code" would raise consumer purchasing power and increase employment. To mobilize political support for the NRA, and the administrations "blanket code", Johnson launched the "NRA Blue Eagle" campaign. The "Blue Eagle" was to be displayed in commercial establishments by employers who accepted the provisions of the blanket code. Blue Eagle flags, posters, and stickers, with the slogan "We Do Our Part," rapidly became visible in shops and workplaces throughout the country. Meanwhile, Johnson needed extraordinary public and corporate support for enough bargaining strength to negotiate the codes with both business and labor. Cooperation proved to be a great burden; a firm could, after all, ignore such codes in search for a competitive advantage. In the short run, enough support among key sectors of society was generated. Even so, Johnson won agreements from almost every major industry in the nation. Hugh Johnson On May 27 1935, the NRA was found to be unconstitutional by a unanimous decision of the US Supreme Court in the case of Schechter v. United States on the grounds that its codes were an illegal delegation of legislative authority to the executive branch and an excessive use of the commerce clause.

The Second New Deal

Legislative successes and failures

In the spring of 1935, responding to the setbacks in the Court, a new skepticism in Congress, and the growing popular clamor for more dramatic action, the administration proposed or endorsed several important new initiatives. Historians refer to them as the "Second New Deal" and note that it was more radical, more pro-labor and anti-business, than the "First New Deal" of 1933-34. The National Labor Relations Act (July 5), also known as the Wagner Act, revived and strengthened the protections of collective bargaining contained in the original (and now unconstitutional) NIRA. The result was a tremendous growth of membership in the labor unions comprising the American Federation of Labor. Labor thus became a major component of the New Deal political coalition. Roosevelt nationalized unemployment relief through the Works Progress Administration (WPA), headed by close friend Harry Hopkins. It created hundreds of thousands of low-skilled blue collar jobs for unemployed men (and some for unemployed women and white collar workers). Applicants for WPA jobs did not have to be Democrats, but their foremen quickly explained that Roosevelt created their paychecks and that conservative Republicans wanted to abolish the program. The National Youth Administration was the semi-autonomous WPA program for youth. Its Texas director, Lyndon Baines Johnson, later used the NYA as a model for some of his Great Society programs in the 1960s. But the most important achievement of 1935, and perhaps the New Deal as a whole, was the Social Security Act (August 14), which established a system of insurance against Old Age, unemployment insurance, and welfare benefits for such protected groups as dependent children and the handicapped, establishing a framework for U.S. welfare system. He decided that it should be funded by payroll taxes rather than from the general fund; he said "We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program."

Defeat: Court Packing and Executive Reorganization

Roosevelt, however, emboldened by the triumphs of his first term, set out in 1937 to consolidate authority within the government in ways that provoked powerful opposition. Early in the year, he asked Congress to expand the number of justices on the Supreme Court so as to allow him to appoint members sympathetic to his ideas and hence tip the ideological balance of the Court. In one sense the proposal succeeded; Justice Owen Roberts, almost certainly in response to the threat, switched positions and began voting to uphold New Deal measures, effectively creating a liberal majority in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish and National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation. Journalists called this change the "switch in time that saved nine." But the "court packing plan," as it was known, did lasting political damage to Roosevelt and was finally rejected by Congress in July. At about the same time, the administration proposed a plan to reorganize the executive branch in ways that would significantly increase the president's control over the bureaucracy. Like the Court-packing plan, executive reorganization garnered opposition from those who feared a "Roosevelt dictatorship" and failed in Congress; a watered-down version of the bill finally won passage in 1939.

Historical assessment

Historians on the right and left have generally been disappointed with Roosevelt's second term. On the right, there have been charges of an FDR "executive dictatorship" since the 1930s. Journalist John T. Flynn, for example, denounced FDR as a socialistic radical and a despot in The Roosevelt Myth (1956). Conversely, historians on the left have denounced the New Deal as a conservative phenomenon that let slip the opportunity to radically reform capitalism. Since the 1960s, "New Left" historians have been among the New Deal's harsh critics. (For a list of relevant works, see the list of suggested readings appearing toward the bottom of the article.) Barton J. Bernstein, in a 1968 essay, compiled a chronicle of missed opportunities and inadequate responses to problems. The New Deal may have saved capitalism from itself, Bernstein charged, but it had failed to help—and in many cases actually harmed—those groups most in need of assistance. Paul K. Conkin in The New Deal (1967) similarly chastised the government of the 1930s for its policies toward marginal farmers, for its failure to institute sufficiently progressive tax reform, and its excessive generosity toward select business interests. Howard Zinn, in an essay in 1966, criticized the New Deal for working actively to actually preserve the worst evils of capitalism. Yet, much of the more recent work on the New Deal has been less interested in the question of whether the New Deal was a "conservative" or "revolutionary" phenomenon than in the question of constraints within which it was operating. Political sociologist Theda Skocpol, in an influential series of articles, has emphasized the issue of "state capacity" as an often-crippling constraint. Ambitious reform ideas often failed, she argued because of the absence of a government bureaucracy with significant strength and expertise to administer them. Other more recent works have stressed the political constraints that the New Deal encountered. Both in Congress and among certain segments of the population conservative inhibitions about government remained strong; thus some scholars have stressed that the New Deal was not just a product of its liberal backers, but also a product of the pressures of its conservative opponents.

The New Deal and the "broker state"

Theda Skocpol's "Construction of a Dam" (1939), a portion of which is seen here, is characteristic of much of the national mural art of the 1930s. Workers are seen in heroic poses, laboring in unison to complete a great public project.]]

Government role: balance labor, business and farming

The New Deal was to elevate and strengthen new interest groups so as to allow them to compete more effectively for the interests by having the federal government evolve into an arbitrator in competition among all elements and classes of society, acting as a force that could mediate when necessary to help some groups and limit the power of others. By the end of the 1930s, business found itself competing for influence with an increasingly powerful labor movement, one that was engaged in mass mobilization and sometimes militant action; with an organized agricultural economy, and occasionally with aroused consumers. The New Deal accomplished this by creating a series of state institutions that greatly, and permanently, expanded the role of the federal government in American life. The government was now committed to providing at least minimal assistance to the poor and unemployed; to protecting the rights of labor unions; to stabilizing the banking system; to building low-income housing; to regulating financial markets; to subsidizing agricultural production; and to doing many other things that had not previously been federal responsibilities. Thus, perhaps the strongest legacy of the New Deal, in other words, was to make the federal government a protector of interest groups and a supervisor of competition among them. As a result of the New Deal, political and economic life became politically more competitive than before, with workers, farmers, consumers, and others now able to press their demands upon the government in ways that in the past had been available only to the corporate world. Hence the frequent description of the government the New Deal created as the "broker state," a state brokering the competing claims of numerous groups. If there was more political competition, there was less market competition. Farmers were not alowed to sell for less than the official price. The transportation industry (especially airlines, trucking and railroads) was tightly regulated so that every firm had a guaranteed market and management and labor had high profits and high wages, all at the cost of high prices and much inefficiency. Quotas in the oil industry were fixed by the state Texas Railroad Commission [http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/RR/mdr1.html] with the federal [http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/CC/mlc3.html Connally Hot Oil Act of 1935] guaranteeing that illegal "hot oil" would not be sold. To the New Dealers, the free market meant "cut-throat competition" and they considered that evil. Not until the 1970s and 1980s would most of the New Deal regulations be relaxed. The liberal assumptions that the New Deal acted as the foe of private business interests have been challenged. After all, in many cases New Deal efforts were intended to enhance the position of private entrepreneurs—especially their concerns over inflation—even, at times, at the cost of some of the liberal reform goals that some administration officials espoused. The New Deal also did enhance the positions of some previously disadvantaged groups, but did little or nothing for many others, especially blacks, sharecroppers, and the urban poor. Thus, it did not transform American capitalism in any genuinely radical way. Except in the field of labor relations, corporate power remained nearly as free from government regulation in 1939 as it had been in 1933, but that changed dramatically during the war, as Washington took control over wage rates, prices, and allocation of raw materials, and sent military officers into munitions plants. All the relief programs were closed down during the war, but one major program survived--Social Security--to become the liberal hallmark of the New Deal into the 21st century.

African Americans

Texas Railroad Commission [http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/RR/mdr1.html African Americans benefited in significant though limited ways from New Deal relief programs. The WPA, NYA, and CCC allocated 10% of their budgets to blacks (who comprised about 10% of the total population, and 20% of the poor). They operated separate all-black units with the same pay and conditions as white units. The African American community responded favorably, so that by 1936 the majority who voted (usually in the North) were voting Democratic. This was a sharp realignment from 1932, when the most African Americans preferred the Republican ticket. The New Deal thus established a political alliance between African Americans and the Democratic Party that survives into the 21st century. The great majority of Southern Congressmen supported the New Deal, but Roosevelt knew they would revolt if he tried to abolish segregation or make lynching a federal crime. The NRA tolerated widespread practices of paying blacks less than whites; blacks were largely excluded from employment at the TVA; the FHA refused to provide mortgages to blacks moving into white neighborhoods; and the AAA was ineffectual in protecting the interests of black sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Some liberal historians argue the New Deal laid the ground work for the "broker state" to be expanded a generation later, mostly through the work of the next wave of liberal reform—the civil rights movement and the Great Society—to embrace groups marginalized in the 1930s. However many African American historians insist that the Civil Rights movement owed everything to black activists, and very little to the New Deal. Note that the New Deal was especially beneficial to white ethnic minorities, who responded with 80-90% of their votes for Roosevelt's reelection.

The recession of 1937 and recovery

As the Depression wore on, Roosevelt tried public works, farm subsidies and other devices to restart the economy, but he never completely gave up trying to balance the budget. Unemployment remained high throughout the New Deal years. On the whole, however, the direction of the economy was steadily upward from March, 1933, until a sudden unexpected downturn that started in May 1937 and continuing through June 1938. Production declined sharply, as did profits and employment. Unemployment jumped from 14.3% in 1937 to 19.0% in 1938. The administration reacted by launching a rhetorical campaign against big business as the villain. Talk of a strong antitrust effort went nowhere, and ended once the war began because the nation needed all its business executives to expand production, not defend lawsuits. The administration's other response to the deepening recession of 1937 had more tangible results. Ignoring the protests of the Treasury Department and responding to the urgings of the converts to Keynesian economics and others in his administration, Roosevelt abandoned his efforts to balance the budget and launched a $5 billion spending program in the spring of 1938, an effort to increase mass purchasing power. The Keynesian inspiration was problematical; the idea of priming the pump with deficit spending was Hoover's plan in 1930.

World War II and the end of the Great Depression

The Depression, however, continued until the U.S. entered the Second World War; Roosevelt, once committed to war in Europe and Asia, then had little choice. Under the special circumstances of war mobilization, massive war spending doubled the GNP. Businessmen ignored the mounting national debt and heavy new taxes, redoubling their efforts for greater output as an expression of patriotism. Patriotism drove most people to voluntarily work overtime and give up leisure activities to make money after so many hard years. Patriotism meant that people accepted rationing and price controls for the first time. Cost-plus pricing in munitions contracts guaranteed that businesses would make a profit no matter how many mediocre workers they employed, no matter how inefficient the techniques they used. The demand was for a vast quantity of war supplies as soon as possible, regardless of cost. Business hired every person in sight, even driving sound trucks up and down city streets begging people to apply for jobs. New workers were needed to replace the 12 million working aged men servining in the military. These events magnified the role of the federal government in the national economy. In 1929 federal expenditures accounted for only 3 percent of GNP. Between 1933 and 1939, federal expenditure tripled, and Roosevelt's critics charged that he was turning America into a socialist state. However, spending on the New Deal was far smaller than on the war effort. In the first peacetime year of 1946, federal spending still amounted to $62 billion, or 30 percent of GNP. Wartime spending and other measures were able to provide an enormous output. Between 1939 and 1944 (the peak of wartime production), the nation's total output almost doubled. This, along with the conscription and removal of soldiers, meant that unemployment plummeted—from 14 percent in 1940 to less than 2 percent in 1943 as the labor force grew by ten million. Millions of farmers left marginal operations, students quit school, and housewives returned to the labor force. The war economy was not run on the basis of free enterprise, but was the result of government/business sectionalism, of government bankrolling business. A major result of the full employment at high wages was a sharp, permanent decrease in the level of inequality. The gap between rich and poor narrowed dramatically in the area of nutrition, because food rationing and price controls guaranteed a reasonably priced diet to everyone. Large families that had been poverty-stricken in the 1930s had four or five or more workers, and shot to the top one-third income bracket. Overtime made for huge paychecks in the munitions factories; white collar workers were fully employed too, but they did not receive overtime and their salary scale was no longer much higher than the blue collar wage scale.

The legacies of the New Deal

socialist Some economists argue that although the New Deal did not end the depression, all in all it helped to prevent the economy from decaying further by increasing the regulatory functions of the federal government in ways that helped stabilize previous trouble areas of the economy: the stock market, the banking system, and others. Others argue that it worsened the depression. All analysts agree the New Deal produced a new political coalition that sustained the Democratic Party as the majority party in national politics for more than a generation after its own end. Roosevelt's 12 years in office saw a dramatic increase in the power of the federal government as a whole. Roosevelt also established the presidency as the preeminent center of authority within the federal government. By creating a large array of agencies protecting various groups of citizens—workers, farmers, and others—who suffered from the crisis, enabling them to challenge the powers of the corporations, the Roosevelt administration generated a set of political ideas—known to later generations as New Deal liberalism—that remained a source of inspiration and controversy for decades and that helped shape the next great experiments in liberal reform, the civil rights movement and Great Society of the 1960s.

Most Important New Deal programs

Great Society The New Deal was composed of countless programs, labeled an "alphabet soup" by its detractors. Among the New Deal acts were the following, most of them passed within the first 100 days of FDR's administration. Most were abolished around 1943, others remain in operation in 2005: Reconstruction Finance Corporation a Hoover agency exapanded under Jesse Jones to make large loans to big business. Ended in 1954. Federal Emergency Relief Agency (FERA) a Hoover program to create unskilled jobs for relief; replaced by WPA in 1935.
- United States bank holiday, 1933: closed all banks until they became certified by federal reviewers
- Abandonment of gold standard, 1933: gold reserves no longer backed currency; still exists
- Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), 1933: employed young men to perform unskilled work in rural areas; under Army supervision; separate program for Native Americans
- Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 1933: effort to modernize very poor region (most of Tennessee), centered on dams that generated electricity on the Tennessee River; still exists
- Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), 1933: raised fame prices by cutting total farm output of major crops (and hogs)
- National Recovery Act (NRA), 1933: industries set up codes to reduce unfair competition, raise wages and prices;
- Public Works Administration (PWA), 1933: built large public works projects; used private contractors (did not directly hire unemployed)
- Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) / Glass-Steagall Act: insures deposits in banks in order to restore public confidence in banks; still exists
- Securities Act of 1933, created the SEC, 1933: codified standards for sale and purchase of stock, required risk of investments to be accurately disclosed; still exists
- Civil Works Administration (CWA), 1933-34: provided temporary jobs to millions of unemployed
- Indian Reorganization Act, 1934 moved away from assimilation
- Social Security Act (SSA), 1935: provided financial assistance to: elderly, handicapped, paid for by employee and employer payroll contributions; required years contributions, so first payouts were 1942; still exists
- Works Progress Administration (WPA), 1935: a national labor program for 2+ million unemployed; created useful construction work for unskilled men; also sewing projects for women and arts projects for unemployed artists, musicians and writers.
- National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) / Wagner Act, 1935: set up National Labor Relations Board to supervise labor-management relations; In 1930s it strongly favored labor unions. Modified by Taft-Hartley (1947); still exists
- Judicial Reorganization Bill, 1937: gave President power to appoint a new Supreme Court judge for every judge 70 years or older; failed to pass Congress
- Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), 1938: established a maximum normal work week of 40 hours, and a minimum pay of 40 cents/hour; still exists

Scholarly Secondary Sources from Different Points of View

- Badger, Anthony J. The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933-1940. (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), a balanced overview.
- Bernstein, Barton J. "The New Deal: The Conservative Achievements of Liberal Reform." In Barton J. Bernstein, ed., Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History, pp. 263-88. (New York: Knopf, 1968), an influential New Left attack on the New Deal.
- Bernstein, Irving. Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), the best history of labor in the era.
- Best, Gary Dean. Pride, Prejudice, and Politics. (New York: Praeger, 1990), a conservative critique.
- Brinkley, Alan. The End Of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War. (New York: Vintage, 1995)
- Conkin, Paul K. The New Deal. (Arlington Heights, Ill.: AHM, 1967), a brief New Left critique.
- Fraser, Steve and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), essays focused on the long-term results.
- Gordon, Colin. New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics, 1920-1935 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
- Graham, Otis L. and Meghan Robinson Wander, eds. Franklin D. Roosevelt: His Life and Times. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985. The best encyclopedic reference.
- Kennedy, David M. Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945. New York: Oxford UP, 1999, the best recent scholarly narrative.
- Leuchtenberg, William E. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940. (1963). A standard interpretive history.
- Patterson, James T. The New Deal and the States: Federalism in Transition (Princeton UP, 1969).
- Powell, Jim. FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression. (New York: Crown Forum, 2003), a stinging atack from the right.
- Rothbard, Murray. America's Great Depression. Princeton, NJ, 1963, an analytic attack from a leading libertarian.
- Saloutos, Theodore. The American Farmer and the New Deal (1982).
- Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., The Age of Roosevelt, 3 vols, (1957-1960), the classic narrative history. Online at [http://image.ulib.org/cgi-bin/handlers/handle8?call=15522.20704 vol 2] [http://delta.ulib.org/zoom/record.html?id=15523 vol 3]
- Sitkoff, Harvard. ed. Fifty Years Later: The New Deal Evaluated. (New York; McGraw Hill, 1984). A friendly liberal evaluation.
- Skocpol, Theda, and Kenneth Finegold. "State Capacity and Economic Intervention in the Early New Deal." Political Science Quarterly 97 (1982): 255-78.
- Zinn, Howard, ed. New Deal Thought. (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), a compilation of highly useful primary sources.

Primary Sources (not online)

- Chase, Stuart; A New Deal. New York:The Macmillan Company, 1932.
- Nixon, Edgar B. ed. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Foreign Affairs (3 vol 1969), covers 1933-37. 2nd series 1937-39 available on microfiche and in a 14 vol print edition at some academic libraries.
- Roosevelt, Franklin D.; Rosenman, Samuel Irving, ed. The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt (13 vol, 1938, 1945); public material only (no letters); covers 1928-1945.
- [http://www.lexisnexis.com/academic/2upa/Aph/fdrDocumentary.asp Documentary History of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration] 20 vol. available in some large academic libraries.

Online Primary Sources

- [http://www.nisk.k12.ny.us/fdr/] FDR Cartoon Archive, 2000+ original editorial cartoons
- [http://newdeal.feri.org/texts/default.cfm] New Deal Document Library
- [http://newdeal.feri.org/library/default.cfm] New Deal Photo Library
- [http://www.mhric.org/fdr/fdr.html] Fireside Chats of Franklin D. Roosevelt

Online Secondary Sources

- [http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/NN/ncn4.html] National Youth Administration (in Texas)
- [http://delta.ulib.org/zoom/record.html?id=15523] Arthur Schlesigner, Jr. ' ' The Age of Roosevelt ' ' (3 vol, 1957-60).
- [http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1623 The New Deal Debunked (again)] by Thomas DiLorenzo
- [http://www.wealth4freedom.com/truth/2/FDR.htm Franklin Delano Roosevelt and His Fraudulent System]
- [http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:fHF_o54pFCEJ:www.fee.org/pdf/the-freeman/1005RME When the Supreme Court Stopped Economic Fascism in America] by Richard M. Ebeling - discusses the new deal as economic fascism Category:U.S. presidential domestic programs ja:ニューディール政策 ko:뉴딜정책

Dixiecrats

The term Dixiecrat is a portmanteau of Dixie, referring to the Southern United States, and Democrat, referring to the United States Democratic Party. Initially, it referred to a 1948 splinter from the party: for over a century, white Southerners had overwhelmingly been Democrats, but that year many bolted the party and supported Strom Thurmond's third-party candidacy for president of the United States. Over the next several decades, as the white South slowly re-aligned from the Democrats to the Republicans, the term came to have a broader usage, including, for example, with reference to the members of the Electoral College who in the election of 1960 voted for Byrd rather than Kennedy, or the white Southern voters and electors who in 1968 supported Wallace. The term has also been used to refer to conservative white Southerners who remain within the Democratic Party, and those who were formerly Democrats but now identify as Republicans.

1948 presidential election

The States' Rights Democratic Party was a short-lived splinter group that broke from the Democratic Party in 1948. The States' Rights Democratic Party opposed racial integration and wanted to retain Jim Crow laws and racial segregation. The party slogan was "Segregation Forever!" Members of the States' Rights Democratic Party, were often known as Dixiecrats. The party was formed after thirty-five delegates from Mississippi and Alabama walked out of the 1948 Democratic National Convention. Even before the convention started, the Southern delegates were upset by President Harry S. Truman's executive order to racially integrate the armed forces. The walkout was prompted by a controversial speech by Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota urging the party to adopt an anti-segregationist plank in the platform. After President Truman's endorsement of the civil rights plank, Strom Thurmond, governor of South Carolina, helped organize the walkout delegates into a separate party, whose platform was ostensibly concerned with states' rights. The Dixiecrats held their convention in Birmingham, Alabama, where they nominated Thurmond for president and Fielding L. Wright, governor of Mississippi, for vice president. Dixiecrat leaders worked to have Thurmond-Wright declared the "official" Democratic Party ticket in Southern states. They succeeded only in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina; in other states, they were forced to run as a third-party ticket. These included Arkansas, whose governor-elect, Sid McMath, a young prosecutor and decorated World War II Marine veteran, vigorously supported Truman in speeches across the region, much to the consternation of the sitting governor, Ben Laney, an ardent Thurmond supporter. Laney later used McMath's pro-Truman stance against him during his 1950 re-election bid which McMath won handily. Efforts to paint other Truman loyalists as "turncoats" generally failed, although the seeds of discontent were planted which in years to come took their toll on Southern moderates, among them Congressman Brooks Hays of the Second (central) District of Arkansas, whose efforts at reconciliation during the 1957 Little Rock School Crisis made him vulnerable to defeat in 1958 by a segregationist surrogate fielded by forces loyal to then-Governor Orval Faubus, whose justification for using the national guard to bar entry to black pupils in defiance of a federal court order echoed much of the 1948 Dixiecrat platform. On election day 1948, the Thurmond-Wright ticket carried the previously solid Democratic states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina, receiving 1,169,021 popular votes and 39 electoral votes. The split in the Democratic party in the 1948 election was seen as virtually guaranteeing a victory by the Republican nominee, Thomas E. Dewey of New York, yet Truman won re-election in an upset.

