Party Ideologies in America, 1828-1996 (review)

Party Ideologies in America, 1828-1996. By John Gerring (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1998) 337 pp. $64.95.

The central thesis of Gerring's engaging book is that American political parties have, and historically have had, consistent ideological differences of no lesser average magnitude than those in putatively more ideological European settings. Gerring sets out this argument of substantial ideological distinctiveness along both comparative and historical dimensions. From a comparative perspective, Gerring concludes that the two major American political parties are about as different from one another as the two leading parties in any other system are. In essence, the author limits the range of comparison not to all parties, but to those parties that consistently get the largest share of the vote. By this comparison, he argues, the U.S. party system is as ideologically distinctive as any other.

He also argues from a temporal perspective that the American parties, though having consistently clear differences with each other, have held different positions across different eras. Gerring traces a Whig/Republican lineage and a Democrat lineage, using 1828 as the starting point of a competitive party politics. He discovers two major periods of Whig/Republican ideology. One, from 1828 to 1924, stressed order, nationalism, morality, antipopulism, and the role of government, especially at the federal level. Traces of a Hamiltonian vision of society can be detected in this outlook. From 1928 to 1992, Republican appeals shifted from social order and elitism to a neoliberal agenda and a populism of the right.

The Democrats during this same time frame underwent an additional ideological transformation. Gerring refers to the 1828-1892 period as the Jeffersonian era, in which the fundamental emphasis of the party's appeals lay in civil society, anti-statism--especially anti-federal government--pre-industrial agrarianism, the preservation of liberty, and the perpetuation of racism. By the time William Jennings Bryan came to the forefront, the Democrats' appeals were about to be transformed. The party's appeals then began to emphasize populism and a form of class conflict (parasites versus producers), as well as a rehabilitation of the state as an entity able to confront the otherwise uncontested power of monopolists. In this view, the New Deal was less the beginning of a political ideology than the capstone of it. In Gerring's formulation, this second Democratic political epoch lasted from 1896 to 1948. Harry Truman, he concludes, was the last populist Democratic president who employed the rhetoric of conflict between the working people and big business interests as a campaign tool. The period between 1952 and 1992 is seen as the latest transformation of the Democrats' political appeals, an era in which inclusiveness and the search for social harmony replaced the more flamboyant rhetoric of populism and class conflict.

The author adds a chapter on the 1996 presidential election that places the Democrats within their most recent tradition but is less clear about the Robert Dole campaign, which harkened back to earlier appeals of nationalism and moral virtue but, in the end, hinged its electoral prospects on the issue of tax cuts, a distinctive element of neoliberal appeal.

Gerring limits his analysis to the rhetoric of presidential campaigns and to the speeches of presidents. This tactic substantially narrows the range of variability likely to be found within each party's set of appeals and, indeed, may limit the breadth of interests represented by each of the parties and the degree of overlap between them. It may have the effect of making the parties look more different in certain eras than would be the case if the congressional wings were included. In other eras, possibly including the present, the differences between the congressional parties might be even greater than those between the presidential nominees.

The author especially wants to show that the American parties, despite the absence of a socialist model, have had consistent and powerful differences in ideas and are not merely responding to constituencies, interests, or...