Subsequent elections

The Dixiecrat Party largely dissolved after the 1948 election. Senators Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms eventually switched parties and joined the Republicans. Several others remained in the Democratic Party and went on to become prominent Democratic Senators. These former Dixiecrats, turned Senators, went on to serve multiple terms in the service of their respective states. These long careers in the Senate elevated their seniority putting them in positions of power and prestige. Today, one original member of the Dixiecrat Party remains in public service as a Senator, Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia. None of these Representatives and Senators who bucked the Democratic party ever suffered punishment from their caucuses by expulsion or demotion of seniority or removal from prized committee chairmanships. Regardless of the power struggle within the Democratic Party, concerning segregation policy, the south remained a strongly Democratic voting block for local, state, and federal Congressional elections. This was not true of Presidential elections. In the 1960s, the courting of white Southern Democratic voters was the basis of the "southern strategy" of the Republican Party's Presidential Campaigns. Republican Presidential Candidate Barry Goldwater carried the Deep South in 1964, despite losing in a landslide in the rest of the nation to President Lyndon B Johnson of Texas. Johnson surmised that his advocacy behind passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would lose the South for the Democratic party. The only Democratic presidential candidate after 1956 to solidly carry the Deep South was President Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election. Into the twenty-first century, the South has changed from a Democratic monolith to a majority Republican sector of the country with GOP gains in state legislatures. Many of the political ideologies of the Dixiecrats have been so totally adopted by the Republicans that these principles are now considered to be the core values of the modern Republican Party. This change, which began in 1972 with Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy", was followed up by the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the reconquest of the House of Representatives in 1994 by Newt Gingrich, reached its ultimate pinnacle in 2000 with the election of George W. Bush, giving religiously motivated former Dixiecrats total control over all three branches of the federal government. It has also caused significant friction with the few remaining paleo-conservatives in the GOP as they see the Dixiecrat transplants to be openly hostile towards limited-government conservatism and in favor of more authoritarian government.

Notable members

Senators

- (D)VA Harry F. Byrd, 1933-1965
- (D)VA A. Willis Robertson, 1946-1966
- (D)WV Robert C. Byrd, 1959-Present
- (D)MS John C. Stennis, 1947-1989
- (D)MS James O. Eastland, 1941-1941,1943-1978
- (D)LA Allen J. Ellender, 1937-1972
- (D)LA Russell B. Long, 1948-1987
- (D)NC Sam Ervin, 1954-1974
- (D)NC Everett Jordan, 1958-1973
- (R)NC Jesse Helms, 1973-2003
- (D)OK Thomas Pryor Gore, 1906-1921,1931-1937
- (D)AL J. Lister Hill, 1938-1969
- (D)AL John J. Sparkman, 1946-1979
- (D)FL Spessard Holland, 1946-1971
- (D)FL George Smathers, 1951-1969
- (D)SC Olin D. Johnston, 1945-1965
- (D,R)SC Strom Thurmond, 1954-1956,1956-2003
- (D)AR John McClellan, 1943-1977
- (D)GA Richard B. Russell, Jr., 1933-1971
- (D)GA Herman E. Talmadge, 1957-1981
- (D)TN Herbert S. Walters, 1963-1964

State governors

- Benjamin Travis Laney, Arkansas Governor
- Fielding Wright, Mississippi Governor
- Frank M. Dixon, Former Alabama Governor
- William H. Murray, Former Oklahoma Governor
- Mills E. Godwin Jr. governor of Virginia

Others

- Floyd Spence state representative from South Carolina
- Albert Watson while U.S. Representative from South Carolina
- Walter Sillers JR, Mississippi Speaker of the House
- Harvey T. Ross, Mississippi State Legislature
- Thomas P. Brady, Associate Justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court
- Gessner T. McCorvey, Alabama state Democratic Executive Committee Chairman
- Orval Faubus cadidate for president.
- Leander Perez, Louisiana political "leader"
- Horace C. Wilkinson, Birmingham attorney defender of the Klan and political "leader"
- Ross Lillard
- John Kasper
- Mrs. Anna B. Korn
- Mrs. Ruth Lackey
- Clark Hurd
- William E. Jenner
- Francis Haskell
- John Oliver Emmerich, Speech writer
- Hugh Roy Cullen
- T. Coleman Andrews
- John Steel Baston
- Dr. Frazier
- O. L. Penny
- Clifton Ratlift
- M. F. Ray
- Thomas Jefferson Tubb
- J.K. Wells
- Barney Wolverton
- Governor White
- Thomas H. Werdel

External links

- Scott E. Buchanan, [http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-1366 Dixiecrats], [http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org New Georgia Encyclopedia].
- [http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/showplatforms.php?platindex=SR1948 1948 Party Platform] Category:Historic United States political parties
- Category:portmanteaus ja:%E5%B7%9E%E6%A8%A9%E6%B0%91%E4%B8%BB%E5%85%9A

Liberal Party of Canada

The Liberal Party of Canada (French: Parti libéral du Canada) is Canada's current governing political party. It currently forms the federal government under Prime Minister Paul Martin. The Liberal Party has been in power in Canada for most of the past century. As of the end of 2005 it is one of only two parties that have governed Canada since Confederation; the other being the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada (one of the ancestors of the modern-day Conservative Party of Canada). Every Liberal leader in the 20th century and since has served as Prime Minister of Canada. The party, at least for the past few decades, has been a centrist party, combining a generally progressive social policy with moderate economics. The party, known colloquially as the "Grits" (originally "Clear Grits") has a reputation among members for being very united and loyal, though this is always called into question during leadership races. However, the party has recently been plagued by party infighting. The Liberal Party is a member of the Liberal International.
- For information about the 2004 election, including a list of nominated candidates see: Canadian federal election, 2004

History

(External Web Link http://www.liberal.ca/party_e.aspx?id=1 explores the orgins of the Liberal Party of Canada)

Origins

The Liberals are descended from the mid-19th century Reformers who agitated for responsible government throughout British North America. These included George Brown, Robert Baldwin, William Lyon Mackenzie and the Clear Grits in Upper Canada, Joseph Howe in Nova Scotia, and the Patriotes and Rouges in Lower Canada led by figures such as Louis-Joseph Papineau.

Confederation

At the time of the confederation of the former British colonies of Canada (now Ontario and Quebec), New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, the radical Liberals were marginalized by the more pragmatic Conservative coalition assembled under Sir John A. Macdonald. In the 30 years after Canadian confederation, the Liberals were consigned to opposition, with the exception of one stint in government. Alexander Mackenzie was able to lead the party to power in 1873 after the Macdonald government lost a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons because of the Pacific Scandal. Mackenzie subsequently won the 1874 election, but lost the government to Macdonald in 1878.

Laurier

1874 election] In their early history, the Liberals were the party of continentalism (free trade with the United States), and opposition to imperialism. The Liberals also became identified with the aspirations of Quebecers as a result of the growing hostility of French-Canadians to the Conservatives. The Conservatives lost the support of Quebecers because of the role of Conservative governments in the execution of Louis Riel, the suppression of the rights of French-Canadians outside of Quebec, and their role in the Conscription crisis of 1917. It was not until Wilfrid Laurier became leader that the Liberal Party emerged as a modern party. Laurier was able to capitalize on the Tories' alienation of French Canada by offering the Liberals as a credible alternative. Laurier was able to overcome the party's reputation for anti-clericalism that offended the still-powerful Quebec Catholic Church. In English-speaking Canada, the Liberal Party's support for free trade made it popular among farmers, and helped cement the party's hold in the growing prairie provinces. Laurier led the Liberals to power in the 1896 election, and oversaw a government that increased immigration in order to settle Western Canada. Laurier's government created of the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta out of the North-West Territories, and promoted the development of Canadian industry. The Liberals lost power in the 1911 election due to opposition to the party's policies on reciprocity (or free trade), and the creation of a Canadian navy. The Conscription crisis divided the party as many Liberals in English Canada supported conscription and Sir Robert Borden's Unionist government. With numerous Liberal candidates running as Unionists or Liberal-Unionists with the support of provincial Liberal parties in a number of provinces, the Laurier Liberals were reduced to a largely Quebec-based rump. The long term impact of the Conscription crisis benefited the party as the issue only added to the animosity of French-Canadians towards the Conservatives, making that party virtually unelectable in Quebec for decades.

Canadian sovereignty

rump] Under Laurier, and his successor William Lyon Mackenzie King, the Liberals promoted Canadian sovereignty and greater independence from the British Empire. In Imperial Conferences held throughout the 1920s, Canadian Liberal governments often took the lead in arguing that Britain and the dominions should have equal status, and against proposals for an imperial parliament that would have subsumed Canadian independence. After the King-Byng Affair of 1926, the Liberals argued that the Governor General of Canada should no longer be appointed on the recommendation of the British government. The decisions of the Imperial Conferences were formalized in the Statute of Westminster, which was actually passed in 1931, the year after the Liberals lost power. The Liberals also promoted the idea of Canada being responsible for its own foreign and defence policy. Initially, it was Britain which determined external affairs for the dominion. In 1905, Laurier created the Department of External Affairs, and in 1909 he appointed the first Secretary of State for External Affairs to Cabinet. It was also Laurier who first proposed the creation of a Canadian Navy in 1910. Mackenzie King appointed Vincent Massey the first Canadian ambassador to Washington in 1926, marking the Liberal government's insistence on having direct relations with the United States, rather than having Britain act on Canada's behalf.

Liberals and the welfare state

Britain] The Liberals have often been accused of, or credited with, simply advancing whatever policies would get them elected. In the period just before and after the Second World War, the party became a champion of 'progressive social policy'. Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King introduced several measures that led to the creation of Canada's welfare state (or social safety net). Bowing to popular pressure, Mackenzie King introduced the mother's allowance, a monthly payment to all mothers with young children. He also reluctantly introduced old age pensions when J. S. Woodsworth required it in exchange for his Cooperative Commonwealth Federation party's support of King's minority government. Later, Lester B. Pearson introduced universal health care, the Canada Pension Plan, Canada Student Loans, and the Canada Assistance Plan (which provided funding for provincial welfare programs).

Trudeau era

Canada Pension Plan] Under Pierre Trudeau, this mission evolved into the goal of creating a "just society". In recent years, however, the party has been accused of "campaigning on the left and governing from the right". The Trudeau Liberals became the champions of official bilingualism, passing the Official Languages Act, which gave the French and English languages equal status in Canada. Trudeau hoped that the promotion of bilingualism would cement Quebec's place in confederation, and counter growing calls for an independent Quebec. This policy aimed to transform Canada into a country where English and French-Canadians could live together in comfort, and could move to any part of the country without having to lose their language. While this has not occurred, official bilingualism has helped to halt the decline of the French language outside of Quebec, and has also ensured that all federal government services (as well as radio and television services provided by the government-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Radio-Canada) are available in both languages throughout the country. The Trudeau Liberals are also credited with support for official multiculturalism as a means of integrating immigrants into Canadian society without forcing them to shed their culture. As a result of this and a more sympathetic attitude by Liberals towards immigration policy, the party has built a base of support among recent immigrants and their children. The most lasting effect of the Trudeau years has been the patriation of the Canadian constitution and the creation of Canada's Charter of Rights. Trudeau Liberals support the concept of a strong, central government, and fought Quebec separatism, other forms of Quebec nationalism, and the granting of "distinct society" status to Quebec.

The post-Trudeau party in opposition

After Trudeau's retirement in 1984, many Liberals, such as Jean Chrétien and Clyde Wells, continued to adhere to Trudeau's concept of federalism. Others, such as John Turner, supported the failed Meech Lake and Charlottetown Constitutional Accords, which would have recognized Quebec as a "distinct society" and would have increased the powers of the provinces to the detriment of the federal government. Charlottetown Constitutional Accord] Under the party's new leader, John Turner, the Liberals lost power in the 1984 election, and were reduced to only 40 seats in the House of Commons. The Liberals began a long process of reconstruction. The 1988 election was notable for John Turner's strong opposition to the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement negotiated by Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Although most Canadians voted for parties opposed to free trade, the Tories were returned with a majority government, and implemented the deal.

The party under Chrétien

Turner resigned in 1990 due to growing discontent within the party with his leadership, and was replaced by bitter rival Jean Chrétien. Chrétien's Liberals campaigned in the 1993 election on the promise of renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and of replacing the Goods and Services Tax (GST). But when Chrétien took power, his government implemented only minor changes to NAFTA, embraced the free trade concept and -- with the exception of the replacement of the GST with the Harmonized Sales Tax in some Atlantic provinces -- broke his promise to replace the GST. While the Chrétien Liberals campaigned from the left, their time in power is most marked by the cuts made to many programs in order to balance the federal budget. Chrétien continued the Trudeau Liberal approach to federalism, and opposed making major concessions to Quebec and other provincialist factions. After a proposal for Quebec independence was narrowly defeated in the 1995 Quebec referendum, the Liberals passed the "Clarity Act" which outlines the federal government's preconditions for negotiating provincial independence. In Chrétien's final days, he supported same-sex marriage in Canada as well as decriminalizing the possession of small quantities of marijuana. Chrétien shocked and offended the United States when he pledged that his government would not support the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In part due to the fractured nature of the opposition in the House of Commons during his tenure, Chretien's Liberals remained very popular among Canadians, particularly compared to his predecessor as Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney.

Recent history

Paul Martin succeeded Chrétien in 2003. Despite the personal rivalry between the two, Martin was the architect of the Liberals' economic policies as Chrétien's Minister of Finance during the 1990s. He is expected to continue these policies, although there is speculation that he will be more flexible on the issue of federalism and possible constitutional concessions to the provinces. There is also a belief that he will formalize the role of Canada's major cities in confederation. In the June 28th, 2004 federal election, the Martin Liberals were returned to government, despite stronger competition from the newly-united Conservative Party led by Stephen Harper. The Liberal Party was reduced from a majority to a minority government due, in part, to a scandal in which advertising agencies supporting the Liberal Party received grossly inflated commissions for their services. This scandal is well known as the sponsorship scandal. It continues to be damaging to the party and serves as a threat to the Liberal's prospects of forming the government after the next federal election.

Liberal Party infighting

sponsorship scandal] The period between Paul Martin's assumption of the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada on November 14, 2003, and the 2004 Canadian election being called on May 23, 2004, saw a large amount of infighting within the party. Many pundits have dated the current split to that earlier era, arguing that there is a clear division between the socially-populist, federalist wing of the party represented by Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chrétien, and the constitutionally flexible, economically-minded wing of John Turner and Paul Martin. When the Liberals formed a majority government after the 1993 election with Chrétien at the helm, party unity was assured by placing Martin, whom Chrétien had defeated for the party leadership in 1990, in the crucial role of Minister of Finance. Martin was the clear successor to Chrétien, and Martin's wide-spread support ensured that most of the institutions of the Liberal Party were controlled by his allies. The split opened wider, however, in the summer of 2002 when Chrétien moved to curtail Martin's apparent campaigning for the leadership, after promising that he would remain prime minister until 2004, in defiance of the Martin camp's organizing. There are varying stories as to what actually occurred at this point. Chretien claims that Martin resigned from cabinet; Martin claims that Chretien fired him. Martin was replaced as Finance Minister by Deputy Prime Minister John Manley, who many saw as Chretien's preferred heir. Martin's influence in the party, and the fact that polls at the time indicated that Mr. Martin was a more popular leader among the Canadian public than Mr. Chretien, forced Chrétien to announce his retirement later in the year, earlier than he had originally hoped. Martin easily beat the unpopular Minister of Canadian Heritage Sheila Copps at the Liberal leadership convention in November 2003, and in December of that year Martin formed his government as Prime Minister. Chretien and Martin have reportedly had few words for each other since the summer of 2002. While the issue of the party leadership was settled, at the lower levels of the party considerable in-fighting began. Most of the Chrétien-era cabinet ministers were relegated to the backbenches and ministers such as John Manley, Allan Rock, Don Boudria, Sheila Copps, David Anderson, Herb Dhaliwal and Stephane Dion were moved into minor roles as Martin built his cabinet. Many of them decided to leave politics for the private sector. Some Chrétien loyalists refused to retire, hoping to remain as backbenchers. Unlike in previous elections, however, incumbent Liberals were not backed by the party in their ridings. In many cases, Chrétien allies faced challengers who received unofficial support from the Martinites. For example, the periodic redrawing of riding boundaries resulted in a high-profile battle between former cabinet minister Sheila Copps and future Martin House Leader Tony Valeri for a riding nomination. In late 2004, Paul Martin fired former supporter and Mississauga MP Carolyn Parrish from the Liberal Caucus after she told Martin he could "go to hell." Parrish currently sits as an independent in the House of Commons, but votes with the Liberals on almost all issues. Issues have also recently arisen between the largely Chrétien-appointed Liberal Senate Caucus and the Prime Minister's Office. Martin has also faced criticism for being closer with and more rewarding to recent political additions to the Liberal Party including MPs Jean Lapierre, Scott Brison, Ujjal Dosanjh, Keith Martin and most recently Belinda Stronach, as opposed to regular Liberal MPs. In April, 2005 David Kilgour, one of the party's two MPs from Alberta announced that he was leaving the party to sit as an independent member of the House of Commons due to the damaging allegations of corruption in the Liberal Party's Quebec wing based on testimony in the Gomery Commission inquiry. This was followed shortly thereafter by the announcement of Liberal MP Pat O'Brian that he too was departing from the Liberal Caucus because of the Prime Minister's decision to rush same-sex marriage legislation through the House of Commons. Pat O'Brian on May 17, 2005, announcing her decision to leave the Conservative Party in order to join the Liberal Party and Martin's cabinet.]] In May 2005, MP Belinda Stronach surprised many when she crossed the floor from the Conservative Party to join the Liberal Party. Some believed Stronach's departure could damage the Conservative Party's chances to attract socially liberal voters, particularly in Ontario. Others have raised suspicions about the timing and opportunism of Stronach's decision, noting that she became a cabinet minister immediately after crossing the floor, and that the departure came mere days before a crucial non-confidence vote in the house. Chrétien's supporters have suggested that Martin has used the scandal as a pretense to remove many Chrétien supporters, such as André Ouellet, Alfonso Gagliano, and Jean Pelletier, from their positions in government, crown corporations, and the party. The Chrétien camp contends that the Gomery commission was set up to make them look bad, and that it was not a fair investigation. Subsequent to the release of the first report, Chrétien has decided to take an action in Federal Court to review the commission report on the grounds that Gomery showed a "reasonable apprehension of bias", and that some conclusions didn't have an "evidentiary" basis. [http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20051101/gomeryreport_CHRETIENreaction_20051101/20051101?hub=TopStories]

Leaders of the Liberal Party

- George Brown (July 1 1867 - September 20 1867)¹ (unofficial)
- Alexander Mackenzie (March 6 1873 - April 27, 1880)
- Edward Blake (May 4, 1880 - June 2, 1887)
- Wilfrid Laurier (June 23, 1887 - February 17, 1919)
- Daniel Duncan McKenzie (February 17, 1919 - August 7, 1919 interim)
- William Lyon Mackenzie King (August 7, 1919 - August 6, 1948)
- Louis St. Laurent (August 7, 1948 - January 15, 1958)
- Lester B. Pearson (January 16, 1958 - April 5, 1968)
- Pierre Trudeau (April 6, 1968 - June 15, 1984)
- John Turner (June 16, 1984 - June 22, 1990)
- Jean Chrétien (June 23, 1990 - November 13, 2003)²
- Paul Martin (November 14, 2003 - present) NOTES: ¹ Brown was regarded by most Liberal candidates as their leader in the 1867 election but did not officially hold the title. Had he won a seat he would have almost certainly become Leader of the Opposition and had the Liberals won enough seats to form a government Brown would almost certainly have become Prime Minister. However, he failed in his bid for a seat in the House of Commons and the Liberals had no official leader until 1873. ² Herb Gray served as Leader of the Opposition from June 23 until Chrétien was re-elected to Parliament in December 1990, though he was never the leader or interim leader, of the Liberal party. The Liberal Party held its first leadership convention in 1919, electing William Lyon Mackenzie King as leader. Prior to that party leaders were chosen by caucus.

Election results 1867-2004

- 1953-1968 includes one Liberal-Labour Member of Parliament.
- In 1917, some Liberals ran under the Unionist banner, figures only count those who ran as "Laurier Liberals"

Provincial and territorial Liberal parties

Each province in Canada has its own Liberal Party. In most provinces, they are direct organizational affiliates with the federal Liberal party, much like the provincial sections of the New Democratic Party. These parties, and their leaders, are:
- Manitoba Liberal Party, Hon. Jon Gerrard, MLA
- New Brunswick Liberal Association, Shawn Graham, MLA
- Liberal Party of Newfoundland and Labrador, Hon. Gerry Reid (interim leader), MHA
- Nova Scotia Liberal Party, Francis MacKenzie
- Prince Edward Island Liberal Party, Robert Ghiz, MLA
- Saskatchewan Liberal Party, David Karwacki
- Yukon Liberal Party, Hon. Pat Duncan, MLA The Ontario Liberal Party (Hon. Dalton McGuinty, MPP, Premier of Ontario, leader) and Alberta Liberal Party (Kevin Taft, MLA, leader) are officially autonomous but are still closely associated with the federal Liberal Party. The Parti libéral du Québec (Hon. Jean Charest, MNA, Premier of Quebec, leader) and the British Columbia Liberal Party (Hon. Gordon Campbell, MLA, Premier of British Columbia, leader) use the Liberal name but are completely independent of the federal party and function as coalitions of Liberal and Conservative supporters. They do not support the Liberal Party in federal elections, preferring to remain neutral. In practice, these parties, especially the B.C. Liberals, are mostly conservative in orientation, though they do have prominent supporters of the federal Liberals in their caucuses. The Saskatchewan Party was an unofficial merger of the members of the Progressive Conservative Party of Saskatchewan and members of the Saskatchewan Liberal Party, now contains supporters of the federal Conservatives and federal Liberals in its ranks. The Saskatchewan Party is also completely independent and officially neutral when it comes to federal politics, although its only leaders have had roots in the Reform and Progressive Conservative parties of the past. The Northwest Territories and Nunavut have non-partisan legislatures, except for 1898 to 1905 when parties were elected, to the Northwest Territories, Northwest Territories Liberal Party formed the opposition for two elections.

External link

- [http://www.liberal.ca/ Liberal Party of Canada] (official website)
-

Region

Region can be used to mean either:
- any more or less well-defined geographical area of a country or continent, defined by geography, culture or history
- in political geography, an administrative subdivision of a country or of the European Union. It is a common English translation of the Russian and Ukrainian administrative subdivision область (oblast) It is worth noting that regions are found in the minds of humans and so regions can be of any size and that each region is unique in its own way. The term also has a more specific use in relation to DVDs; see also regional lockout. For the place-name Region in the works of JRR Tolkien, see Region (Middle-earth).

Administrative regions

The word "region" is taken from the Latin regio, and a number of countries have borrowed the term as the formal name for a type of subnational entity (eg, the región, used in Chile). In English, the word is also used as the conventional translation for equivalent terms in other languages (eg, the область (oblast), used in Russia alongside with a broader term регион).
Countries using administrative regions
The following countries use the term "region" (or its cognate) as the name of a type of subnational entity:
- Belgium (in French, région; in German, Region; the term gewest is used in Dutch)
- Chile (región)
- Congo (région)
- Côte d'Ivoire (région)
- Denmark (effective from 2007)
- France (région)
- Ghana
- Hungary (régió)
- Italy (regione)
- Mali (région)
- Namibia
- New Zealand
- Peru (región)
- Tanzania
- Togo (région) The Canadian province of Québec also uses the "administrative region" (région administrative). Prior to 1996, Scotland was also divided into regions. The government of the Philippines uses the region (in Filipino, rehiyon) when it's necessary to group provinces, the primary administrative subdivision of the country. this is also the case in Brazil which groups its primary administrative divisions (estados; "states") into grandes regiões (≈"greater regions") for statistical purposes, while Russia uses экономические районы ("economic regions") in a similar way. The government of Singapore makes use of regions for its own administrative purposes. Similarly, the British government also makes limited use of regions for England. The following countries use an administrative subdivision conventionally referred to as a region in English:
- Russia, which uses the область (oblast).
- Ukraine, which uses the область (oblast). China has five 自治区 (zìzhìqū) and two 特別行政區 (or 特别行政区; tèbiéxíngzhèngqū) which are conventionally translated as "autonomous region" and "special administrative region", respectively.
Geographical regions
A region can also be used for a geographical area; with this usage, there is an implied distinctiveness about the area that defines it. Such a distinction is often made on the basis of a historical, political, or cultural cohesiveness that separates the region from its neighbours. Geographical regions can be found within a country (eg, the Midlands, in England), or transnationally (eg, the Middle-East).
Examples of geographical regions

- Geographical regions in Serbia and Montenegro
- Historical regions of Central Europe
- Historical regions of the Balkan Peninsula
- List of regions in Australia
- List of regions of Canada
- List of regions of the United States
- List of traditional regions of Slovakia
- Regions of Japan
See also

- Autonomous region
- Committee of the Regions
- Euroregion
- Latin names of regions
- Regional district
- Regional municipality Category:Regions ja:地方

Social democracy

Social democracy is a political ideology that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries from supporters of Marxism. Initially, social democratic parties included revolutionary socialists, such as Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin alongside those who advocated a gradualist, evolutionary approach, such as Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky and Jean Jaures. After World War I and the Russian Revolution, social democracy became exclusively associated with the non-revolutionary approach. Modern social democracy emphasises a program of gradual legislative reform of the capitalist system in order to make it more equitable and humane, with the theoretical end goal of building a socialist society either de-emphasised or limited in scope. The term social democracy can also refer to the particular kind of society that social democrats advocate. The Socialist International (SI) - the worldwide organisation of social democratic and democratic socialist parties - defines social democracy as an ideal form of representative democracy, that may solve the problems found in a liberal democracy. The SI emphasizes the following principles: Firstly, freedom - not only individual liberties, but also freedom from discrimination and freedom from dependence on either the owners of the means of production or the holders of abusive political power. Secondly, equality and social justice - not only before the law but also economic and socio-cultural equality as well, and equal opportunities for all including those with physical, mental, or social disabilities. Finally, solidarity - unity and a sense of compassion for the victims of injustice and inequality. See [http://www.socialistinternational.org/4Principles/dofpeng2.html the SI's Declaration of Principles]

Social democratic political parties

Social democratic political parties are a feature of many democratic countries. Over the course of the twentieth century, parties such as the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, the German SPD and many other such parties throughout Europe, Canada (New Democratic Party), Australia (Labor Party) and New Zealand (Labour Party) stood in elections on political platforms that included policies such as stronger labor laws, nationalization of major industries, and a strong welfare state. During the later part of the century, most of the aforementioned parties gradually distanced themselves from socialist-style economics (and socialism in general). At present, social democrats generally do not see a conflict between a capitalist market economy and their goals. A great many social democratic parties have adopted policies of the centrist Third Way, which supports a deregulated economy and emphasises equality of opportunity as the benchmark for social equity. Modern social democrats have also broadened their social goals to encompass aspects of feminism, racial equality and multiculturalism. Whether this modern form of social democracy can properly be described as "socialist" is a matter of dispute. Many social democrats do not see themselves as socialist. Most social democratic parties are members of the Socialist International, which is a successor to the Second International. See also List of social democratic parties

"Democratic socialism" versus "Social democracy"

Democratic socialism or reformism arguably forms a distinct current of thought from social democracy, in that self-described democratic socialists still see themselves as working towards the establishment of a socialist society with a socialist economic system. Many separate parties calling themselves "social democrats" have sought to distance themselves from their democratic socialist counterparts. Naturally, there is some degree of overlap, and some self-professed democratic socialists remain associated with social democratic parties in an effort to render them more avowedly socialist. In most cases, those who merely want to improve capitalism have kept the name "social democrats" while those who want to gradually abolish capitalism through democratic means are called "democratic socialists". In other cases, particular names are used solely by historical accident.

History

Many parties in the second half of the 19th century described themselves as social democratic, such as the British Social Democratic Federation, and the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. In some cases these were revolutionary socialist or Marxist groups, who were not only seeking to introduce socialism, but also democracy in undemocratic countries. The modern social democratic current came into being through a break within the socialist movement in the early 20th century, between two groups holding different views on the ideas of Karl Marx. Many related movements, including pacifism, anarchism, and syndicalism, arose at the same time (often by splitting from the main socialist movement) and had various quite different objections to Marxism. The social democrats, who were the majority of socialists at this time, did not reject Marxism (and in fact claimed to uphold it), but wanted to reform it in certain ways and tone down their criticism of capitalism. They argued that socialism should be achieved through evolution rather than revolution. Such views were strongly opposed by the revolutionary socialists, who argued that any attempt to reform capitalism was doomed to fail, because the reformers would be gradually corrupted and eventually turn into capitalists themselves. Two key figures within the socialist movement at this time were César de Paepe of the Belgian International Working Men's Association, and Jean Jaures (who led the French Socialist Party until his assassination on July 31, 1914, one day before the general mobilization of forces that began World War I). Despite their differences, the reformist and revolutionary branches of socialism remained united until the outbreak of World War I. The war proved to be the final straw that pushed the tensions between them to breaking point. The reformist socialists supported their respective national governments in the war, a fact that was seen by the revolutionary socialists as outright treason against the working class (since it betrayed the principle that the workers of all nations should unite in overthrowing capitalism). Bitter arguments ensued within socialist parties, as for example between Eduard Bernstein (reformist socialist) and Rosa Luxemburg (revolutionary socialist) within the SPD in Germany. Eventually, after the Russian Revolution of 1917, most of the world's socialist parties fractured. The reformist socialists kept the name "social democrats", while the revolutionary socialists began calling themselves "communists", and soon formed the modern communist movement. (See also Comintern) Since the 1920s, differences between social democrats and communists have been constantly growing (although it should be noted that the communists themselves are far from doctrinally unified on the best way to achieve socialism). Following the split between social democrats and communists, another split developed within social democracy, between those who still believed it was necessary to abolish capitalism (without revolution) and replace it with a socialist system through democratic parliamentary means, and those who believed that the capitalist system could be retained but simply needed adjustments and improvements such as the nationalization of large businesses, the implementation of social programs (public education, universal healthcare, etc.) and the (partial) redistribution of wealth through a welfare state, in order to make capitalism more humane. Eventually, most social democratic parties have come to be dominated by the latter position and, in the post World War II era, have abandoned any real commitment to abolish capitalism. For instance, in 1959, the Social Democratic Party of Germany adopted the Godesberg Program which rejected class struggle and Marxism. In response, supporters of the former position - that is, those who wish to abolish capitalism rather than merely "improving" it - have taken to calling themselves democratic socialists and have either split from the social democratic parties or formed dissenting factions within them. Since the late 1980s, most social democratic parties have adopted the "Third Way" - either formally or in practice. Modern social democrats are generally in favor of a mixed economy, which should be mainly capitalistic but with governmental provision of certain social services. Many social democratic parties have shifted emphasis from their traditional goals of social justice to human rights and environmental issues. In this, they are facing increasing challenge from Greens, who view ecology as fundamental to peace, and require reform of money supply and safe trade measures to ensure ecological integrity. In Germany in particular, Greens, Social Democrats, and other left-wing parties have cooperated in so-called Red-Green Alliances. A number of the policies advocated by social democrats have become permanent in the countries where they have been implemented, in the sense that they are now supported by all mainstream political parties. Such policies include the progressive income tax and publicly funded medicine. Other measures, however, (such as tuition-free university education) have sometimes been overturned, occasionally by social democratic governments themselves. Social democrats have, for the most part, also abandoned the concept of nationalization and have instead fully or partly privatised state owned industry and services. These changes have been seen in the governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating in Australia, that of Tony Blair in the United Kingdom, Gerhard Schröder in Germany, Göran Persson in Sweden, and the Rogernomics of David Lange and Finance Minister Roger Douglas in New Zealand. In general, these reversals in policy are supported more by the party leadership and far less by the average members of social democratic parties and their voter base. Many have claimed that the present leadership of the social democratic movement is corrupt and has abandoned social democracy in practice; to which 'modernizing' social democrats counter that their 'new' social democracy is an adaptation of those historic principles to the reality of the modern world. When discussing the recent reversal of social democratic policy it is important to bear in mind that what many people refer to as 'traditional' social democracy is now generally regarded to have been possible only because of the prevailing international climate - the post-war Bretton Woods consensus. What is of interest to contemporary social democrats, therefore, is why this consensus itself collapsed, whether it would be possible to rebuild it, and how. Some social democratic parties have at some point in their history been supporters of free trade, on the grounds that limiting international trade harms the poor by raising prices and reducing incomes: for example the Labour Party first came to government in the UK in 1924 after their opponents had lost the 1923 election by proposing protectionism. See also History of Socialism.

Views of Social Democrats today

In general, contemporary Social Democrats support:
- Regulatory systems over private enterprise in the interests of workers, consumers and small enterprise.
- A Social Market Economy over a Free market.
- Advocacy of Fair trade over Free trade.
- An extensive system of social security (though usually not to the extent advocated by democratic socialists or other socialist groups), notably to counteract the effects of poverty and to insure the citizens against loss of income following illness or unemployment. (See welfare state)
- Government-owned or subsidised programs of education, health care, child care, etc. for all citizens.
- Moderate to high levels of taxation to fund government expenditure and a progressive taxation system.
- A system of industrial regulation (statutory minimum wages, working conditions, protection against arbitrary dismissal).
- Environmental protection laws (although not to the extent advocated by Greens).
- Immigration and multiculturalism.
- A secular and progressive social policy, although this varies markedly in degree. Some social democrats support gay marriage, abortion and a liberal drug policy, while others are either non-committed or openly opposed to these policies.
- A foreign policy supporting multilateralism and international institutions such as the United Nations.

Criticism of social democracy

Most criticism of social democracy comes from the right wing. Conservatives typically argue that social democratic systems are too restrictive on individual rights, particularly economic freedom, and that individual choice is not as great in systems that provide state-run schools, health care, child care and other services. Social democrats usually retort by arguing that their policies are in fact enhancing individual rights, by raising the standard of living of the vast majority of the population and eliminating the threat of extreme poverty. Economic conservatives and classic liberals argue that social democracy interferes with market mechanisms and hurts the economy by encouraging large budget deficits and restricting the ability of entrepreneurs to invest as they see fit. Social democrats might respond to this argument by observing that right-wing governments have also built up large budget deficits in recent years, notably the Reagan and Bush, Jr. administrations in the USA and the Thatcher government post-1987 in the UK. The modern liberal critique of social democracy is centred on its willingness to restrict the political and legal rights of the individual in favour of a perceived social good. For example, the debate over detention of terrorist suspects without trial in the UK in 2004-05 pitted the Liberal Democrat party, who supported the right to a fair trial, against the Labour government, who argued that curtailing human rights was justified if it served a social end. However, this critique assumes that the British Labour Party has remained true to it's social democratic ideals, see the following paragraph, and ignores similar terrorism laws introduced by the Liberal Party of Australia in late 2005. There is also extensive criticism against social democracy coming from many segments of the Left. Democratic socialists and revolutionary socialists criticise social democrats for being so dependent on the capitalist system that they become indistinguishable from modern liberals. Many social democrats explicitly renounce the label "socialist" and the goal of achieving a socialist state. This willingness to work within the capitalist system rather than trying to overturn it leads many on the left to accuse modern social democratic parties of betraying their principles out of corruption and a desire to placate business lobbies and other interest groups. Left critics allege that some professed social democrats, such as Tony Blair, Göran Persson and Gerhard Schröder, end up doing the work of the capitalists by implementing tax cuts, cuts in social programs, privatisations, industrial deregulation, and a rolling back of the welfare state rather than extending it.

Social democrats

- Karl Ast
- Paul Axelrod
- Tony Blair
- Fedor Dan
- Toomas Hendrik Ilves
- Jack Layton
- Mihkel Martna
- Julius Martov
- Aleksandr Martynov
- Georgi Plekhanov
- August Rei
- Vera Zasulich

External link

- [http://www.socialistinternational.org/ Socialist International]
- [http://www.socialdemocrat.org/ Socialdemocrat.org] Category:Political parties by ideology Category:Political theories Category:Social democracy ja:社会民主主義

Liberal democracy

Liberal democracy is a form of representative democracy where the ability of elected representatives to exercise decision-making power is subject to the rule of law and moderated by a constitution which emphasizes the protection of the rights and freedoms of individuals and minorities (also called constitutional democracy and constitutional liberalism), and which places constraints on the extent to which the will of the majority can be exercised. These rights and freedoms include the rights to due process, private ownership of property, privacy, and equality before the law, and freedoms of speech, assembly and religion. In liberal democracies these rights (also known as ‘’liberal rights’’) may sometimes be constitutionally guaranteed, or are otherwise created by statutory law or case law, which may in turn empower various civil institutions to administer or enforce these rights. Liberal democracies also tend to be characterized by tolerance and pluralism; widely differing social and political views, even those viewed as extreme or fringe, are permitted to co-exist and compete for political power on a democratic basis. Liberal democracies periodically hold elections where groups with differing political views have the opportunity to achieve political power.

Qualities of liberal democracies

Qualities of liberal democracies include:
- A constitution that limits the authority of the government and protects many civil rights
- Universal suffrage, granting all adult citizens the right to vote regardless of race, gender or property ownership (See also elective rights)
- Freedom of religion and of expression, including speech
- Freedom of the press and access to alternative information sources
- Freedom of association and assembly
- Equality before the law and due process under the rule of law
- The right to private property and privacy
- An independent judiciary, with opportunities for appeal
- A system of checks and balances between branches of government

Critique

Some would argue that 'liberal democracy' is not democratic or liberal at all. They would argue that 'liberal democracy' does not respect majority rule (except when citizens are asked to vote for their representatives), and also that its "liberty" is restricted by the constitution or precedent (in the UK) decided by previous generations. They would argue that, by prohibiting citizens the right to cast votes on all issues (especially for serious subjects like going to war, constitutional amendments or constitution abolishment, etc.), this turns 'liberal democracy' into the precursor of oligarchy. Anti-capitalists, which include Marxists, socialists and anarchists, argue that liberal democracy is an integral part of the capitalist system and is class-based and not fully democratic or participatory. Because of this it is seen as fundamentally un-egalitarian, existing or operating in a way that facilitates economic exploitation. Others would say that only a liberal democracy can guarantee the individual liberties of its citizens and prevent the development into a dictatorship. Unmoderated majority rule could, in this view, lead to an oppression of minorities.

Open society

The concept of an open society is closely related to liberal democracies. Since many liberals see democracies with strong statist reflections through the public choice theory as slow, dogmatic, conservative and not too apt for change, the liberal democracy contrasts with what could be called the "statist" democracy in that it emphasizes the civil society as the engine of its public discourse and development further. All in all, liberal democrats often simply see the civil society as exactly the best way to satisfy the private, cultural and communitarian preferences of minorities (as well as majorities). Democratically supporting the arts, private communities, sports leagues or other associations in the civil society is seen by them to boost the majorities' preferences, either willingly or unwillingly by the policy makers.

Relation to indirect democracy

Liberal democracies are representative democracies. Some of these democracies have additional systems of referenda to give the electorate a possibility to overrule decisions of the elected legislature or even to make decisions by plebiscite without giving the legislature a say in that decision. Switzerland and Uruguay are some of the few liberal democracies with a representative system combined with referenda and plebiscites. Other countries have referenda to a lesser degree in their political system. Adding referenda to a political system could help prevent the evolution of a liberal democracy into an oligarchy. Australia, Canada, the member states of the European Union, Iceland, India, Japan, New Zealand, The Philippines, Norway, Brazil and the United States are all examples of somewhat liberal democracies.

Labour Party

The name Labour Party or Labor Party is used by several political parties around the world. They are usually Social Democrats and traditionally allied to trade unions. Many labour parties are members of Socialist International.
- Antigua – Antigua Labour Party
- Armenia – United Labour Party
- Australia – Australian Labor Party
- Barbados – Barbados Labour Party, Democratic Labour Party
- Bulgaria – a historical name of Bulgarian Communist Party
- Burkina Faso – defunct: Voltaic Labour Party
- Dominica – Dominica Labour Party
- Fiji – Fiji Labour Party
- Georgia – Labour Party
- Gibraltar – Gibraltar Labour Party
- Grenada – Grenada United Labour Party
- Guyana – Guyana Labour Party
- Iran – Islamic Labour Party
- Ireland – Irish Labour Party
- Isle of Man – Manx Labour Party
- Israel – Israeli Labour Party
- Jamaica – Jamaican Labour Party
- Lithuania – Labour Party, Democratic Labour Party of Lithuania
- Malta – Malta Labour Party
- Mexico – Labour Party
- Mauritius – Mauritius Labour Party
- Namibia – defunctLabour Party
- Netherlands – Labour Party
- New Zealand – Labour Party, NewLabour Party
- Norway – Norwegian Labour Party
- Papua New Guinea – Papua New Guinea Labour Party
- Solomon Islands – Solomon Islands Labour Party
- South Africa – Labour Party (Coloured), New Labour Party
- Saint Kitts and Nevis – Saint Kitts and Nevis Labour Party
- Saint Lucia – Saint Lucia Labour Party
- Saint Vincent and the Grenadines – Unity Labour Party
- Senegal – defunct: Labour Party of Sine Saloum
- Singapore – Labour Party
- South korea – Democratic Labor Party
- Suriname – Labour Party
- Sweden – Swedish Social Democratic Labour Party
- Tanzania – Tanzanian Labour Party
- United Kingdom – Labour Party, Social Democratic and Labour Party (Northern Ireland). Defunct: Belfast Labour Party, Northern Ireland Labour Party, Scottish Labour Party
- United States – Labor Party. Defunct: U.S. Labor Party See also: Workers' Party, Socialist Labour Party, List of political parties. Category:Lists of political parties by generic name ja:労働党 ko:노동당

Green Party of Ontario

The Green Party of Ontario (GPO) contests provincial elections in Ontario, Canada. It is Canada's second-largest provincial Green Party after the Green Party of British Columbia. Although it shares the same Ten Key Values as other North American Greens, it is sometimes criticized by leftists as being eco-capitalist and one of the "furthest right" Green Parties in North America. The elements of green politics it emphasizes, including a green tax shift there are almost libertarian in character. For this reason they are sometimes called Blue Greens or Green Tories. Many key members are recruits from the former centrist Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, including the party's only elected politician, Elio Di Iorio who was a protege of former Canadian Prime Minister Joe Clark. While the party's "left" sometimes resents compromises, the defenders of this strategy argue that it builds a "big tent", effectively splits the right wing vote, and does not prevent Greens from cooperating on the municipal and regional level with more left-wing parties. A term that Green activists coined to describe this strategy is radical centrist. Another term used to describe it is eco-capitalist. Leader Frank de Jong is a key figure in this strategy, and has led the Ontario Greens since 1993. As of June 2003, the Ontario Greens stood as the fourth party, with support of 6% of the decided voters. The party did not, however, win any seats in the October 2003 provincial election. Perhaps accordingly, it is a strong supporter of electoral reform which will be decided in May 2005 for British Columbia: a referendum on single transferable vote - see British Columbia electoral reform referendum, 2005. Also in November 2005 PEI holds a similar referendum on mixed proportional representation - see PEI electoral reform referendum, 2005. Should either pass, the Ontario electoral reform referendum, 2007 would certainly proceed as planned. Either scheme, or combining the two into bioregional multi-member districts as the GPO has long advocated to create a bioregional democracy in Ontario, would benefit the GPO greatly. As of February 2005 it was at 9% in provincial polls, perhaps due largely to reversals by Dalton McGuinty, the Liberal premier, on major environmental issues such as the Oak Ridges Moraine and Red Hill Expressway and 905 Big Pipe.

Elected Greens

- Tom Adams, Oakville Town Councillor, Oakville
- Elio Di Iorio, Richmond Hill Town Councillor, Richmond Hill
- Warren Maycock, Orangeville Town Councillor, Orangeville
- Greg Pietersma, Dundas County English Public School Board Trustee, Dundas County
- Chris Rickett, Stratford City Councillor, Stratford
- Rob Strang, Orangeville Town Councillor, Orangeville
- Richard Thomas, Reeve of Armour Township
- Roger Villeneuve, Stormont County French Catholic School Board Trustee, Stormont County

Election results

External links

- http://www.greenparty.on.ca/
- http://gpo.ca/ Ontario Category:Provincial political parties in Ontario

Secessionist

Secession is the act of withdrawing from an organization, union, or political entity. Typically there is a strong issue difference that drives the withdrawal. The word derives from the latin term secessio.

Political secessions

American Revolution

A proposed example of successful secession in the modern era is American Revolution by which the Thirteen Colonies separated from the British Crown. Some argue that this was a secession movement as opposed to a revolution. Revolutions seek to replace current governments or to seek independence from colonial rule, while secession movements seek to separate from current governments in which the party seeking separation already has a voice.

Confederate States of America

Other secession movements include the case of the Southern states of the United States seceding to form the Confederate States of America. Less dramatically, new U.S. states were commonly formed out of an older state as the United States grew, such as in the northeast (Maine created out of Massachusetts), the mid-Atlantic (Kentucky created out of Virginia) and then repeatedly in the western territories. The formation of such states are not typically considered secessionist because they were officially accepted by the parent state and the national government. During the American Civil War, West Virginia seceded from the state of Virginia (which had joined the Confederacy) and became the 35th state of the U.S. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1869 case Texas v. White that unilateral secession by a U.S. state was unconstitutional.

Local examples in the United States

Local examples of secession also exist, such as the attempt of Staten Island to break away from New York City in the late-1980s and early 1990s. San Fernando Valley recently lost a vote to separate from Los Angeles County but has seen an increased attention to its infrastructure needs. Several cities in Vermont including Killington are currently exploring a secession request to allow them to join New Hampshire over claims that they are not getting adequate return of state resources from their state tax contributions. There have been other modern secessionist movements to create new states. There was a short-lived effort to create a Jefferson State out of counties in southern Oregon and northern California in 1941, in part motivated by requests for better roads, but it was quickly shelved by the outbreak of World War II. Advocates in the upper peninsula of Michigan, with off and on intensity, have called for it to become a separate 51st state. A movement in Western Massachusetts, harkening back to Shays' Rebellion, seeks to secede from Massachusetts. There have been calls for formation of Cascadia in the Pacific Northwest. A less ambitious plan would create a new state from Washington east of the Cascade Mountains, along with northern Idaho, northwestern Montana, and possibly northeastern Oregon. It would be centered on Spokane, Washington (the largest city in the region), and called "Columbia" after the Columbia River. The Great Republic of Rough and Ready was a small, short-lived self-declared independent nation that existed in Nevada County in northern California in the United States in 1850. Founded in the town of Rough and Ready by miners largely as a protest against a recently-introduced tax on new mining claims and the prohibition of alcohol in Nevada County, it never achieved formal recognition of any government and was abolished after only three months. The incident has become part of the colorful folklore of the region. At the time of the "secession", the town was populated largely by miners from Wisconsin. The declaration of independence was sent to Washington, DC, but was lost along the way. The United States Congress never got official word that a small town in the newly-admitted State of California was seceding from both the state and the Union, and thus the U.S. government never had the opportunity to take formal action against the "secession." Had it achieved true independence, it would have become the world's smallest nation, with an area of only 0.75 square miles (1.9 km²). The citizens disbanded the Republic the following summer, supposedly when they realized to their dismay that they could not celebrate Independence Day on July 4, since they were no longer part of the United States. The history of the Republic is now celebrated annually in Nevada County on Secession Days during the second weekend of April. There are also web sites currently advocating a separate [http://www.newcaliforniarepublic.org California] nation, and independent nation of Hawaii as well as other [http://www.secessionist.us sections] of the United States. A humorous response to an alleged infringement of the Constitutional protection against unlawful search and seizure inspired the brief formation of the Conch Republic in the Florida Keys. Many articles after the 2004 Presidential election questioned whether the so-called "blue" and "red" states can continue to co-exist or ever reconcile or if they might be drifting toward irreparable policy differences and social conflict and possible future separation. Alternatively it is possible the political conflict may result in gradual diminution of the federal government- for lack of a true national consensus - and perhaps a greater emphasis on state rights to permit them to chart more of their own domestic agendas while maintaining the federal union for a more limited set of national actions than undertaken today and for international purposes.

Canada

In addition, Canada has had the chronic threat of the province of Quebec seceding in some fashion from the confederation. This has led to two referendums which voted repeatedly to defeat the move, but the possibility of another remains. See Secession of Quebec. There is also a growing Secessionist sentiment in the province of Alberta, see Alberta Separatism.

World of art

In the world of art, the term Sezession has been applied to withdrawals from official academies by artists seeking greater freedom to exhibit avant-garde or controversial work. Three such withdrawals occurred in the German-speaking world in the last years of the nineteenth century: the Vienna Secession and the Munich and Berlin Secessions.

External links

- [http://4.1911encyclopedia.org/S/SE/SECESSION.htm Secession - from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica]
- [http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/history/A0844253.html Secession - from the Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia]
- [http://www.jeffersonstate.com/ Website on short-lived effort to create Jefferson State on the U.S. west coast] Category:Ethics Category:Politics

Governor of Alaska

This is a list of the governors of the U.S. state of Alaska, of Alaska Territory and of the District of Alaska, and the military commanders of the District of Alaska, as well as the governors of Russian America.

Governors of Russian America (1790–1867)

Commanders of District of Alaska (1867–1877)

Answered to the Department of War

Commanders of District of Alaska (1877–1884)

Answered to the Treasury Department
1 Lieutenant Commander

District Governors (1884–1912)

Territorial Governors (1912–1959)

1 Buckner was the military commander of Alaska during most of World War II.

State Governors (1959— )

Alaska became a state on January 3 1959. The four–year term of governor begins and ends on the first Monday of December.
1 Resigned as Governor to become Secretary of the Interior on January 29, 1969. 2 Switched to the Republican Party in April 1994.

External links

- [http://gov.state.ak.us/ Office of the Governor of Alaska]
- [http://www.explorenorth.com/library/yafeatures/bl–ExecAlaska.htm Past Governors of Alaska] Alaska
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United States/Republican Party

:This article is about the modern United States Republican Party. For the earlier Republican Party, see Democratic-Republican Party (United States). The Republican Party, often called the GOP (for "Grand Old Party"), is a political party and is one of the two major political parties in the United States (the other being the Democratic Party). The party was first established in 1854 by Northerners who were opposed to the spread of slavery. In the modern political era, the GOP is usually considered the more socially conservative and economically neoliberal of the two major parties. The current President of the United States, George W. Bush, is the party leader. Since 2002 the Republican Party has held a majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. It also controls a majority of governorships, and a majority of state legislatures. The official symbol of the Republican Party is the elephant. A political cartoon by Thomas Nast, published in Harper's Weekly on November 7, 1874, is considered the first important use of the symbol [http://www.harpweek.com/09Cartoon/BrowseByDateCartoon.asp?Year=2003&Month=November&Date=7]. In the early 20th century, the traditional symbol of the Republican Party in Midwestern states such as Indiana and Ohio was the eagle, as opposed to the Democratic rooster. This symbol still appears on Indiana ballots. The party tends to hold both conservative and libertarian stances on social and economic issues. Major policies that the party has recently supported include the 2003 Iraq War and across-the-board tax cuts. It has sought business deregulation, gun ownership rights, free trade and a partial privatization of Social Security. It favors the death penalty, calls for restricted access to abortion, and opposes the legalization of same-sex marriage. The Republican coalition is quite diverse, and "moderate" and "conservative" factions compete for power to frame platforms and select candidates. The "conservatives" are strongest in the South, where they draw support from religious conservatives. The "moderates" tend to dominate the party in New England, and are well represented in all states. In the 1940s and 1950s under such leaders as Thomas Dewey, Dwight Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller they usually dominated the presidential wing of the party. Since Barry Goldwater defeated them in 1964 they have been less powerful, though they were well represented in the cabinets of all Republican presidents.

History and trends

Birth

Both Ripon, Wisconsin, and Jackson, Michigan, claim the honor of setting up the first statewide Republican party organization in 1854. Delegates In Jackson, Michigan on July 6, 1854 declared their new party opposed to the expansion of slavery into new territories, as permitted by the proposed Kansas-Nebraska Act.They selected a state-wide slate of candidates. The Republican Party is not to be confused with the Democratic-Republican party of Thomas Jefferson or the National Republican Party of Henry Clay. Besides opposition to slavery, the new party drew on the previous traditions of the members, most of whom had been Whigs, and some of whom had been Democrats or members of third parties especially the Free Soil Party, and American Party. Since its inception, its chief opposition has been the Democratic Party, which was formed in the 1830s. American Party–1865).]] John C. Frémont ran as the first Republican nominee for President in 1856, using the political slogan: "Free soil, free labor, free speech, free men, Frémont." Although Frémont's bid was unsuccessful, the party showed a strong base. It dominated in New England, New York and the northern Midwest, and had a strong presence in the rest of the North. It had almost no support in the South, where it was roundly denounced in 1856-60 as a divisive force that threatened civil war. The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 ended the domination of the fragile coalition of pro-slavery southern Democrats and conciliatory northern Democrats which had existed since the days of Andrew Jackson. Instead, a new era of Republican dominance based in the industrial and agricultural north ensued. Republicans still often refer to their party as the "party of Lincoln" in honor of the first Republican President.

Late nineteenth century

With the end of the Civil War came the upheavals of Reconstruction. Republicans at first welcomed president Andrew Johnson; the Radical Republicans thought he was one of them and would take a hard line in punishing the South. Johnson however broke with them and formed a loose alliance with moderate Republicans and some Democrats. The showdown came in the Congressional elections of 1866, in which the Radicals won a sweeping victory and took full control of Reconstruction, passing key laws over the veto. Johnson was impeached by the House, but acquitted by the Senate. In 1868 the Republicans united around Ulysses S. Grant. In 1872 the party split, as Liberal Republicans detested Grant's corruption and thought that Reconstruction had succeeded and should be ended. Many of the founders of the GOP joined the movement, as did many powerful newspaper editors. They nominated Horace Greeley, who gained unofficial Democratic support, but was defeated in a landslide. Reconstruction came to an end when the contested election of 1876 was handed to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes who promised, through the unofficial Compromise of 1877 to withdraw federal troops from control of the last three southern states. The region then became the Solid South, giving overwhelming majorities of its electoral votes and Congressional seats to the Democrats until 1964. The GOP, as it was now nicknamed, split into "Stalwart" and "Half-Breed" factions, but policy differences were slight; in 1884, "Mugwump" reformers split off and helped elect Democrat Grover Cleveland. As the Northern post-bellum economy mushroomed with industry and immigration, and prosperous agriculture, support for hard money (i.e. gold), high tariffs, and high benefits for veterans became Republican policy. From 1960 to 1912 the Republicans took advantage of the association of the Democrats with "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion". Rum stood for the liquor interests and the tavernkeepers, in contrast to the GOP, which had a strong dry element. "Romanism" meant the Catholics, especially the Irish, who staffed the Democratic party in every big city, and whom the Republicans denounced for political corruption. "Rebellion" stood for the Confederates who tried to break the Union in 1861, and the Copperheads in the North who sympathized with them. Demographic trends aided the Democrats, as the German and Irish Catholic immigrants were Democrats, and outnumbered the English and Scandinavian Republicans. During the 1880s and 1890s, the Republicans struggled against the Democrats' efforts, winning several close elections and losing two to Grover Cleveland (in 1884 and 1892). 1892 faction of the Republican Party.]]

Early twentieth century

The election of William McKinley in 1896 is widely seen as a resurgence of Republican dominance and is sometimes cited as a realigning election. He relied heavily on industry for his support and cemented the Republicans as the party of business; his campaign manager, Ohio's Marcus Hanna, developed a detailed plan for getting contributions from the business world, and McKinley outspent his rival William Jennings Bryan by a large margin. This emphasis on business was in part mitigated by Theodore Roosevelt, McKinley's successor after assassination, who engaged in trust-busting. Roosevelt did not seek another term in 1908, instead endorsing Secretary of War William Howard Taft as his successor, but the widening division between progressive and conservative forces in the party resulted in a third-party candidacy for Roosevelt on the Progressive, or "Bull Moose" ticket in the election of 1912. He finished ahead of Taft, but the split in the Republican vote resulted in a decisive victory for Democrat Woodrow Wilson, temporarily interrupting the Republican era. The party controlled the presidency throughout the 1920s, running on a platform of opposition to the League of Nations, high tariffs, and promotion of business interests. Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover were resoundingly elected in 1920, 1924, and 1928 respectively, but the Great Depression cost Hoover the presidency with the landslide election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. Roosevelt's New Deal coalition controlled American politics for most of the next three decades, excepting the two-term presidency of Republican Dwight Eisenhower.

Second half of the twentieth century

Dwight Eisenhower.]] The post-war emergence of the United States as one of two superpowers and rapid social change caused the Republican Party to divide into a conservative faction (dominant in the West and Southeast) and a liberal faction (dominant in New England) – combined with a residual base of inherited progressive Midwestern Republicanism active throughout the century. A Republican like U.S. Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio represented the Midwestern wing of the party that continued to oppose New Deal reforms and continued to champion isolationism. Thomas Dewey represented the Northeastern wing of the party that was closer to liberalism and internationalism. In the end, the isolationists were marginalized by those who supported a strong U.S. role in opposing the Soviet Union throughout the world, as embodied by President Eisenhower. The conservatives made a comeback under the leadership of Barry Goldwater who defeated liberal Nelson Rockefeller as the Republican candidate for the 1964 presidential election. Goldwater was strongly opposed to the New Deal but he rejected isolationism and containment, calling for an aggressive anti-Communist foreign policy. On social issues Goldwater was a libertarian and did not seek support from the social conservatives. One element of the New Deal coalition was the "Solid South", a term describing the Southern states' reliable support for Democratic presidential candidates. Goldwater's electoral success in the South, and Nixon's successful Southern strategy in 1968 and 1972, represented a significant political turnabout, as Southern whites began moving into the party. Later, the Democratic Party's support for liberal social stances such as abortion, criminal law issues such as abolition of the death penalty, and same-sex marriage drove many former Democrats into a Republican party that was embracing the conservative views on these issues. Conversely, liberal Republicans in the northeast began to join the Democratic Party. In The Emerging Republican Majority, Kevin Phillips, then a Nixon strategist, argued (based on the 1968 election results) that support from Southern whites and growth in the Sun Belt, among other factors, was driving an enduring Republican electoral realignment. Today, the South is still solid, but the reliable support is for Republican presidential candidates, and no Democratic presidential candidate who wasn't from the South has won a presidential election since 1960. realignment, providing conservative influence that continues to the present day.]] Any enduring Republican majority, however, was put on hold when the Watergate Scandal forced Nixon to resign under threat of impeachment. Gerald Ford succeeded Nixon under the 25th Amendment and struggled to forge a political identity separate from his predecessor. The taint of Watergate and the nation's economic difficulties contributed to the election of Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976, a Washington outsider.

Reagan Era, 1980-1992

The trends Phillips described, however, could be seen in the 1980 and 1984 elections of Ronald Reagan - the latter being a landslide in which Reagan won nearly 59% of the popular vote and carried 49 of the 50 states. The Reagan Democrats were Democrats before the Reagan years, and afterwards, but who voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984 (and for George H. W. Bush in 1988), producing their landslide victories. They were mostly white ethnics in the Northeast who were attracted to Reagan's social conservatism on issues such as abortion, and to his strong foreign policy. They did not continue to vote Republican in 1992 or 1996, so the term fell into disuse except as a reference to the 1980s. The term is not used to describe southern whites who became permanent Republicans in presidential elections. Stanley Greenberg, a Democratic pollster analyzed white ethnic voters, largely unionized auto workers, in suburban Macomb County, Michigan, just north of Detroit. The county voted 63 percent for Kennedy in 1960 and 66 percent for Reagan in 1984. He concluded that Reagan Democrats no longer saw Democrats as champions of their middle class aspirations, but instead saw it as being a party working primarily for the benefit of others, especially African Americans and the very poor. Bill Clinton targeted the Reagan Democrats with considerable success in 1992 and 1996.

Capture the House 1994

House Republican Minority Whip Newt Gingrich-led "Republican Revolution" of 1994 and its Contract With America. It was the first time since 1952 that the Republicans secured control of both houses of U.S. Congress, which, with the exception of the Senate during 2001-2002, has been retained through the present time. This capture and subsequent holding of congress represented a major legislative turnaround, as Democrats controlled both houses of congress for the forty years preceeding 1994, with the exception of the 1981-1987 congresses (in which Republicans controlled the Senate). In 1994, Republican Congressional candidates on a platform of major reforms of government with measures, such as a balanced budget amendment and welfare reform. These measures and others formed the famous Contract with America, which represented the first effort to have a party platform in an off-year election. The Republicans passed some of their proposals, but failed on others such as term limits. Democratic President Bill Clinton opposed many of the social agenda initiatives, though he co-opted the proposals for welfare reform and a balanced federal budget. The result was a major change in the welfare system, which conservatives hailed and liberals bemoaned. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives also failed to muster the two-thirds majority required to pass one of the most popular proposals—a Constitutional amendment to impose term limits on members of Congress. In 1995, a budget battle with Clinton led to the brief shutdown of the federal government, an event which contributed to Clinton's victory in the 1996 election.

Present day

1996 election With the victory of George W. Bush in the closely contested 2000 election, the Republican party gained control of the Presidency and both houses of Congress for the first time since 1952, only to lose control of the Senate by one vote when Vermont Senator James Jeffords left the Republican party to become an independent in 2001 and chose to vote with the Democratic caucus. In the wake of the 2001 September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States, however, Bush's popularity rose as he pursued a "War on Terrorism" that included the invasion of Afghanistan and the USA PATRIOT Act. The Republican Party fared well in the 2002 midterm elections, solidifying its hold on the House and regaining control of the Senate, in the run-up to the war in Iraq. This marked just the third time since the Civil War that the party in control of the White House gained seats in both houses of Congress in a midterm election (others were 1902 and 1934). On November 2, 2004, Bush was re-elected to a second term, receiving 51% of the popular vote and becoming the first presidential candidate to win a majority of the popular vote since 1988. Republicans gained additional seats in both houses of Congress, leaving Democrats again in the minority. The Republican 2004 political platform was titled "A Safer World and a More Hopeful America".[http://www.gop.com/media/2004platform.pdf] It expressed commitment to:
- Winning the War on Terror
- Ushering in an Ownership Era
- Building an Innovative Economy to Compete in the World
- Strengthening Our Communities
- Protecting Our Families

Current structure and composition

The Republican National Committee (RNC) of the United States is responsible for developing and promoting the Republican political platform, as well as for coordinating fundraising and election strategy. There are similar committees in every U.S. state and most U.S. counties (though in some states, party organization lower than state-level is arranged by legislative districts). It is the counterpart of the Democratic National Committee. The chairman of the RNC, since January of 2005, is Ken Mehlman. The Republican Party also has fundraising and strategy committees for House races (National Republican Congressional Committee), Senate races (National Republican Senatorial Committee), and gubernatorial races (Republican Governors Association).

Factions

Republican Governors Association Defining the views of any "faction" of any large political party is difficult at best, and any attempt to apply labels within a single political party is subject to some oversimplification. Nevertheless, there are several ideological groups recognized by some in the modern-day GOP, including the social conservatives, Republican In Name Only, paleoconservatives, neoconservatives, moderates, fiscal conservatives, Log Cabin Republicans, and libertarians.

Future trends, realignment?

Thus, as of 2006, Republicans will have controlled the White House for 26 of the previous 38 years, and both houses of Congress since 1994 (except for over a year in the Senate), leading some Conservative commentators to speculate about a permanent political realignment along the lines of the presidential election of 1896, in which Mark Hanna helped William McKinley construct a Republican majority that lasted for the next 36 years — Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political advisor, has been reported to be a keen student of this election. Evidence supporting this view includes Bush's relative success among Hispanic voters, winning 35% of their vote in 2000 and 44% in 2004, although the latter figure has been questioned by some analysts (most notably the anti-immigration Steve Sailer, whose analysis of several exit polls placed Hispanic support for Bush in 2004 at a maximum of 39%), and Bush's victory in 2004 in ninety-seven of the hundred fastest-growing counties in the country, evidence of Republican strength in quickly growing exurbs and in the booming metropolitan areas of the South. By 2010, the United States Census predicts that state population changes will cause states that voted for Bush in 2004 to gain six Congressional seats and electoral votes, while states that voted for Kerry will lose six.[http://www.willisms.com/archives/2005/06/checking_in_on_1.html] Others, such as left-wing commentators Ruy Teixeira and John Judis see prospects of a Republican realignment as unlikely, given the relative decrease in the proportion of white and rural voters, who traditionally have supported the GOP, and noting that Democrats have tended to win healthy majorities among Hispanics, African Americans, and city dwellers (among African American voters, Bush — like all recent Republican presidential candidates — lost overwhelmingly both times, though he did manage to increase his support from 9% in 2000 to 11% in 2004). Critics claim that an inconsistency in the views held within the Republican Party, which they see as a dramatic difference between anti-government libertarians and social conservatives, will undermine the Party's success. There are several outreach campaigns to attract more minorities to register Republican. Notably, that the head of the NAACP for Florida's Orange County, Derrick Wallace has responded to GOP outreach efforts by changing his party affiliation to Republican.[http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/columnists/orl-maxwell1705nov17,0,2971218.column?coll=orl-news-col] There are other notable minorities who attract other minorities to the GOP. [http://www.gop.com/Teams/AfricanAmericans/]

Presidential tickets

Other noted Republicans

Present-day

- George Allen, Senator from Virginia.
- Howard Baker, Ambassador to Japan and former senator.
- Haley Barbour, Governor of Mississippi and former chair of the Republican National Committee.
- Michael Bloomberg, media entrepreneur and Mayor of New York City/ RINO.
- Jeb Bush, Governor of Florida.
- Saxby Chambliss, Senator from Georgia.
- Norm Coleman, Senator from Minnesota.
- Tom DeLay, former House Majority Leader, from Texas.
- Elizabeth Dole, Senator from North Carolina, former Labor Secretary and Transportation Secretary, and former presidential candidate.
- John Engler, former Governor of Michigan and current head of National Association of Manufacturers.
- Bill Frist, Senate Majority Leader, from Tennessee.
- Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, from Georgia.
- Phil Gramm, former Senator from Texas.
- Rudy Giuliani, former Mayor of New York/RINO.
- Alexander Haig, former Secretary of State.
- Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the House, from Illinois.
- Jesse Helms, former Senator from North Carolina.
- Mike Huckabee, current Governor of Arkansas.
- Thomas Kean, former Governor from New Jersey.
- Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State.
- Trent Lott, former Senate Majority Leader, from Mississippi.
- John McCain, Senator from Arizona and former presidential candidate.
- George Pataki, Governor of New York.
- Tim Pawlenty, Governor of Minnesota.
- Colin Powell, former Secretary of State.
- Dan Quayle, former Vice President.
- Tom Ridge, former Homeland Security Secretary and former Governor of Pennsylvania.
- Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State.
- Dana Rohrabacher, Representative from California.
- Karl Rove, president George W. Bush's chief political strategist and deputy chief of staff.
- Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense.
- Mark Sanford, Governor of South Carolina.
- Rick Santorum, Senator from Pennsylvania and chairman of the Senate Republican Conference.
- George P. Shultz, former Secretary of State and Secretary of the Treasury.
- Arlen Specter, Senator from Pennsylvania.
- Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California.
- Theodore Stevens, president pro tempore of the U.S. senate.
- Caspar Weinberger. former Secretary of Defense.
- Christine Todd Whitman, former Governor of New Jersey and former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
- Pete Wilson, former Governor of California.

Historical

- James G. Blaine (1830 - 1893), former Senator from Maine and Presidential candidate
- John Connally (1917 - 1993), a Governor of Texas
- Joseph Gurney Cannon (1836 - 1926), Speaker of the House
- Charles Curtis (1860 - 1936), Vice President
- Charles G. Dawes (1865 - 1951), Vice President
- George Frisbie Hoar (1826 - 1904), Senator from Massachusetts
- Robert G. Ingersoll (1833 - 1899), political activist
- Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924) Senator from Massachusetts
- Joseph McCarthy (1908 - 1957), Senator from Wisconsin and noted anti-communist
- Thomas Brackett Reed (1839 - 1902), Speaker of the House
- Nelson Rockefeller (1908 - 1979), Vice President, Governor of New York, and repeated presidential candidate
- Leland Stanford (1824 - 1893), Governor of California, Senator, and founder of Stanford University
- Robert Alphonso Taft (1889 - 1953), Senator and former presidential candidate
- Strom Thurmond (1902 - 2003), the oldest serving Senator in history (from South Carolina)
- Arthur H. Vandenberg (1884 - 1951), Senator from Michigan
- Earl Warren (1891 - 1974), Governor of California and Chief Justice of the United States

Lists

- List of African American Republicans
- List of Latino Republicans
- List of state Republican Parties in the U.S.
- List of Republican National Conventions
- List of liberal U.S. Republicans
- List of Republican celebrities

External links

- [http://www.rnc.org/ Republican National Committee]
- [http://www.gop.com/media/2004platform.pdf 2004 Platform] (PDF format)
- [http://www.crnc.org/ College Republican National Committee]
- [http://www.savethegop.com/ SavetheGOP.com]
- [http://www.pachyderms.org/ Grand Order of Pachyderm Clubs]
- [http://www.gopwing.com/ National Federation of Republican Assemblies]
- [http://www.republicanmainstreet.org/ Republican Main Street Partnership]
- [http://www.rlc.org/ Republican Liberty Caucus]
- [http://www.RepublicanIssues.com/ Republican Issues Campaign]
- [http://www.GOPToday.com/ Americans for a Republican Majority]
- [http://www.RepublicanLeadership.org/ Republican Leadership Coalition]
- [http://www.GOPinion.com/ GOPinion], conservative news from around the web
- [http://www.yrnf.com/ Young Republican National Federation]
- Thomas Frank, New Statesman, 30 August 2004, [http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FQP/is_4703_133/ai_n6247127 "Bush, the working class hero"] - How the Republicans captured the working class vote

Scholarly Secondary Sources

- American National Biography (20 volumes, 1999) covers all politicians no longer alive; online at many academic libraries.
- Barone, Michael, and Grant Ujifusa, The Almanac of American Politics 2006: The Senators, the Representatives and the Governors: Their Records and Election Results, Their States and Districts (2005) covers all the live politicians with amazing detail.
- Ehrman, John, The Eighties: America in the Age of Reagan (2005)
- Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (1970) [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=90104191 online at Questia]
- Frank, Thomas. What's the Matter with Kansas? : How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (2005), an insightful but unflattering appraisal.
- Gienapp, William E. The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (1987).
- Gould, Lewis. Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans (2003), the best overview.
- Jensen, Richard. The Winning of the Midwest: Social and Political Conflict, 1888-1896 (1971)
- Kennedy, David M. Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (2001) well balanced scholarly synthesis.
- Lamis, Alexander P. ed. Southern Politics in the 1990s (1999)
- Mayer, George H. The Republican Party, 1854-1966. 2d ed. (1967), older, well-balanced narrative.
- Patterson, James T. Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (1997) well balanced scholarly synthesis.
- Patterson, James T. Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush vs. Gore (2005) well balanced scholarly synthesis.
- Patterson, James T. Mr. Republican;: A biography of Robert A. Taft (1972)
- Rutland, Robert Allen. The Republicans: From Lincoln to Bush (1996), less useful than Gould.
- Schlesinger, Arthur Meier, Jr. ed. History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-2000 (various multivolume editions, latest is 2001). For each election includes good scholarly history and selection of primary document. Essays on the most important election are reprinted in Schlesinger, The Coming to Power: Critical presidential elections in American history (1972)
- Silbey, Joel H. The American Political Nation, 1838-1893 (1991) [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=94090777 online at Questia]
- Teixeira, Ruy and John B. Judis. The Emerging Democratic Majority, (2002) ISBN 0743254783, by two liberal Democrats.
- Wooldridge, Adrian and John Micklethwait. The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America sophisticated study by two British journalists (2004).
Primary Sources

- Schlesinger, Arthur Meier, Jr. ed. History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-1984 (various multivolume editions, 1986). For each election includes good scholarly history and selection of primary document. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Category:Conservative parties Republican Category:U.S. Republican Party Category:International Democrat Union ko:공화당 (미국) ja:共和党 simple:United States Republican Party

United States Reform Party

The Reform Party of the United States of America (abbreviated Reform Party USA or RPUSA) is a political party in the United States, founded by Ross Perot in 1995 who said Americans were disillusioned with the state of politics--as being corrupt and unable to deal with vital issues--and desired a viable alternative to the Republican and Democratic Parties. It is usually referred to simply as the Reform Party within the United States.

History

The party grew out of Ross Perot's efforts in the 1992 presidential election, where—running as an Independent—he became the first non-major party candidate since 1912 to have been considered viable enough to win the presidency. Perot made a splash by bringing a focus to fiscal issues such as the federal deficit and national debt; government reform issues such as term limits, campaign finance reform, and lobbying reform; and issues on trade. A large part of his following was grounded in the belief he was addressing vital problems largely ignored by the two major parties. While at one point in the race he led in polls, Perot ended up receiving about 18.9% of the popular vote. He continued being politically involved after the election, concentrating on defeating the NAFTA trade agreement. Though in 1994 the Republicans who took power in Congress tried to deal with many of Perot's fiscal issues, Perot and his supporters were still dissatisfied and by 1995 sought to found a third party which would rival the Republicans and Democrats. There were several names suggested for the party, including 'Independent Party' and 'Independence Party', which were designed to appeal to the belief that voters identified as 'independent' and not aligned with the two parties or other third parties had a common voice. Because of legal reasons, the party ended up being called the 'Reform Party'. There was a drive to get the party on the ballot in all 50 states, which ended up involving lawsuits challenging state ballot access requirements. It also involved incorporating minor parties in many states which formed since 1992 on Perot's principles, such as the Patriot Party, and United We Stand America, the organization through which Perot had coordinated his 1992 campaign. When the 1996 election season arrived Perot at first held off from entering the contest for the Reform Party's nomination, calling for others to try for the ticket. The only person who announced such an intention was Dick Lamm, former Governor of Colorado. After the Federal Election Commission indicated only Perot and not Lamm would be able to secure federal matching funds--because his 1992 campaign was as an Independent--Perot entered the race. Some were upset that Perot wouldn't give Lamm the chance at running, and this built up to the beginning of a splinter within the movement when it was alleged certain problems in the primary process, such as many Lamm supporters not receiving ballots, were Perot's doing. Eventually, Perot was nominated and he chose economist Pat Choate as his vice-presidential candidate. After a decision that they would not be allowed in the presidential debates, Perot and Choate tried legal efforts but failed. In the end, they won 8% of the vote. Between then and the next election, raucous conventions were held in which dissenters upset at Perot's perceived control over the party fought with those who held party offices. Eventually a small group split to establish the American Reform Party. In 1998, the Reform Party received a victory by electing Jesse Ventura governor of Minnesota, the highest office win for a national third party since the beginning of the century. By the 2000 election, any presidential candidate nominated by the party was qualified for the federal matching funds--$12.5 million--and this had made it an attractive takeover target. Both former Republican Pat Buchanan--supported by Choate and Lenora Fulani--and John Hagelin of the Natural Law Party attempted to win control of the Reform Party. An internecine struggle ensued with each claiming to be the official candidate. Many members who supported Hagelin were upset that Buchanan had enlisted his long-time supporters to swamp local party chapters to ensure him delegates and worried about potential changes to the party platform that would match Buchanan's positions on social issues. There were several high profile individuals who also made it known they were considering to run for the Reform Party nomination. This included the celebrities Warren Beatty and Donald Trump; their aspirations were not taken too seriously by the public, and both later decided not to run. Former Connecticut Governor and Senator Lowell Weicker, with the support of Ventura, also considered a run but did not want to get in the middle of the fight between Buchanan and Hagelin supporters. That struggle culminated in August 2000, when Buchanan was nominated by the party's convention in Long Beach, California and Hagelin was nominated by a rump convention of delegates who walked out of the one dominated by Buchanan supporters. The split was characterized by heated arguments and even shoving matches between the Buchanan and Hagelin factions. Buchanan was ruled by the Federal Election Commission to be the official candidate and therefore eligible for the federal election funds. In the 2000 election, Buchanan and Vice-Presidential running mate Ezola B. Foster received 448,895 votes, or 0.4% of the popular vote, failing to meet the 5% threshold to receive federal election funds in 2004. John Hagelin received 83,714 votes--mainly on the Natural Law Party line--which amounted to barely 0.1% of the popular vote. The Minnesota branch of the Reform Party, which helped elect Ventura, disaffiliated from the national party after the Buchanan takeover and renamed itself the Independence Party of Minnesota. The final Reform Party split occurred in April 2002, when former Buchanan supporters left in droves to form the right-wing America First Party. Buchanan supporters took at least eight affiliated state parties with them when they quit, badly hurting the Reform Party's future prospects. By the October 2003 convention the Reform Party was organized in only thirty states (many of which were rump affiliates controlled by the America First Party) and had ballot access for the 2004 election in only seven. In most of those seven states, the party organizations had recently left the national party or were about to disaffiliate from it. Ballot status was not expected to be gained in any other states. The Reform Party was presented with a surprise opportunity to retain ballot status in some states when Ralph Nader announced that he would not run as a Green Party candidate. More than two thirds of the 41 participants in a presidential candidate nominating session held May 12, 2004 voted to nominate Nader as the RPUSA candidate for President. People against Nader's role in the race, mainly Democrats, tried to vigorously argue that the Reform Party, which had somewhat broken down, was no longer viable and did not constitute a national party by FEC regulations. By August 11, 2004 it appeared that whatever remained of the Reform Party USA was over, as the national party treasurer, William D. Chapman Sr, informed Federal Election Commission officials the party had only $18.18 left in the bank and should be ended. As of that date, the party was more than $300,000 in debt. In response, the Reform Party leadership suspended Chapman from his post. The 2004 RPUSA convention was scheduled to be held July 22-25 in Columbus, Ohio but the location and date were changed to August 27-28 in Irving, Texas. Sixty-three delegates attended the Irving Nominating Convention, which chose Ralph Nader to be the party's nominee for President. Ohio and a few other states suspended participation in the National Organization due both the change in location and the nomination of Mr. Nader. In early September, the appeals to have Nader's name stricken from the Florida and Colorado ballots on the basis that the party was no longer a "national" party choosing its nominee by a "national" convention were denied by the courts in those states. In early 2005, press releases from the Reform Party have indicated that the party is in the process of rebuilding, with appeals for donations, attempts to reconstitute state party affiliates which were lost during the breakaways of such groups as the Independence Party of Minnesota and the America First Party, and the election of new party officials.

Presidential tickets

- 1996 - Ross Perot and Pat Choate (lost)
- 2000 - Pat Buchanan and Ezola B. Foster (lost)
- 2004 - Ralph Nader and Peter Miguel Camejo (lost)

Platform

The Reform Party platform includes the following:
- Maintaining a balanced budget, ensured by passing a Balanced Budget Amendment and changing budgeting practices, and paying down the federal debt.
- Campaign finance reform, including strict limits on campaign contributions and the outlawing of PACs
- Aggressive enforcement of immigration laws
- Opposition to free trade agreements like NAFTA, a call for withdrawal from the WTO.
- Term limits on U.S. Representatives and Senators, A noticeable absence from the Reform Party platform has been what are so-called 'social issues', including abortion and gay rights. Reform Party representatives had long stated beliefs that their party could bring together people from both sides of these issues, which they consider divisive, to address what they considered to be more vital concerns as expressed in their platform. The idea was to form a large coalition of moderates; but this aspect of the platform is something severely criticized by other minor party candidates who have argued that the disunity on these issues has in part led to the party's breakdown over the years. The Reform Party is an example of what is sometimes called producerism or Radical Centrism. Suspicious of both elites and persons seen as unproductive such as those on welfare or receiving other forms of government assistance. The Party's stand on immigration includes a provision that "No national, state or local government assistance of any kind for education, Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid shall be provided for anyone that is not a legal alien or US citizen."

External links

- [http://www.reformparty.org Official homepage]
- [http://www.reformparty.org/platform.htm RPUSA platform] Reform

United States Constitution Party

The Constitution Party is a conservative third party in the United States, founded as the U.S. Taxpayers Party in 1992. Its name was changed to the Constitution Party in 1999, but some state affiliate parties have different names. The Michigan affiliate has kept the U.S. Taxpayers Party name in order to retain ballot status, and in Connecticut the affiliate is the Concerned Citizens Party. The Constitution Party ranks third nationally in registered voters, most of which come from two states: California, in which the affiliate is the American Independent Party, founded in 1967, and Nevada, in which the affiliate is named the Independent American Party. According to Richard Winger, the editor of Ballot Access News, and other observers, the word "Independent" in the party name may have attracted the registrations of voters intending to declare themselves unaffiliated with any party. In the 2004 elections, the Constitution Party was the only one of the national third parties to increase its percentage of the vote, polling more than 40% better than in 2000. One of its candidates, Rick Jore, was thought to have won election to the Montana state legislature, but lost when the state supreme court invalidated "one or more" of seven disputed ballots.

Platform

right The Constitution Party holds that American laws have origin in the Bible. It advocates a stricter adherence to what it claims to be the original intent of the United States Constitution and the principles of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. It has a strict approach to moral and personal issues, especially homosexuality and abortion, and seeks to encourage the role of religion in American life. Members support reducing the role of the United States federal government through major reductions in taxes, regulation and spending. Its leaders are among the strongest advocates of abolishing most forms of federal taxation, especially the income tax. They view most current regular federal expenditures (such as those for healthcare, education, welfare, etc.) as unconstitutional per the Tenth Amendment. Additionally, they favor a noninterventionist foreign policy. In such, they advocate reduction and eventual elimination of the role the United States plays in multinational and international organizations such as the United Nations and favor withdrawal of the United States from most current treaties. The party takes paleoconservative positions in supporting protectionist policies on international trade. They are steadfastly opposed to illegal immigration and governmental welfare, and they also seek a more restrictive policy on immigration. The party also generally views the Second Amendment to the Constitution as securing broad rights to own guns.

Controversy

After the 1992 National Convention in New Orleans it was discovered that Michael Skaggs, the party's first convention manager, was fired by nominee and founder Howard Phillips because Skaggs did not vote for Phillips at the convention for president. Skaggs, who was also a delegate representing the District of Columbia and was at no time told his vote for Phillips was a requirement for remaining employed, instead voted for Arizona Governor Evan Mecham and as a result of his vote was fired by Phillips from his position with Phillips' group, the Conservative Caucus. The only reason Phillips gave for the firing was Skaggs' vote for Mecham. Skaggs filed a lawsuit for wrongful firing which was settled out of court. At no time has Phillips admitted any wrongdoing or taken responsibility.

2004 election results

Nationally, the Peroutka/Baldwin ballot (144,292 votes) received over 33% more votes than Howard Phillips did in 2000. This came during an election when the Green Party vote for Cobb/LaMarche (119,852 votes) declined by 83% and the Libertarian Party vote for Badnarik/Campagna (397,367 votes) was essentially flat compared to the 2000 election. Pat Buchanan's absence from the race may have contributed in large part to the increase in the Constitution vote in 2004. Rick Jore nearly won a seat in the Montana House of Representatives, but was found to have lost by one vote after some dual-marked ballots with one vote crossed out were discarded. In Pennsylvania, Jim Clymer won 214,837 votes in his race against incumbent U.S. Senator Arlen Specter. Attorney Joel Hansen, running on the Independent American Party ticket, got 197,934 votes (27%) for Justice of the Nevada Supreme Court. The number of Nevada voters registered in the Constitution Party doubled in 2004, making it the third largest party in the state. In South Carolina, Gary McLeod, running for a U.S. House seat in the Sixth Congressional District received 79,600 votes, 33 percent of the total votes cast, as the candidate of both the Constitution and Republican parties, but only 4,157 of those votes were cast for him as the Constitution Party candidate with the remainder (over 90% of his votes) being cast for him as the Republican candidate.

Presidential and vice presidential nominees

- 1992: Howard Phillips and Albion Knight, Jr. — 42,960 popular votes (0.04%)
- 1996: Howard Phillips and Herb Titus — 184,820 popular votes (0.19%)
- 2000: Howard Phillips and Dr. J. Curtis Frazier (replacing Joseph Sobran) — 98,020 popular votes (0.09%)
- 2004: Michael Peroutka and Chuck Baldwin — 144,421 popular votes (0.12%)

United States Socialist Party

The Socialist Party of America was a socialist political party in the United States. It was formed in 1901 by a merger between the Social Democratic Party of Eugene V. Debs, formed three years earlier by veterans of the Pullman Strike of the American Railway Union, and a wing of the older Socialist Labor Party of America.

History

Early history

From 1901 to the onset of World War I, the Socialist Party was arguably the most successful third party of the twentieth century, with thousands of local elected officials. There were two Socialist members of congress, Meyer London of New York and Victor Berger of Wisconsin; over 70 mayors, and many state legislators and city councilors. Socialist organizations were strongest in the midwestern and plains states, particularly Oklahoma and Wisconsin. Ideologies of the early participants ranged from more conservative democratic socialists, such as New York party leader Morris Hillquit and Congressman Berger to the radical syndicalists of the Industrial Workers of the World, who eventually left the party in a dispute over the appropriateness of industrial sabotage. The party's ranks were filled with a diverse collection of trade unionists, miners, immigrants and intellectuals. On June 16, 1918 the Party's most well-known member, Eugene V. Debs made an anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, protesting World War I, and was arrested under the Sedition Act of 1918. He was convicted and sentenced to serve ten years in prison and disenfranchised for life, losing his citizenship. The party's opposition to World War I caused a decline among some of its historic membership, but by 1919, membership nonetheless topped 100,000, due in part to increases in membership in its language federations from areas involved in the Bolshevik Revolution, such as Finland, Russia, Poland, and Ukraine.

Expulsion of supporters of Bolshevism

In January 1919, Vladimir Lenin invited the left wing of the Socialist Party to join in the founding of the Communist Third International, the Comintern. During the spring of 1919, the left wing of the Party prepared to take control. A referendum to join the Comintern passed with 90% support. Elections for the party's National Executive Committee resulted in twelve leftists being elected out of a total of fifteen. Calls were made to expel moderates from the party. The moderate incumbents struck back by expelling several state organizations, half a dozen language federations, and many locals, in all two thirds of the membership. They then called an emergency convention to be held in Chicago on August 30, 1919. The left wing held a conference in June, 1919 to plan to regain control of the party by bringing delegations from the sections of the party that had been expelled to demand that they be seated. However, the language federations, eventually joined by Charles Ruthenberg and Louis Fraina broke away from that effort and formed their own party, the Communist Party of America, at a separate convention in Chicago on September 2, 1919. Meanwhile plans led by John Reed and Benjamin Gitlow to crash the Socialist Party convention went ahead. Tipped off, the incumbents called the police, who obligingly expelled the leftists from the hall. The remaining leftist delegates walked out and, meeting with the expelled delegates, formed the Communist Labor Party on September 1, 1919. The two parties eventually merged in 1921 to form the predecessor of the Communist Party USA.

Electoral campaigns

From 1904 to 1912, the Socialist Party ran Eugene Debs for president. The best showing ever for a Socialist ticket was in 1912, when Debs polled 6% of the popular vote. In 1920 Debs ran again, this time from prison, where he was serving time for opposing American involvement in World War I. The Socialist Party did not run a presidential candidate in 1924, but joined the American Federation of Labor and railroad brotherhoods in support of the Progressive Party's candidate, Senator Robert M. La Follette, Sr. of Wisconsin. In 1928, the Socialist Party returned as an independent electoral entity under the leadership of Norman Thomas, a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. Thomas would remain the party's presidential candidate and leader until after World War II.

A turn to the left

During the 1930s the party experienced growth, particularly among youth, and turned leftwards politically. A left wing caucus, called the Clarity caucus, was formed to argue for more left wing policies. This led to the formation of the Social Democratic Federation by some of the Old Guard, as they were described, who later left the party. This deepened the turn to the left. The youth were organised in the Young People's Socialist League. Also in the 1930s, as a result of the left turn taken by the party, the small Trotskyist movement then in existence in the U.S. dissolved its organisation, at that point named the Workers Party of America, and joined the Socialists. In a short time they won a great deal of support particularly amongst the youth of the YPSL. At the end of 1938 the Trotskyists left the SP to form their own Socialist Workers Party and Young People's Socialist League (Fourth Internationalist).

McCarthyism

The party's pacifist anti-war stance further weakened it during World War II, and it was further hurt by the anti-Communist drives of the McCarthy era, although the party itself strongly opposed Stalin's Soviet Union. Almost all of the few remaining electoral strongholds of the Socialist Party were lost in this period, the last of any substance being the mayorship of Milwaukee. In the succeeding decades, the party was rent by internal dissent.

The Independent Socialist League

In 1958 the party admitted to its ranks the members of the Independent Socialist League led by former Trotskyist Max Shachtman, who was now moving rightwards. Some of his more youthful supporters, however, rejected his right move and worked in the Young Socialist League until they left entirely in the early 1960s to form the Independent Socialist Committee. Meanwhile, Shachtman emerged as the leader of the right wing of the party.

Split

By 1973 the Socialist Party of America had fallen under the control of the right-Shachtmanites and their allies, who renamed it the Social Democrats USA, in pursuit of their strategy of realignment in American politics that sought to realign the Democratic Party on a pro-labor and pro-civil rights basis. Meanwhile, a faction led by Michael Harrington became the Democratic Socialists of America, which also worked within the Democratic Party but was less dogmatically anti-communist. A third faction, including David McReynolds, reclaimed the name Socialist Party USA. This last re-formed Socialist Party has developed into a small third party in U.S. politics with roughly 1,500 members. The party regularly runs candidates for public office without any great success.

Presidential tickets

- 1900 - Eugene V. Debs & Job Harriman (Social Democratic Party)
- 1904 - Eugene V. Debs & Ben Hanford
- 1908 - Eugene V. Debs & Ben Hanford
- 1912 - Eugene V. Debs & Emil Seidel
- 1916 - Allan L. Benson & George Kirkpatrick
- 1920 - Eugene V. Debs & Seymore Stedman
- 1924 - Robert M. La Follette, Sr. & Burton K. Wheeler (Progressive Party)
- 1928 - Norman Thomas & James H. Maurer
- 1932 - Norman Thomas & James H. Maurer
- 1936 - Norman Thomas & George A. Nelson
- 1940 - Norman Thomas & Maynard C. Krueger
- 1944 - Norman Thomas & Darlington Hoopes
- 1948 - Norman Thomas & Tucker P. Smith
- 1952 - Darlington Hoopes & Samuel H. Friedman
- 1956 - Darlington Hoopes & Samuel H. Friedman

Prominent members

Prominent members included:
- Victor L. Berger
- Ella Reeve Bloor
- Earl Browder
- Eugene V. Debs
- James P. Cannon
- Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
- William Z. Foster
- Bill Haywood
- Morris Hillquit
- Helen Keller
- Jack London
- Theresa S. Malkiel
- Mary E. Marcy
- Scott Nearing
- Kate Richards O'Hare
- Mary White Ovington
- A. Philip Randolph
- John Reed
- Victor Reuther
- Walter Reuther
- Bayard Rustin
- Carl Sandburg
- Margaret Sanger
- Upton Sinclair
- Rose Pastor Stokes
- Norman Thomas
- Frank P. Zeidler

External links

Socialist Party of America websites

- [http://www.marxists.org/subject/usa/eam/socialistparty.html Socialist Party chronology] in [http://www.marxists.org/subject/usa/eam/index.html Early American Marxism] on Marxist Internet Archive. Retrieved April 20, 2005.
- [http://www.marxists.org/subject/usa/eam/spadownloads.html SPA Downloadable Documents 1897 - 1930] on Marxist Internet Archive. Retrieved April 20, 2005.
- [http://www.marxists.org/subject/usa/eam/spapubs.html SPA Lists of Publications 1897 - 1930] on Marxist Internet Archive. Retrieved April 20, 2005.

Articles

- [http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/21/1410236&mode=thread&tid=25 The Last Socialist Mayor]. Frank Zeidler, Mayor of Milwaukee (1948-1960). Interviewer, Amy Goodman. Democracy Now!. Monday, June 21st, 2004. Retrieved May 12, 2005.

Communism

:This article is about communism as a form of society and as a political movement. For issues regarding Communist organizations, see the Communist party article. For issues regarding Communist Party-run states, see Communist state. Communism refers to a theoretical system of social organization and a political movement based on common ownership of the means of production. As a political movement, communism seeks to establish a classless society. A major force in world politics since the early 20th century, modern communism is generally associated with The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, according to which the capitalist profit-based system of private ownership is replaced by a communist society in which the means of production are communally owned, such as through a gift economy. Often this process is said initiated by the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie (see Marxism), passes through a transitional period marked by the preparatory stage of socialism (see Leninism). Pure communism has never been implemented, it remains theoretical: communism is, in Marxist theory, the end-state, or the result of state-socialism. The word is now mainly understood to refer to the political, economic, and social theory of Marxist thinkers, or life under conditions of Communist party rule. In the late 19th century, Marxist theories motivated socialist parties across Europe, although their policies later developed along the lines of "reforming" capitalism, rather than overthrowing it. The exception was the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party. One branch of this party, commonly known as the Bolsheviks and headed by Vladimir Lenin, succeeded in taking control of the country after the toppling of the Provisional Government in the Russian Revolution of 1917. In 1918, this party changed its name to the Communist Party; thus establishing the contemporary distinction between communism and socialism. After the success of the October Revolution in Russia, many socialist parties in other countries became communist parties, owing allegiance of varying degrees to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (see Communist International). After World War II, regimes calling themselves communist took power in Eastern Europe. In 1949 the Communists in China, led by Mao Zedong, came to power and established the People's Republic of China. Among the other countries in the Third World that adopted a Communist form of government at some point were Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Angola, and Mozambique. By the early 1980s, almost one-third of the world's population lived under Communist states. Communism never became a popular ideology in the United States, either before or after the establishment of the Communist Party USA in 1919. Since the early 1970s, the term "Eurocommunism" was used to refer to the policies of Communist Parties in Western Europe, which sought to break with the tradition of uncritical and unconditional support of the Soviet Union. Such parties were politically active and electorally significant in France and Italy. With the collapse of the Communist governments in Eastern Europe from the late 1980s and the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Communism's influence has decreased dramatically in Europe, but around a quarter of the world's population still lives under Communist Party rule.

Marxism

Like other socialists, Marx and Engels sought an end to capitalism and the exploitation of workers. But whereas earlier socialists often favored longer-term social reform, Marx and Engels believed that popular revolution was all but inevitable, and the only path to socialism. According to the Marxist argument for communism, the main characteristic of human life in class society is alienation; and communism is desirable because it entails the full realization of human freedom. Marx here follows G.W.F. Hegel in conceiving freedom not merely as an absence of constraints but as action having moral content. Not only does communism allow people to do what they want but it puts humans in such conditions and such relations with one another that they would not wish to have need for exploitation. Whereas for Hegel, the unfolding of this ethnical life in history is mainly driven by the realm of ideas, for Marx, communism emerged from material, especially the development of the means of production. Marxism holds that a process of class conflict and revolutionary struggle will result in victory for the proletariat and the establishment of a communist society in which private ownership is abolished over time and the means of production and subsistence belong to the community. Marx himself wrote little about life under communism, giving only the most general indication as to what constituted a communist society. It is clear that it entails abundance in which there is little limit to the projects that humans may undertake. In the popular slogan that was adopted by the communist movement, communism was a world in which 'each gave according to his abilities, and received according to his needs.' The German Ideology (1845) was one of Marx's few writings to elaborate on the communist future: :In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm] Marx's lasting vision was to add this vision to a positive scientific theory of how society was moving in a law-governed way toward communism, and, with some tension, a political theory that explained why revolutionary activity was required to bring it about. Some of Marx's contemporaries, such as Mikhail Bakunin, espoused similar ideas, but differed in their views of how to reach to a harmonic society with no classes. To this day there has been a split in the workers movement between Marxists (communists) and anarchists. The anarchists are against, and wish to abolish, every state organisation. Among them, anarchist-communists such as Peter Kropotkin believed in an immediate transition to one society with no classes, while anarcho-syndicalists believe that labor unions, as opposed to Communist parties, are the organizations that can help usher this society.

The growth of modern Communism

Soviet Marxism

In Russia, the modern world's first effort to build socialism or communism on a large scale, following the 1917 October Revolution, led by Lenin's Bolsheviks, raised significant theoretical and practical debates on communism among Marxists themselves. Marx's theory had presumed that revolutions would occur where capitalist development was the most advanced and where a large working class was already in place. Russia, however, was the poorest country in Europe, with an enormous, illiterate peasantry and little industry. Under these circumstances, it was necessary for the communists, according to Marxian theory, to create a working class itself. Nevertheless, some socialists believed that a Russian revolution could be the precursor of workers' revolutions in the west. For this reason, the socialist Mensheviks had opposed Lenin's communist Bolsheviks in their demand for socialist revolution before capitalism had been established. In seizing power, the Bolsheviks found themselves without a program beyond their pragmatic and politically successful slogans "peace, bread, and land," which had tapped the massive public desire for an end to Russian involvement in the First World War and the peasants' demand for land reform. The usage of the terms "communism" and "socialism" shifted after 1917, when the Bolsheviks changed their name to the Communist Party and installed a single-party regime devoted to the implementation of socialist policies. The revolutionary Bolsheviks broke completely with the non-revolutionary social democratic movement, withdrew from the Second International, and formed the Third International, or Comintern, in 1919. Henceforth, the term "Communism" was applied to the objective of the parties founded under the umbrella of the Comintern. Their program called for the uniting of workers of the world for revolution, which would be followed by the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat as well as the development of a socialist economy. Ultimately, their program held, there would develop a harmonious classless society, with the withering away of the state. In the early 1920s, the Soviet Communists formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or Soviet Union, from the former Russian Empire. Following Lenin's democratic centralism, the Communist parties were organized on a hierarchical basis, with active cells of members as the broad base; they were made up only of elite cadres approved by higher members of the party as being reliable and completely subject to party discipline. In 1918-1920, in the middle of the Russian Civil War, the new regime nationalized all productive property. When mutiny and peasant unrest resulted, Lenin declared the New Economic Policy (NEP). However, Joseph Stalin's personal fight for leadership spelled the end of the NEP, and he used his control over personnel to abandon the program. The Soviet Union and other countries ruled by Communist Parties are often described as 'Communist states' with 'state socialist' economic bases. This usage indicates that they proclaim that they have realized part of the socialist program by abolishing private control of the means of production and establishing state control over the economy; however, they do not declare themselves truly communist, as they have not established communal ownership.

Stalinism

The Stalinist version of socialism, with some important modifications, shaped the Soviet Union and influenced Communist Parties worldwide. It was heralded as a possibility of building communism via a massive program of industrialization and collectivization. The rapid development of industry, and above all the victory of the Soviet Union in the Second World War, maintained that vision throughout the world, even around a decade following Stalin's death, when the party adopted a program in which it promised the establishment of communism within thirty years. However, under Stalin's leadership, evidence emerged that dented faith in the possibility of achieving communism within the framework of the Soviet model. Stalin had created in the Soviet Union a repressive state that dominated every aspect of life. After Stalin's death, the Soviet Union's new leader, Nikita Khrushchev admitted the enormity of the repression that took place under Stalin. Later, growth declined, and rent-seeking and corruption by state officials increased, which dented the legitimacy of the Soviet system. Despite the activity of the Comintern, the Soviet Communist Party adopted the Stalinist theory of "socialism in one country" and claimed that, due to the "aggravation of class struggle under socialism," it was possible, even necessary, to build socialism in one country alone. This departure from Marxist internationalism was challenged by Leon Trotsky, whose theory of "permanent revolution" stressed the necessity of world revolution.

Trotskyism

Trotsky and his supporters organized into the "Left Opposition," and their platform became known as Trotskyism. But Stalin eventually succeeded in gaining full control of the Soviet regime, and their attempts to remove Stalin from power resulted in Trotsky's exile from the Soviet Union in 1929. After Trotsky's exile, world communism fractured in two distinct branches: Stalinism and Trotskyism. Trotsky later founded the Fourth International, a Trotskyist rival to the Comintern, in 1938. Though some follow Trotskyism today, Trotsky's theories were never reaccepted in Communist circles in the Soviet bloc, even after Stalin's death; and Trotsky's interpretation of communism has not been successful in leading a political revolution that would overthrow a state. However, Trotskyist ideas have occasionally found an echo among political movements in countries experiencing social upheavals (such is the case of Alan Woods' Trotskyist Committee for a Marxist International, which has had contact with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela), most parties are active in politically stable, developed countries (such as Great Britain, France, Spain and Germany). It is noteworthy that Trotskyists groups that contribute with pro-capitalist parties have not escaped criticism as opportunists from other Trotskyists which are loathe to do so (see Trotskyism).

Cold War years

As the Soviet Union won important allies by victory in the Second World War in Eastern Europe, communism as a movement spread to a number of new countries, and gave rise to a few different branches of its own, such as Maoism. Communism had been vastly strengthened by the winning of many new nations into the sphere of Soviet influence and strength in Eastern Europe. Governments modeled on Soviet Communism were formed in Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Romania. A Communist government was also created under Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia, but Tito's independent policies led to the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform, which had replaced the Comintern, and Titoism, a new branch in the world communist movement, was labeled "deviationist." By 1950 the Chinese Communists held all of China except Taiwan, thus controlling the most populous nation in the world. Other areas where rising Communist strength provoked dissension and in some cases actual fighting include Laos, many nations of the Middle East and Africa, and, especially, Vietnam (see Vietnam War). With varying degrees of success, Communists attempted to unite with nationalist and socialist forces against Western imperialism in these poor countries.

Maoism

After the death of Stalin in 1953, the Soviet Union's new leader, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced Stalin's crimes and his cult of personality. He called for a return to the principles of Lenin, thus presaging some change in Communist methods. However, Khrushchev's reforms heightened ideological differences between China and the Soviet Union, which became increasingly apparent in the 1960s and 1970s. As the Sino-Soviet Split in the international Communist movement turned toward open hostility, Maoist China portrayed itself as a leader of the underdeveloped world against the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, with Maoism gaining recognition worldwide as a new branch of Marxism.

Collapse of the Soviet Union and Communism today

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union and relaxed central control, in accordance with reform policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). The Soviet Union did not intervene as Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary all abandoned Communist rule by 1990. In 1991, the Soviet Union itself dissolved. By the beginning of the 21st century, Communist parties hold power in China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam. President Vladimir Voronin of Moldova is a member of the Communist Party of Moldova, but the country is not run under one-party leadership. However, China has reassessed many aspects of the Maoist legacy; and China, Laos, Vietnam, and, to a lesser degree, Cuba have reduced state control of the economy in order to stimulate growth. Communist parties, or their descendent parties, remain politically important in many European countries and throughout the Third World, particularly in India. Theories within Marxism as to why communism in Eastern Europe was not achieved after socialist revolutions pointed to such elements as the pressure of external capitalist states, the relative backwardness of the societies in which the revolutions occurred, and the emergence of a bureaucratic stratum or class that arrested or diverted the transition press in its own interests. Marxist critics of the Soviet Union referred to the Soviet system, along with other Communist states, as "state capitalism," arguing that Soviet system fell far short of Marx's communist ideal. They argued that the state and party bureaucratic elite acted as a surrogate capitalist class in the heavily centralized and repressive political apparatus. Non-Marxists, in contrast, have often applied the term to any society ruled by a Communist Party and to any party aspiring to create a society similar to such existing nation-states. In the social sciences, societies ruled by Communist Parties are distinct for their single party control and their socialist economic bases. While anticommunists applied the concept of "totalitarianism" to these societies, many social scientists identified possibilities for independent political activity within them, and stressed their continued evolution up to the point of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its allies in Eastern Europe during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Today, Marxist revolutionaries are active in India, Nepal, and Colombia.

"Communism" or "communism"?

According to the 1996 third edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage, communism and derived words are written with the lowercase "c" except when they refer to a political party of that name, a member of that party, or a government led by such a party, in which case the word "Communist" is written with the uppercase "C".

Criticism of communism

:Main article: Criticisms of communism. A diverse array of writers and political activists have published anticommunist work, such as Soviet bloc dissidents Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vaclav Havel; economists Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman; and historians and social scientists Hannah Arendt, Robert Conquest, Daniel Pipes and R. J. Rummel, to name a few. Some writers such as Conquest go beyond attributing large-scale human rights abuses to Communist regimes, presenting events occurring in these countries, particularly under Stalin, as an argument against the ideology of Communism itself. It should be noted that these are criticisms of Communist parties and states they have ruled, rather than criticisms of communism as such. It should also be noted that many Communist parties outside of the Warsaw Pact (i.e. Communist parties in Western Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa) differed greatly, therefore no single criticism fits all.

External links

Online resources for original Marxist literature

- [http://www.marxists.org Marxists Internet Archive]
- [http://www.libcom.org/library Libertarian Communist Library]
- [http://www.marxist.net Marxist.net]
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm?title= Theses on Feuerbach]
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm?title= Principles of Communism]
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/index.htm?title= The Communist Manifesto]
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/index.htm?title= The Civil War in France]
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm?title= Socialism: Utopian and Scientific]
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/deleon/works/1896/960126.htm Reform or Revolution?]
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/index.htm?title= What is to be Done?]
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1904/onestep/index.htm?title= One Step Forward, Two Steps Back]
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/two-tact/index.htm?title= Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution]
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/index.htm?title= Materialism and Empirio-Criticism]
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/self-det/index.htm?title= The Right of Nations to Self-Determination]
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/index.htm?title= Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism]
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/index.htm?title= The State and Revolution]
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/miliprog/index.htm?title= The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution]
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/tasks/index.htm?title= The Tasks of the Proletariat In Our Revolution] Category:Communism Category:Political theories Category:Society Category:Economic ideologies zh-min-nan:Kiōng-sán-chú-gī ko:공산주의 ms:Komunisme ja:共産主義 simple:Communism

United States Prohibition Party

The Prohibition Party is a political party in the United States. As the name implies, the party advocates the prohibition of the use of beverages containing alcohol and was an integral part of the temperance movement. While never one of the nation's leading parties, it was an important force in US politics in the late 19th century and the early years of the 20th century. In 1887, Prohibition Party member Susanna M. Salter of Argonia, Kansas, became the first woman mayor in the United States. The party was founded in 1867. Its first National Committee Chairman was John Russell of Michigan, who served from 1867-1872. The party succeeded in getting many communities and a number of states to outlaw the production and sale of intoxicating beverages. The party's greatest success was in 1919, with the passage of the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which outlawed the production, sale, transportation, import, and export of alcohol. The era of illegal alcohol in the USA is generally known as "Prohibition". The enactment of national prohibition took away the party's main issue, and the party declined in importance. The "Prohibition" era saw the rise of "Speakeasies", bootleggers, and a great growth of organized crime. By the start of the Great Depression, the cause of prohibition was considered discredited by much of the public. National prohibition was repealed by the 21st Amendment in 1933. While hardline prohibitionists objected, the US Prohibition Party declined into insignificance. From 1977 to 1980, the party was called the National Statesman Party. The party still exists today, though its following is small, and since 2003, there has been a schism between supporters and opponents of longtime party chairman Earl Dodge. It has nominated a candidate for president in every election since 1872, and is thus the longest-lived American political party after the Democrats and Republicans.

Presidential candidates

- 1872 - James Black
- 1876 - Green Clay Smith
- 1880 - Neal Dow
- 1884 - John Saint John
- 1888 - Clinton B. Fisk
- 1892 - John Bidwell
- 1896 - Joshua Levering
- 1900 - John G. Woolley
- 1904 - Silas C. Swallow
- 1908 - Eugene W. Chafin
- 1912 - Eugene W. Chafin
- 1916 - Frank Hanly
- 1920 - Aaron Watkins
- 1924 - Herman P. Faris
- 1928 - William F. Varney
- 1932 - William D. Upshaw
- 1936 - D. Leigh Colvin
- 1940 - Roger Babson
- 1944 - Claude A. Watson
- 1948 - Claude A. Watson
- 1952 - Stuart Hamblen
- 1956 - Enoch A. Holtwick
- 1960 - Rutherford Decker
- 1964 - E. Harold Munn
- 1968 - E. Harold Munn
- 1972 - E. Harold Munn
- 1976 - Benjamin C. Bubar
- 1980 - Benjamin C. Bubar
- 1984 - Earl Dodge
- 1988 - Earl Dodge
- 1992 - Earl Dodge
- 1996 - Earl Dodge
- 2000 - Earl Dodge
- 2004 - Earl Dodge, Gene Amondson

External links

- [http://www.prohibition.org Prohibition Party Website (pro-Dodge)]
- [http://www.prohibitionists.org Prohibition Party Website (anti-Dodge)]
- [http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/Controversies/1091124904.html National Prohibition of Alcohol in the U.S.] Prohibition Prohibition Category:Prohibition

United States Populist Party

The Populist Party was a short-lived political party in late 19th century in the United States. In some states, it was known as the People's Party. It flourished among western farmers, based largely on its opposition to the gold standard. Although the party did not remain a lasting feature of the political landscape, many of its positions have become adopted over the course of the following decades. The very term "populist" has since become a generic term in U.S. politics for politics which appeals to the common person in opposition to established interests.

History

populist The Populist Party grew of the agrarian revolt that rose after the collapse of agriculture prices following the Panic of 1873. The Farmers' Alliance, formed in Lampasas, Texas in 1876, promoted collective economic action by farmers and achieved widespread popularity in the South and Great Plains. The Farmers' Alliance was ultimately unable to achieve its wider economic goal of collective economic action against brokers, railroads, and merchants, and many in the movement agitated for changes in national policy. By the late 1880s, the Alliance had developed a political agenda that called for regulation and reform in national politics, most notably an opposition to the gold standard to counter the deflation in agricultural prices. The drive to create a new political party out of the movement arose from the refusal of both Democrats and Republicans to take up and promote the policies advocated by the Alliance, notably in regard to the Populists' call for unlimited coinage of silver. The promotion of silver as legal tender was especially favored by farmers as a means of countering the deflation of agricultural prices and allowing credit to flow more easily through the rural banking system. The Populist Party was formed by members of the Alliance, in conjunction with the Knights of Labor, in 1889–1890. The movement reached its peak in 1892 when the party held a convention in Omaha, Nebraska and nominated candidates for the national election. The party's platform called for the abolition of national banks, a graduated income tax, direct election of Senators, civil service reform, and a working day of eight hours. In the 1892 Presidential election, James B. Weaver received 1,027,329 votes. Weaver carried four states (Colorado, Kansas, Idaho, and Nevada) and received electoral votes from Oregon and North Dakota as well. The party flourished most among farmers in the Southwest and Great Plains. Opposition to the gold standard was especially strong among western farmers, who viewed the inherent scarcity of gold (and its slow movement through the banking system) as an instrument of Eastern banking interests who could force mass bankruptcies among farmers in the west by instigating "credit crunches". Many western farmers rallied around the Populist banner in the belief that "easy money" not backed by a hard mineral standard would allow credit to flow more freely through rural regions. The Populists were also the first political party in the United States to actively include women in their affairs. By 1896, the Democratic Party took up many of the Populist Party's causes and the party faded from the national political scene. Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan took up the Populist opposition to the gold standard in his famous Cross of gold speech. The nation nevertheless remained on the gold standard until 1973, a fact that some (but by no means all) economic historians blame for the banking crisis during the Great Depression. Likewise, the Populist Party's call for direct election of Senators was realized in 1913 with the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment. The party's call for civil service reform became a part of the Progressive Party platform.

Legacy

Though the Populist Party's political power was short-lived, they did enact and promote important political policies like term limits and the secret ballot. The Populists were also responsible for their support of the grassroot political powers of initiative, referendum and recall. Initiatives allow ordinary citizens to introduce legislation, usually by collecting a certain number of signatures. Referendums sumbit legislation to the voting public for approval, and recalls allow citizens to replace politicians before their term has expired. Many of these Populist ideas were adopted by the Democratic party. Once the more established party adopted the Populist policies, they no longerhad much political force.

Modern incarnations

In 1984, the Populist Party name was revived by some extreme right activists including Willis Carto. The party's 1984 presidential nominee, Olympic medalist and ordained minister Bob Richards and running mate Maureen Salaman carried 66,324 votes. This party became the electoral vehicle for the right-wing Presidential campaigns of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke in 1988, and of former Green Beret officer Bo Gritz in 1992, but was defunct by 1996. Willis Carto and party chair Don Wassall were said to be rivals competing for control of the party, and supporters of each side blame the other for the party's collapse.

References

- Goodwyn, Lawrence. 1978. The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (ISBN 0195024168 or ISBN 0195024176)
- Kazin, Michael. 1995. The Populist Persuasion: An American History. New York: Basic Books. (ISBN 0465037933)
- McMath, Robert C. Jr. 1993. American Populism: A Social History 1877-1898. New York: Hill and Wang; Farrar, Straus & Giroux. (ISBN 0809077965)
- Nugent, Walter T. K. 1962. The Tolerant Populists: Kansas Populism and Nativism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Stock, Catherine McNicol. 1996. Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. (ISBN 0801432944)

External links

- [http://www.populistamerica.com/ Populist Party of America] Category:Historic United States political parties

Democratic Leadership Council

The Democratic Leadership Council is an influential non-profit corporation that argues that the United States Democratic Party should abandon progressive principles. More conservative party leaders founded the DLC in response to the landslide victory of Republican candidate Ronald Reagan over Democratic candidate Walter Mondale during the 1984 Presidential election. The founders believed the United States Democratic Party needed to abandon their political philosophy if they were to ever retake the White House, a goal which had eluded the Democrats since the 1976 election of Jimmy Carter. The DLC hails President Clinton as proof of the viability of third way politicians and a DLC success story. Critics contend that the DLC is effectively a powerful, corporate-financed mouthpiece within the Democratic party that acts to keep Democratic Party candidates and platforms sympathetic to corporate interests and the interests of the wealthy. The DLC's affiliated think tank is the Progressive Policy Institute. Democrats who adhere to the DLC's philosophy often call themselves New Democrats. Its current chairman is Governor Tom Vilsack of Iowa, and its vice chair is Senator Tom Carper of Delaware. Its CEO is Al From and its president is Bruce Reed.

Founding and Early History

The DLC was founded in 1985 by Democrats who were concerned that traditional liberal positions would doom their party to permanent minority status. The organization started as a group of forty-three elected officials, and two staffers, Al From and Will Marshall. Their original focus was on influencing internal Democratic politics so as to secure the 1988 presidential nomination for a Southern moderate such as Sam Nunn or Chuck Robb, both of whom were early DLC supporters. But when the DLC's pet project, the Super Tuesday primary, turned out to be a boon for the Reverend Jesse Jackson, a vocal critic of the DLC, the group realized it would have to advocate its ideas publicly. In 1989, Marshall founded the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank which ever since has turned out policy blueprints for the DLC.

Positions

It is the opinion of the DLC that progressive positions are not politically viable, citing the defeated Presidential campaigns of Senator George McGovern in 1972 and Vice-President Walter Mondale in 1984. The DLC claims that it “seeks to define and galvanize popular support for a new public philosophy built on progressive ideals, mainstream values, and innovative, non-bureaucratic, market-based solutions.” In terms of concrete policies, the DLC's claims credit for the Welfare Reform Act, President Clinton's expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the creation of AmeriCorps. Currently, the DLC supports expanded health insurance via tax credits for the uninsured and opposes plans for single-payer universal health care. The DLC would like to address the education crisis with universal access to preschool, charter schools, and school choice (but not school vouchers), and supports the No Child Left Behind Act. The DLC supports both NAFTA and CAFTA. The DLC has opposed certain policies of President George W. Bush, such as the partial birth abortion ban, and the underfunding of the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program. Often the DLC criticism is measured and nuanced: The DLC supports Bush's tax cuts except tax cuts for the wealthy, and supports some forms of Social Security privatization but opposes financing private retirement accounts with large amounts of borrowed money.

The 2003 Invasion of Iraq

The DLC also gave strong support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Prior to the war, Will Marshall co-signed a letter to President Bush from the Project for the New American Century endorsing military action against Saddam Hussein. Despite the DLC's centrist pretences, the organization spared no criticism of anti-war voices. During the 2004 Primary campaign the DLC attacked Presidential candidate Howard Dean as an out-of-touch liberal, because of his anti-war stance. The DLC has dismissed other war critics such as filmmaker Michael Moore as "Anti-American" and members of the "loony left"[http://www.dlc.org/ndol_ci.cfm?contentid=252914&kaid=127&subid=173]. Even as domestic support for the Iraq War plummeted in 2004 and 2005, Marshall called upon Democrats to balance their criticism of Bush's handling of the Iraq War with praise for the President's achievements and cautioned "Democrats need to be choosier about the political company they keep, distancing themselves from the pacifist and anti-American fringe."

Criticism

The DLC has become unpopular within many progressive circles. Mild critics claim the strategy of triangulation between the political left and right to gain broad appeal is fundamentally flawed. Opponents believe that moderation does not inspire passion in voters and lacks the persistent principles and moral clarity which are critical to building a popular political movement. In the long run, so opponents say, a strategy of triangulation results in concession after concession to the opposition, while alienating traditional voters. Others contend that the DLC's distaste for economic class warfare has allowed the language of populism to be monopolized by the right-wing. Many argue that the Democrats' abandonment of populism to the right-wing has been critical for Republican dominance of Middle America. (See What's the Matter with Kansas) More vocal critics believe the DLC has essentially become an influential corporate and right-wing implant in the Democratic party. Among the DLC's leadership are individuals with impressive right-of-center credentials, such as Marshall Wittmann, a senior fellow at the DLC and the former legislative director for the Christian Coalition, and Will Marshall, a cosigner of a letter issued by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) endorsing not only the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, but also a foreign policy that has much in common with the neoconservative world-view. Finally, progressive detractors of the DLC note that the DLC receives funding from the right-wing Bradley Foundation as well as from corporate oil giants, military contractors, and a large number of Fortune 500 companies.

2004 Presidential Primary

In May 2003, as the Democratic primary of the 2004 presidential campaign was starting to pick up, the organization voiced concern that the Democratic contenders might be taking positions too far left of the mainstream general electorate. Early front-runner Howard Dean, despite his reputation as a centrist governor of Vermont, was specifically criticized by DLC founder and CEO Al From. From's criticism of Dean was likely due to the former governor's outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq, which most party centrists, including From, endorsed. The claim of Senator Paul Wellstone, of Minnesota, later used by Dean, calling himself "from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party" has been interpreted by some as subtle criticism of the DLC and New Democrats in general. The DLC countered that Dean represented the "McGovern-Mondale wing" of the Democratic Party, "defined principally by weakness abroad and elitist, interest-group liberalism at home."

Former chairs

- President Bill Clinton
- Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana
- Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut
- Rep. Dave McCurdy of Oklahoma
- Sen. John Breaux of Louisiana
- Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia
- Sen. Charles Robb of Virginia
- Former House Democratic Leader Rep. Richard Gephardt of Missouri.

References

- [http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/29/politics/campaigns/29DEMS.html New York Times article, "Centrist Democrats Warn Party Not to Present Itself as 'Far Left'" by Adam Nagourney, July 29, 2003]
- The Emerging Democratic Majority, by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira (Scribner, 2002)
- [http://www.prospect.org/print/V12/7/dreyfuss-r.html American Prospect article, "How the DLC Does It" By Robert Dreyfuss, April 23, 2001]

External links

- [http://www.dlc.org/ The Democratic Leadership Council]
- [http://www.newdonkey.com/ Newdonkey.com, sponsored blog]
- [http://www.bullmooseblog.com/ Bull Moose Blog, sponsored blog] Category:U.S. Democratic Party

Blue Dog Democrats

thumb Blue Dog Democrats are social and economic conservatives in the United States Democratic Party. In the United States House of Representatives, Blue Dogs are an actual coalition of likeminded Democrats organized as the Blue Dog Coalition, rather than just an expression such as "Yellow Dog" Democrats. The term is a reference to the "Blue Dog" paintings of Cajun artist George Rodrigue of Lafayette, Louisiana; the original members of the coalition would regularly meet in the offices of Louisiana representatives who had Rodrigue's paintings on their walls.

The Blue Dog Coalition

The Blue Dog Coalition is a group of moderate to conservative Democrats in the United States House of Representatives. The group is currently made up of 35 Democrats, mostly from the U.S. Southern states. The coalition was formed in the 1994 104th Congress as a way for more conservative congressmen of the primarily liberal Democratic party to have a unified voice in Congress. The group's name came from the older description of many in the South who "would vote for a yellow dog if he ran as a Democrat" combined with the feeling that moderate-to-conservative views had been "choked blue" by the Democratic party in years prior to the election. They were notably successful in a special election of February 2004 in Kentucky, to fill a vacant Representative's seat. They were also successful in the November 2004 elections, with three of the five races where a Democrat won a formerly Republican seat in the House won by Blue Dog Democrats. Freshman Blue Dogs in the House are sometimes known as "Blue Pups." Often, the group will be instrumental in striking a balance between liberal and conservative ideas. Despite Blue Dogs' differing degrees of economic and social conservatism, they share a strong orientation toward fiscal responsibility, and as a rule work to promote positions within the House of Representatives which bridge the gap between the two extremes. Blue Dogs are an important swing vote on spending bills and, as a result, have gained an influence in Congress out of proportion to their small numbers. They are frequently sought after to broker compromises between the Democratic and Republican leadership.

List of Blue Dog Coalition members

- Joe Baca (California)
- John Barrow (Georgia)
- Marion Berry (Arkansas)
- Sanford Bishop (Georgia)
- Dan Boren (Oklahoma)
- Leonard Boswell (Iowa)
- Allen Boyd (Florida)
- Dennis Cardoza (California)
- Ed Case (Hawaii)
- Ben Chandler (Kentucky)
- Jim Cooper (Tennessee)
- Jim Costa (California)
- Bud Cramer (Alabama)
- Lincoln Davis (Tennessee)
- Harold Ford, Jr. (Tennessee)
- Jane Harman (California)
- Stephanie Herseth (South Dakota)
- Tim Holden (Pennsylvania)
- Steve Israel (New York)
- Jim Matheson (Utah)
- Mike McIntyre (North Carolina)
- Charlie Melancon (Louisiana)
- Mike Michaud (Maine)
- Dennis Moore (Kansas)
- Collin Peterson (Minnesota)
- Earl Pomeroy (North Dakota)
- Mike Ross (Arkansas)
- John Salazar (Colorado)
- Loretta Sanchez (California)
- Adam Schiff (California)
- David Scott (Georgia)
- John Tanner (Tennessee)
- Ellen Tauscher (California)
- Gene Taylor (Mississippi)
- Mike Thompson (California) Former members of Congress who were prominent Blue Dog Coalition members include Charles Stenholm of Texas and Brad Carson of Oklahoma. Another prominent Blue Dog Democrat was Gary Condit, a Congressman from California and subject of a high-profile sex scandal in 2001-2002.

Differences between the Blue Dogs and the Democratic Leadership Council

Blue Dog Democrats tend to differ ideologically from another coalition of moderate Democrats, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). The DLC describes itself as new Democrat and positions itself as centrist while taking liberal positions on social issues and conservative positions on economic issues and trade. Democrats who identify with the Blue Dogs, on the other hand, tend to be social conservatives, but have differing positions on economic issues ranging from fiscal conservatism to economic populism. For example, most Blue Dogs are strong supporters of gun rights and get high ratings from the National Rifle Association, many have pro-life voting records, and some get high ratings from immigration reduction groups, which cannot be said for most members of the DLC. On economic issues, Blue Dogs span the spectrum from fiscal conservatives to supporters of labor unions, protectionism, and other populist measures, while the DLC tends to favor free trade. A small number of newer Blue Dogs, however, hold positions closer to those of the DLC, and some Blue Dog Coalition members are also DLC members. Blue Dogs share with the DLC a desire to keep the Democratic Party grounded in their view of the political center, and to ensure that the party does not drift too far to the left of their own positions and no longer appeal to what they believe to be the majority of U.S. voters. If the DLC are the "new Democrats", the Blue Dogs are almost surely "old Democrats", hearkening back to the party's past during the eras of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, and to the party's former electoral stronghold in the southern United States (see also: Boll weevil and Dixiecrats). Most members of the Blue Dog Coalition in the House represent rural districts, and a large proportion of them represent Southern states.

Differences between the Blue Dogs and the party's left wing

The Blue Dogs' moderate agenda in Congress has angered many in the Democratic party, as it often leads to them voting with the more conservative Republicans. In 2005, the members of the Blue Dog Coalition voted 32 to 3 in favor of the bill to limit access to bankruptcy protection (S 256). Congressman Collin Peterson was subjected to a heated round of questioning from colleagues in the Democratic Party over several votes where he strayed from the party line before being nominated as the Ranking Member on the U.S. House Committee on Agriculture, in what would otherwise have been a routine nomination. On the other hand, some prominent Blue Dogs have also gotten strong support from progressive activists within the party, most notably Brad Carson of Oklahoma in his unsuccessful 2004 run for the U.S. Senate, John Tanner of Tennessee (whose Republican opponent in 2004, James L. Hart, was a radical eugenics advocate denounced by his own party), Jim Matheson of Utah, and Loretta Sanchez of California in her successful bid to unseat former Congressman Bob Dornan. Online fundraising efforts by liberal weblogs in 2004 named Brad Carson's campaign a top national priority. In some cases this support for Blue Dogs came about because the Republican opponent was seen as holding radical right wing views; in other cases the support is because in some states like Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Utah, a conservative Democrat is seen as the only kind of Democrat who can be viable at the polls. Some progressive activists also view the Blue Dogs as an important part of a Democratic Party big tent coalition, which will give the party important credibility with rural voters and social conservatives, while viewing the Blue Dogs as perhaps easier to swing to the left on fiscal and trade issues than the DLC. Others in the party's left wing disagree, and have promoted the idea of running future primary challenges against both Blue Dog Coalition and DLC members in an effort to unseat Democratic Party members they view as unreliable or too conservative.

External links

- [http://www.house.gov/cardoza/BlueDogs/bluedogs.shtml Official Site]
- [http://www.house.gov/tanner/blue.htm Blue Dog Coalition list on U.S. Congressman John Tanner's website]
- [http://www.bluedogdemocrats.com/ Blue Dog Democrats] (unofficial site)
- [http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bluedogmoderatedemocrats/ Yahoo Blue Dog Democrats group]
- [http://www.rightdemocrat.blogspot.com/ Right Democrat: a blog for conservative Democrats] Category:U.S. Democratic Party Category:Political history of the United States

Social conservative

Social conservatism is a belief in traditional or natural law-based morality and social mores and the desire to preserve these in present day society, often through civil law or regulation. Social change is generally regarded as suspect, while social values based on tradition are generally regarded as tried, tested and true. Its opponents commonly associate it with conservative religious groups, militarism and nationalism. Opponents of social conservatism argue that tradition is not necessarily a source of wisdom. Many views and values, for instance, which were at one time viewed as "traditional" are now viewed as outdated or unacceptable. Proponents of social conservatism counter that many "modern" values are also vapid and corrupt, often pointing to the deterioration of the traditional nuclear family over the past century as a result of increased social acceptance of divorce, promiscuity, and homosexuality. The meaning of social conservatism may vary between locations, depending on the social, religious and nationalistic traditions of a particular locale. It may be, for instance, socially conservative to promote "traditional" marriage in a Protestant, mainstream Mormon, or Catholic community, but socially conservative to promote polygamy in a devoutly Muslim or fundamentalist Mormon community. What is considered to be socially conservative is therefore very much dependent on what is considered traditional. Though most common in American Conservatism—indeed, international observers often wrongly believe it to be the whole of the US Conservative movement—it does have its counterparts outside the United States—in the UK, it is evinced in the work of writers like Peter Hitchens and Alexander Deane, and in publications like the Salisbury Review.

Conservative

:For related and other uses, see Conservatism (disambiguation) Conservatism is any of a number of political philosophies supporting traditional values or an established social order. As the word implies, conservatives seek to conserve the existing social order or to reinstate a social order from the past. Most conservative parties are on the political right, but there are countries where a conservative party falls on the left. Conservatism as a philosophy is much older than the left-right division, and it can include adherents from both. In the Netherlands, for example, defenders of ‘Dutch tolerance’ as a traditional national value and Islamist supporters of Sharia law both call themselves conservatives. In English-speaking countries, conservatism often refers to a political philosophy presented by Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke. Burkean conservatives wish to conserve heritage; they advocate the current social climate. To a Burkean, any existing value or institution has undergone the correcting influence of past experience and ought to be respected. Burkeans do not reject change, as Burke wrote "a state without the means of change is without the means of its conservation," but they insist that further change be organic, rather than revolutionary.
Tradition in conservatism
All conservatives value tradition. Tradition does not mean simply custom, habit or nostalgia for the past, though custom does inform tradition and sustain it. For a conservative, tradition is composed of standards and institutions that have been shown to promote the good, and therefore they find authority in tradition and apply it in politics. This authority, be it a person, a literature or a way of life, is rooted in the past, and thus cannot easily change . To keep tradition alive, conservatives pass it down from generation to generation, embodied in the eternal verities or the sophia perennis. Conservatives accept traditional values as authoritative, and judge the world around them by the standards they have come to trust. Many conservatives believe in God, and believe that He is not only the creator of the universe, but also the Author of those conservative values they espouse. Since conservatives believe tradition supercedes the political process, the laws and constitutions of liberal democracies that permit behavior that conflict with traditional values cause friction in their eyes. Conservatives in a democracy choose to participate, separate, or resist. They often participate in liberal republican politics, using government policy to encourage or preserve their values. Good examples of this are the Christian Democratic parties in Europe. Another method of conservative reform, imposing their values on the public, is common among nationalist or religious conservatives. This can take a relatively benign form, such as Conservative Christians trying to order public school students to pray, or a more violent form, such as Islamists putting to death anyone who blasphemes. Armed conservatives who consider their tradition to be absolute for all may become revolutionary conservatives. In Europe the Catholic-nationalist-conservative regimes of Salazar and Franco were examples. Though relatively rare, a modern example of conservatives who withdraw from society and attempt to live their lives in traditional ways is the Amish.
Some traditional values
Different forms of conservatism emphasise different values, many of them overlapping. For example:
- Order over chaos
- Orientation toward the past rather than the future
- The rural over the urban
- Unity and homogeneity, over discord and fragmentation
- The natural over the artificial and technological
- Existence over possibility
- Slow and incremental change over utopian projects
- Hierarchy over egalitarianism
- Acceptance of inequality over redistribution
- Sovereignty over union, in matters regarding the European Union Order Conservatives typically limit innovation out of risk aversion. Change is by nature risky; it can potentially disrupt or even ruin the social order, which is the only existing guarantee that conservative values will survive. Maintaining the status quo at least preserves these values, so conservatives favour heritage over innovation, incremental change over utopian projects, and unity over discord. This attitude is well summed up by the Shakespearean phrase, "Discretion is the better part of valor." Class Some conservatives consider loyalty to their social class to be paramount. These conservatives are almost always themselves of the privileged class, and consider the lower classes to be so intrinsically inferior that the subject does not merit discussion. In ancient Rome, the patrician class had this attitude toward the plebeian class, and much of the history of the Roman republic is a history of the class struggle. Class is not the same as wealth. It is strictly hereditary, and class conservatives look down on the "nouveau riche" as much as on the working poor. This attitude arises from the conservative distrust of socially disruptive behavior; those who have suddenly acquired wealth, like those who never managed to attain it in the first place, have not shown an ability to sustainably manage assets, and so they represent a threat to the traditional system of financial stewardship that drives conservative culture. Nature Conservatives tend to favour what they call the natural. Nature here is meant in contrast to the artificial or created (rather than invoking the natural world, though this is often included). They see evidence of a design or emergent order that is wiser than any human mind, especially one working outside of the rich traditional depository of values. Conservatives who adhere to the natural often appeal to organic metaphors, such as the notion of society as a living organism. The metaphor illustrates values such as 'rootedness', in which society is seen as a tree with its roots in the past and a crown in the present. Cutting contact with the roots would kill the tree. Through this metaphor, conservatives look askance at the potential for progress. Some may even regard the "natural" order as already for the best, so any deviation by definition would worsen the situation. Conservatives who believe in nature prefer hierarchy to egalitarianism, national sovereignty to created unions and acceptance of inequality to redistribution. Western conservatives derive some of their devotion to the free market from this notion. Virtue and Religion Many conservatives wish to enforce what they see as right living. They do not do this out of prudishness or a desire to make other people unhappy, but for two main reasons: first, they believe right living will do their neighbor good (whether he realizes it or not); second, because social mores tend to decay if they are not practiced by the community (which conservatives often find needs a little prodding). So they emphasize morality over a tacit (if not official) relativism, community over the individual and church involvement in government over laïcité.
Classification of conservatism

Cultural conservatism
Cultural conservatism hopes to enshrine the received heritage of a successful nation or culture. The culture in question may be as large as Western culture or Chinese civilization or as small as that of Tibet. Cultural conservatism does not always support its own culture: Kemal Ataturk attempted to transplant some Western institutions into Turkey, creating a republic. Cultural conservatives try to adapt norms handed down through a culture. The norms may be romantic: The anti-metric movement, demanding the retention of avoirdupois weights and measures in Britain, and opposing their replacement with the metric system is a classic example. They may be institutional: In the West this has included chivalry and feudal social structure, as well as capitalism, laicite and the rule of law. In the East it signifies the state examination system in China or widespread cultural tolerance in India. The norms may also be moral, according to social conservatives. For example, in some cultures such practices as homosexuality, abortion, or women who expose their faces or limbs in public are considered immoral, and conservatives in those cultures often support laws to prohibit such practices. Other conservatives take a more positive approach, supporting good samaritan laws, or laws requiring public charity, if their culture considers these acts moral. Cultural conservatives often argue that old institutions have adapted to a particular place or culture and therefore ought to persevere. Depending on how universalizing (or skeptical) they are, cultural conservatives may or may not accept cultures that differ from their own. Many conservatives believe in a universal morality, but others will allow that moral codes may differ from nation to nation, and only try to support their moral code within their own culture. That is, a cultural conservative may doubt whether the broad ideals of French communities would be equally appropriate in Germany. Other conservatives radicalize, instigating a conservative revolution such as the overthrow of the pro-western Pahlavi regime in Iran. Radical conservatism represents a radical and utopian goal. It asserts that conservatives should ultimately seek a radically different form of society from the one currently in place, a society designed to suppress innovation and freeze the culture as it was in some ideal age in the past. Those who go further, and attempt a radical new model of society, are not conservatives but rather utopians. The idea of a radical transformation of society, for contra-innovative purposes, is part of some theories of fascism.
Religious conservatism
Religious conservatives look to the receipt of special knowledge from a traditional source. Note that these values arrive external to their surrounding social order; religion opposes "the world," though it may be informed by the world. So religious conservatism, rather than considering local sources of tradition, prefers the holy organization of church, mosque or temple, which delivers special knowledge received so long ago. This means religious conservatism does not use the word tradition quite like other conservatives. Tradition in the religious context does not invoke an historically informed evolution. Church tradition by definition cannot evolve because it derives tradition from an unchanging divine act. This does not mean that church tradition never adapts, but that any "changes" enacted after revelation are refinements rather than discontinuities. St. Paul illustrates this use of tradition in First Corinthians: "I have received from the Lord that which also I delivered unto you." The Latin word for delivered here is traditio. While some conservatives may be wary of government intervention into the private lives of citizens, even when that intervention is in support of traditional values, religious conservative movements in general tend to support such causes. The almost universal support by secular, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim conservatives for pro-life movements is the most prominent example. Conservative governments influenced by religious conservatives may promote broad campaigns for a return to traditional values, such as the Back to Basics campaign of British premier John Major. In the European Union, a conservative campaign sought to constitutionally specify certain conservative values in the proposed European Constitution. Most prominently, Pope John Paul II lobbied for inclusion of a reference to God, which was narrowly defeated. Radical movements in Islam illustrate the method by which religious conservatism, rather than trying to preserve an existing social order, seeks to overthrow the existing order and enforce an adoption of its own traditions, values, worldview, and lifestyle. This differs from utopian revolutions, which seek to replace the existing order with a more progressive society. The Salafist movement is often politically radical, and violently repressed for that reason. Salafism seeks to re-create the Islamic society which existed at the time of Muhammad's death and for a short time thereafter, rejects the later development of Islamic societies, and can therefore be classified as a radical religious conservatism. The Salafi give great prominence to a disputed hadith (reported statement of the Prophet), which is classically conservative:

Every innovation is misguidance...[http://www.islamicacademy.org/html/Articles/English/BID'AH%20-%20Innovation%20in%20Islam.htm]

Burkean conservatism
The classical conservative tradition in English-speaking countries, which usually regards Edmund Burke as its intellectual source, often insists that conservatism has no ideology in the sense of a utopian programme, with some form of master plan. Edmund Burke developed his ideas in reaction to the Enlightenment idea of a society guided by abstract "Reason." Although he did not use the term, he anticipated the critique of modernism, a term first used at the end of the 19th century by the Dutch religious conservative Abraham Kuyper. Burke was troubled by the Enlightenment and argued, instead, for the value of tradition. Some men, argued Burke, have more reason than others, and thus some men will make worse governments if they rely upon reason than others. To Burke, the proper formulation of government came not from abstractions such as "Reason," but from time-honoured development of the state and of other important societal institutions such as the family and the Church.

"We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence."

Burke argued that tradition is a much sounder foundation than "reason". The conservative paradigm he established emphasises the futility of attempting to ground human society based on pure abstractions (such as "reason," "equality," or, more recently, "diversity"), and the necessity of humility in the face of the unknowable. Tradition draws on the wisdom of many generations and the tests of time, while "reason" may be a mask for the preferences of one man, and at best represents only the untested wisdom of one generation. In the Burkean view, an attempt to modify the complex web of human interactions that form human society for the sake of some doctrine or theory runs the risk of running afoul of the iron law of unintended consequences. Burke advocates vigilance against the possibility of moral hazards. For Burkean conservatives, human society is something rooted and organic; to try to prune and shape it according to the plans of an ideologue is to invite unforeseen disaster.
Conservatism's effect on history
Conservative attitudes can be found in all historical cultures which left a written record of their politics. In the western world, conservative ideas and conservative thinkers are identifiable elements of Classical Antiquity. The best-known modern conservatisms developed in the early-modern and modern periods in Europe. Events such as the English Civil War and the French Revolution helped shape the modern ideologies. The early-modern conservatives tended to support monarchy, but Edmund Burke, who argued so forcefully against the French Revolution, favoured the American Revolution. Since justifications for the American revolution included appeals to long-standing rights of subjects of the British Crown, which had been violated by the King, it could be described as a conservative revolution, opposed to these perceived changes in political forms. At the end of the Napoleonic period, the Congress of Vienna marked the beginning of a conservative reaction in Europe, to contain the liberal and nationalist forces unleashed by the French revolution. Joseph de Maistre was the most influential spokesperson for counter-revolutionary and authoritarian conservatism, with the emphasis on monarchy as a guarantee of order in society.
Impact on other ideologies
Many forms of conservatism incorporate elements of other ideologies and philosophies. In turn, conservatism has influence upon them. Most conservatives strongly support the nation-state (although that was not so in the 19th century), and patriotically identify with their own nation. Nationalism, which sees the nation as a long-term, centuries-old, community, has many conservative aspects. Nationalist separatist movements are by definition radical but also conservative. They appeal to tradition and often emphasise rural life and folkways. The most controversial ideological impact is the conservative element in fascism. European fascism drew on existing anti-modernist conservatism, and on the conservative reaction to communism and 19th-century socialism. Conservative thinkers such as historian Oswald Spengler provided much of the world view (Weltanschauung) of the Nazi movement. However, traditionalist, monarchist, and Catholic conservatives often despised the fascist mass movements, and the personality cult around the leader. In Britain, the conservative Daily Mail enthusiastically backed Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, and part of the Conservative Party supported closer ties with Nazi Germany. When defeat in the Second World War ideologically and historically discredited fascism, almost all western conservatives tried to distance themselves from it. The theory of totalitarianism, which treats Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as equivalent systems, provided the intellectual foundation. Nevertheless, many post-war western conservatives continued to admire the Franco regime in Spain, clearly conservative but also fascist in origin. With the end of the Franco and Salazar regimes in the 1970’s, the relationship between conservatism and classical European fascism became an issue for historians. The relationship with right-wing ideologies (including some that are described as neo-fascist) is still an issue for conservatives and their opponents. Especially in Germany, there is a constant exchange of ideology and persons, between the influential national-conservative movement, and self-identified national-socialist groups. In Italy too, there is no clear line between conservatives, and movements inspired by the Italian Fascism of the 1920’s to 1940’s, including the Alleanza Nazionale which is member of the governing coalition under premier Silvio Berlusconi. Conservative attitudes to the 20th-century fascist regimes are still an issue.
Conservatism and nationalism
Nationalism has an inherent conservative tendency, since the nation itself is usually defined as a centuries-old community. Conversely, any centuries-old community is by definition attractive to traditionalist and Burkean conservatives. Conservatives may describe their preferred values as the national values, implying that they are in some way compulsory for any resident of the nation. In recent responses to terrorism, both premier Tony Blair and opposition leader Michael Howard have suggested that British values and the British way of life must be enforced in Britain. They refer to a kind of 'Britishness' or 'Englishness' which has a literary rather than a political origin - George Orwell, for instance, defended English values and even the monarchy. Value conservatives in Europe appeal to 'national values'. Burkean conservatives value them for their own sake, because they are the result of long experience, but religious conservatives may use 'community values' as a euphemism for their own Christian values, or even for theonomy. All nationalists appeal to national symbolism - the national flag, national historical icons, founders and emblems, the work of national poets and authors, or the representation of the nation by its artists - and this is often adopted by conservatives. Military institutions in particular defend the nation and also provide tradition and ritual, so conservatives often admire military values: duty, sacrifice and obedience. But good intentions do not always bear out, and this nationalism has often and easily degenerated into militarism and jingoism. Where the nation is not independent, open patriotism is impossible anyway. Consider a Kurdish nationalist in Turkey, for instance, with no official institutions to admire. Saluting the Kurdish flag in public means risking arrest by the Turkish police - one man's patriotism is another man's treason. Nationalism, and more generally patriotism, are therefore typical features of modern conservatism, in established nation-states. This was not the case in the 19th century, when the movements inspired by romantic nationalism were necessarily radical opponents of the then existing states, and separatist movements still are. Nor is present-day nationalism confined to self-identified conservatives, or to the right. The perception persists that nationalism is a remote or provincial ideology, but it is by definition the basis of every nation-state. Nevertheless, even nationalist conservatives sometimes prefers the less pejorative term patriotism, and Burkean conservatives would distance themselves from many nationalist groups and ideologies, on the grounds of their radicalism. Nevertheless radical nationalist conservatism has been a major force in European history, no matter how distasteful that may be to many mainstream conservatives. Anti-immigrant and nationalist populist parties, such as France's Front National, continue to include a strong conservative element, and the conservative-nationalist tradition is very strong in Germany.
Liberal, conservative?
In the USA conservatism and liberalism are sometimes seen as polar opposites, yet in actuality the situation is more complex. A major area of difference in US politics is that between social liberalism and social conservatism. Social liberals advocate policies promoting equality and tolerance while social conservatives support established traditions of American society, or norms of their previous generations. The media widely covers the differnces in opinion in issues such as same-sex marriage, sex education, the separation of church and state among others. Fiscally, US liberals are regarded as advocates for limited social spending, consumer protection regulations, and other policies which run contrary to a more fiscal conservative, (or neoliberal) ideal. The overall (US) terms liberal and conservative are generalizations and do not point to any concrete set of ideals or values. The terms Economic conservatism or Fiscal conservatism are general terms, encompass modern neoliberalism, as well as classical liberalism in the tradition of Adam Smith. Popularily used outside of North America, the traditional usage of liberal refers only to these free-market policies. For example, in Europe 'liberal-conservative' is an accepted term. Differences in meaning and usage of the term 'liberal' have contributed to some confusion, see Liberalism. Theorists of liberalism often assert a moral justification for the free market, grounded in principles of individual liberty and individual choice. Their support is not moral or ideological, but driven by the Burkean notion of prescription: what works best is what is right. Conservatives might also emphasise the importance of civil society in this context: government intervention in the economy will make people feel less responsible for the society. Historically, many arguments have been advanced for the free market, and liberal principles in general. Present western classical-liberalism and political conservatism may have reached their pro-market position by different routes, but by now the lines have blurred. Rarely will a politician claim that free markets are "simply more productive" or "simply the right thing to do" but a combination of both. This merging of the classical liberal and conservative positions is found in most western conservative movements. In any case the free market itself is not an issue, for western conservative movements. They operate in long-established market economies: it is the degree of government intervention that is at issue. One archetypal free-market conservative government of the late 20th century - the Margaret Thatcher government in the UK saw deregulation as the cornerstone of contemporary economic conservatism. Thatcher added privatisation to this policy, and privatised British Airways, with remarkable success, and British Rail, with rather more mixed results. She cut taxes (especially on the upper income brackets) and slowed governmental growth. Proponents of Thatcherism attribute the unparalleled economic boom of the early 1980s to the late 1990s to these policies. Capitalism, and the outcome of the free market, may conflict with value conservatism. At times, as the Communist Manifesto emphasised, capitalism and free markets have been profoundly subversive of the existing social order:
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production...
That economic system continues to conflict with traditional attitudes, for instance in its massive distribution of pornography in many western countries. So it is possible to be a value conservative without supporting market liberalism - at present, this is a common political stance in, for example, Ireland. And not all supporters of the free market are social conservatives. Fiscal conservatism is not a political philosophy, and more a tradition of prudence in government spending and debt. Edmund Burke, in his 'Reflections on the Revolution in France', articulated its principles:
...[I]t is to the property of the citizen, and not to the demands of the creditor of the state, that the first and original faith of civil society is pledged. The claim of the citizen is prior in time, paramount in title, superior in equity. The fortunes of individuals, whether possessed by acquisition or by descent or in virtue of a participation in the goods of some community, were no part of the creditor's security, expressed or implied...[T]he public, whether represented by a monarch or by a senate, can pledge nothing but the public estate; and it can have no public estate except in what it derives from a just and proportioned imposition upon the citizens at large.
In other words, a government doesn't have the right to run up large debts and then throw the burden on the taxpayer; the taxpayers' right not to be taxed oppressively takes precedence even over paying back debts a government may have imprudently undertaken.
Nature and environment
In early liberal philosophy 'Nature' and the environment were treated as a resource to be exploited: value derived from their human use, in accordance with the labor theory of value. Most early conservatives, however, saw the value of Nature as inherent. Both strands have influenced conservative politics in many countries, since the 19th century. The etymology emphasises the close correlation between the early conservation movement and conservative ideals. In recent decades, deep ecology has emerged as parallel, non-anthropocentric conservative philosophy, with remarkable similarities in value preferences. Free-market liberals with environmental concerns are uncomfortable with such strong environmentalist positions. They tend to view free markets as an appropriate instrument, in this context. Given that pollution is an inefficiency, and given that consumers like "green" or "organic" products, the market should protect the environment. Others, conservative and non-conservative, radically dispute this, and see the market and commercialisation as one of the chief threats, if not the sole cause, of damage to the natural world. That may elicit no more than anti-commercial populism among value conservatives, and a shift in consumer preferences. More fundamentally, some conservatives see ecological conservation as necessary to preserve traditional values. European conservatives often identify rural life as the source, or sole remnant, of traditional society, and have often promoted a comprehensive ruralist ideology, usually in specific national versions. Ruralist conservatism inspires several political parties, such as the French Chasse-Pêche-Nature et Tradition (Hunting-Fishing-Nature and Tradition). Conservatives are a prominent element within most European Green Parties. In Britain, the electoral system leaves little room for third parties, and a Blue-Green Alliance with the Conservative Party would be necessary for electoral success. Technological conservatism is often part of environmentalist philosophy, rejecting especially the destructive effects on nature and ecosystems. There is also a long tradition of technological scepticism in western culture, usually directed against socially disruptive effects, and potentially dangerous consequences. The term 'conservatism' is also used in the history of technology to describe the reluctance - on grounds of cost, effort and disruption - to replace a functioning technology by another.
Biological theories on racial differences
Because some conservatives value what they consider 'natural' (also in the sense of pre-existing and given), conservatives often appeal to biological theories and biological analogies. They may form an integral part of a conservative position, or they may be used to justify it. The most common use of biology in conservatism is to use claimed inherent differences to justify inequality and social stratification. They correspond to the belief in inherent differences in talent in liberal social philosophy. The belief that the poor deserve their status is historically widespread, and not specific to one culture. In the late 19th century, however, European biological theories on race, culminating in the idea of Social Darwinism, became the main theoretical reference for conservative justifications of inequality. Later, several waves of IQ theories assumed this function in conservative social philosophy. Under influence of genetic research, both of these sources have merged, producing a range of vehemently disputed theories, on the genetic basis and the inevitability of inequality. Influential examples include The Bell Curve and similar work, explaining socio-economic inequality in multi-ethnic societies by hereditary differences in IQ among racial groups, and IQ and the Wealth of Nations which attributes global inequalities to national differences in average IQ. There is also a long tradition of non-biological theories of cultural superiority, which influenced 19th-century western colonialism. Partly due to the influence of the Clash of Civilizations theory, belief in the superiority of western culture has now become a standard of western conservative thought. Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi's comment on the September 11 attacks is exemplary:

We must be aware of the superiority of our civilisation, a system that has guaranteed well-being, respect for human rights and - in contrast with Islamic countries - respect for religious and political rights, a system that has as its value understanding of diversity and tolerance... The West will continue to conquer peoples, even if it means a confrontation with another civilisation, Islam, firmly entrenched where it was 1,400 years ago.[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3041288.stm]

Conservatism and the Right
In western democracies, 'conservative' and 'right-wing' are often used interchangeably, as near-synonyms. That is not always accurate, but it has more than incidental validity. Certainly the enemy is in both cases the same: the political left. (Although left-wing groups and individuals may have conservative social and cultural attitudes, they are not generally accepted, by self-identified conservatives, as part of the same movement). On economic policy and the economic system, conservatives and the right generally support the free market, although less so in Europe than in other places. Attitudes on some ethical and bio-ethical issues - such as opposition to abortion - are accurately described as either 'right-wing' or 'conservative'. Burkean conservatives favour incremental over radical change, even from the right. Some conservatives distrust the xenophobic and even racist sentiments prominent on the political right. Protectionism and anti-immigration policies may conflict with free-market conservatives' support for deregulation and free trade. Some conservatives oppose military interventionism, inspired by early British conservative thinkers, such as David Hume and Edmund Burke. Burke saw imperialism as interfering with the traditions and organic make-up of the colonised societies. However it is equally true, that there are numerous examples of theocratic religious conservatives, conservative nationalists, jingoist conservative imperialists, and conservative racists - and of ‘respectable’ conservatives allied with them. The Conservative Party in Britain was a staunch defender of the British Empire, and was responsible for initial brutal repression of African decolonisation. The revered Conservative Winston Churchill wrote in the 1920's that he was "strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes.", and did in fact authorise use of poison gas in Iraq. It is the degree of political taboo, rather than inherent ideological incompatibility, that determines the overlap between 'respectable' conservatives and the right. In European parliamentary systems, conservatives currently ally with centrist groups, or even some on the left, rather than with the xenophobic-populist right. All mainstream parties in Belgium cooperate to exclude the Flemish-separatist and xenophobic Vlaams Belang, altough some politicians wish to break this 'cordon sanitaire', and the mainstream parties in France sometime support each others candidates in run-off elections, where that is necessary to exclude the far-right Front National (FN) party (in March 1977, and then in March 1983, FN is present on RPR-UDF lists at municipal elections; in 1988, RPR and UDF right-wing conservative parties allies with the FN in the Bouches-du-Rhône and Var regions. In March 1989, they have common lists in at least 28 cities of more than 9 000 inhabitants. Those alliances are condemned in 1991, but a dozen right-wing deputies gain FN's support in 1997.
Conservatives in various countries
For information on American Conservatism.
Europe
In the United Kingdom, Burkean conservatism is the dominant tradition. However, there is no organisational continuity since the time of Edmund Burke, and he is certainly not the 'founder of the Conservative Party'. Contemporary British conservatives may trace their roots to both the Tories of Canning and the early Whigs (who opposed the monarchy). The Tories, who continued to represent the interests of the aristocracy, in contrast to the Whiggish mercantile class, dominated British politics from the 1770s and the 1830s. Burke, the so-called "Father of Modern Conservatism," articulated a 'progressive' conservative position through the Whig party. Nominally, the modern British Conservative Party was founded out of the Tory party by Sir Robert Peel in the 1840s, splitting almost immediately, over the issue of protectionism. The anti-protectionist faction joined with some Whigs and radicals to form the Liberal coalition, which was to dominate politics for much of the rest of the nineteenth century. A Liberal-Conservative coalition during the first World War, and the rise of the Labour Party, hastened the collapse of the Liberals in the 1920s. After the second World War, the Conservative party made concessions to the socialist policies of the left. This was partly in order to regain power, but also the result of the early successes of central planning and state-ownership forming a cross-party consensus. Under Margaret Thatcher the party returned to classical liberalism. For more detail, see History of the Conservative Party. In other parts of Europe, mainstream conservatism is often represented by the Christian-democratic parties. They form the bulk of the European Peoples Party fraction in the European Parliament. The origin of these parties is usually in Catholic parties of the late 19th and early 20th century, and Catholic social doctrine was their original inspiration. Over the years, conservatism gradually became their main ideological inspiration, and they generally became less Catholic. The German CDU, its Bavarian sister party CSU, and the Dutch CDA are Protestant-Catholic parties. Germany and German-speaking Europe have many non-mainstream conservative movements and an active and influential conservative intellectual tradition. They influence the right wings of the CDU and CSU, and many other right-wing parties and organisations, including neo-nazi groups. However much of the German right is also radical, and officially categorised as 'anti-constitutional' by the German internal security service.
China
China is unique in experiencing roughly two millennia of "feudalism," from around the second century BC until the 20th century, during which Confucian or neo-Confucian thought was endorsed by the state. This long continuity in institution and thought produced a set of values and social standards for Chinese conservatives to defend, especially: reverence for elders, authority figures and the state examination system. These traditional Chinese values are derived from Confucianism, which has an importance in East Asia comparable to Christianity in the West, with particular emphasis on sacrifice, hierarchy, virtue and merit. Ironically, today the Chinese Communist Party exerts the most powerful force in mainstream Chinese conservatism, as it has transitioned from strict communism into important norms of previous Chinese regimes. It is seen by some as the recipient of the Mandate of Heaven, a traditional Chinese idea, and its rulers do not protest at the designation. Just as before, the ruler is revered and generally seen as worthy of praise, with most criticism repressed not simply by law but also by taboo. The party itself has moved to a burgeoning Chinese nationalism as a basis for its legitimacy, and it does not really advocate revolutionary theory, adhering instead to a certain ideological flexibility consistent with Deng Xiaoping's dictum, seek truth from facts. During the first twenty or so years after 1949, the Communist Party did posess a conscious revolutionary spirit. Its leader, Mao Zedong, excoriated Chinese tradition as a vestige of feudalism; the government eliminated opposing views during the Anti-Rightist Movement; the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards tried to manufacture new Chinese "worker" values, notably by frowning on Confucian morality, issuing the Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong instead and "reforming" traditional art to mirror the new standards. The party only transitioned after Mao's death, which opened a power vacuum that would determine the party's future orientation. Three factions wrestled to succeed Mao after his death in 1976: leftist Maoists, who wanted to continue the revolutionary mobilization; rightist restorationists, who advocated a return to the Soviet model of communism; and rightist reformers, led by Deng Xiaoping, who hoped to reduce the role of ideology in government and overhaul the economy. Deng eventually won the seat of the party. While stressing his continuity with Mao, he soon initiated a series of economic reforms and promulgated his Four Cardinal Principles, which clearly outlined (and slightly liberalized) government control over ideology. The party today stems from Deng Xiaoping, and like him it asserts the primacy of pragmatism over communism while maintaining the iron dominion of the Communist Party. His ostensibly communist descendents, notably Jiang Zemin, continued to stray from communist theory on an ad hoc basis while incorporating any convenient parts when useful. The result combined heavy preference for economic growth, hostility to efforts to decentralize power and support for a burgeoning Chinese nationalism, a fusion Deng called Socialism with Chinese characteristics. Traditional Chinese values have since surged, rather assertively, under the Communist regime. Chinese nationalism tends to speak highly of a centralized, powerful Chinese state, so the government is attempting to win and maintain the loyalty of both its own citizens and that of recently departed overseas Chinese. Recent bestseller China Can Say No expresses a sentiment in favor of a uniquely Chinese path that, tellingly, does not have to involve American norms, such as individualism and Western liberalism. Moreover, the tide may still be coming in for Chinese nationalism, as the next generation of Chinese leaders will have grown up in an environment of nationalism. Since the 1990s, there has been a neoconservative movement in China (not connected with the US neoconservative movement).
See also

- Bioconservatism
- Conservative extension (Mathematical logic)
- Conservative Party (UK)
- Constitutional Conservatism
- Christian Democratic Union of Germany
- Conservative Revolutionary movement
- Libertarianism
- New Right
- Old Right
- Paleoconservatism
- Reactionary
- Religious right
- Republitarianism
- Traditional Catholic
- Fundamentalism
Further reading

- Russell Kirk. The Conservative Mind. Regnery Publishing; 7th edition (October 1, 2001): ISBN 0895261715 (hardcover).
- Edmund Burke. Reflections on the Revolution in France, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. October 1997: ISBN 0872200205 (paper).
External links and references

World Wide Web links

- [http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/dhi.cgi?id=dv1-60 Dictionary of the History of Ideas:] Conservatism.
Freenet links

- [http://localhost:8888/SSK@a~F76Clr4Cj9FNtr14W2u7p2mEgPAgM,RqmBC5XFYJ0ZxuMt7Zwscg/ConservativeAlert/4// Conservative Alerts]
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