AHC: A One-Party Democracy in America

kernals12

Banned
There are a lot of states now that qualify as one party Democracies. But I can't see it happening nationally. Our 2 party system survived the Civil War, the Great Depression, and Watergate. If those things couldn't end it, nothing will.
 
Have Taft beat Eisenhower for the GOP nomination in 1952, then lose to Stevenson. The GOP would be in despair ... They ran me-too candidates and lost, then ran a true conservative and lost. They might fragment, extending Democratic control of the White House and helping the Dems control Congress for years to come.

The Democrats lost six presidential elections in a row from 1860 through 1880 without despairing or fragmenting.

Anyway, if Taft lost it would only be narrowly and quite likely the Republicans would gain control of both houses of Congress in 1954 (the post-Korea recession, dissatisfaction with the results of the war, [1] the Soviet H-bomb, etc.)

[1] To be sure in OTL people were glad to see the Korean War end but not thrilled with the results. In OTL, the GOP didn't get much blame for the peace terms because of a widespread belief that Truman had made them inevitable. In this ATL, nobody but the Democrats will take the blame for the "no-win" war.)

Major political parties in the US have not given up or fragmented after bad election results since the Whigs. And in those days it was easier to supplant an old opposition party with a new one. To quote an old post of mine:

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Michael F. Holt in *The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party* notes that some Whigs attempted to keep their spirits up after their party's 1852 defeat by saying that the victorious Democrats were bound to make some terrible mistake. As he notes, they were right about that--the Kansas-Nebraska Act shattered the Democrats in the North. The Whigs were wrong only in thinking that Democratic mistakes and disunity would automatically benefit *them.* As Holt writes (pp. 772-3):

"During the twentieth century, American electoral politics has always been organized around the same two major parties--Republicans and Democrats--in large part because the adoption of state-printed ballots in the 1890s measurably increased the difficulty of launching a third party to challenge them. Since those major parties had an automatic slot on the ballots and since the legal hurdles for other parties to get on those ballots were so high, Republicans and Democrats effectively monopolized voters' choice. During this century, therefore, the Republican party has been the only realistic alternative to the Democrats. Thus it, and not some other party, has usually benefited when voters sought to punish Democrats and to replace them in office.

"In the 1850s and for most of the nineteenth century, however, the rules of the political game encouraged rather than inhibited the creation of new parties. Instead of state-printed ballots that gave legally recognized major parties pride of place and disadvantaged other groups who sought to be listed on them, political parties distributed and printed their own ballots. As a result, it was far easier for new parties to challenge the old ones. As Whigs would learn to their dismay, therefore, politics in the 1850s was not a zero-sum game...Unlike their twentieth-century Republican successors, in sum, Whigs could not monopolize opposition to Democrats and that simple, if easily overlooked, fact more than anything else explains the death of the Whig party."

According to Holt (p. 1130, n. 24):

"For evidence that Democrats and Republicans cooperated in many states to adopt the Australian ballot during the 1890s explicitly to deny third parties access to the electorate, see McCormick, *From Realignment to Reform*, pp. 114-18; Reynold and McCormick, 'Outlawing "Treachery"'; and Argersinger, 'Place on the Ballot.'"
 
Truman doesn’t lose China, or at least only loses half of it, and Korea ends up firmly in the hands of Not Kim Il-Fuckhead, the economy does OK after the war with minimal drop-off and fear of another Depression, and while we’re at it, Eisenhower throws in his lot with the Dems (he was apolitical until he ran for President and early could have been a Dem.)

I just don’t see the GOP coming back from that; the Dems probably become a permanent majority, with legislation being ebbed and flowed based on factions within the party.
 
The Democratic Republicans were the only political party in the US for about a decade during the Era of Good Feelings.

The problem is that the US became simply too big to have a solid political consensus between all the different groups and regions for any substantial amount of time. For example, if the Republicans became the only political party in America tomorrow due to an ASB, it would quickly splinter into two or more parties. Same for the Democrats, if they had become the only party post WW2 the South would have eventually split with them to create a rival party.
 
The Democratic Republicans were the only political party in the US for about a decade during the Era of Good Feelings.

And 1824 showed the result of that: Once the "Virginia dynasty" could no longer provide automatic successors, the party fragmented along personal and sectional lines, much alarming people like Martin Van Buren. To quote an old post of mine:

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IMO the real founder of the Democratic Party was not Andrew Jackson but Martin Van Buren.

Van Buren thought that the disappearance of the Federalists and Monroe's policy of "amalgamation"--adopting many old Federalist policies, appointing some ex-Federalists to office, etc.--was a disaster because as he explained to Thomas Ritchie, "Political combinations between the inhabitants of the different states are unavoidable & the most natural &, beneficial to the country is that between the planters of the South and the plain Republicans of the North. The country has once flourished under a party thus constituted & may again. It would take longer than our lives (even if it were practicable) to create new party feelings to keep those masses together. If the old ones are suppressed, geographical divisions founded on local interests or, what is worse, prejudices between free & slaveholding states, will inevitably take their place. Party attachment in former times furnished a complete antidote for sectional prejudices by producing counteracting feelings. It was not until that defence had been broken down that the clamour agt. Southern influence and African Slavery could be made effectual in the North. Those in the South who assisted in producing the change are, I am satisfied, now deeply sensible of their errour.… Formerly, attacks upon Southern Republicans were regarded by those of the North as assaults upon their political brethren and resented accordingly. This all powerful sympathy has been much weakened, if not, destroyed by the amalgamating policy of Mr. Monroe. It can & ought to be revived..."
http://vanburenpapers.org/content/mvb-thomas-ritchie-13-january-1827

In other words, the Republican/Federalist conflict had to be artificially re-created; if there were no Federalists any more, J. Q. Adams had to be portrayed as one. (Of course Van Buren would have denied that there was anything artificial about it, and may have sincerely believed that the younger Adams was a Federalist at heart. ) Jackson was simply the ideal vehicle Van Buren found for this purpose (he had previously supported Crawford, but now Crawford's health made his presidential prospects impossible), and if Jackson hadn't been around, Van Buren and his associates would have found another. Which of course is not to say that Jackson was Van Buren's or anyone else's tool, but the Democratic party would have come into existence even without him.

(Incidentally, Robert Pierce Forbes in his The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath, pp. 214-15 has a scathing attack on Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Remini, Sean Wilentz, etc.--"the neo-progressive school" as Ronald Formisano called it--for downplaying the role of slavery in the formation of the Jackson coalition. "One is at a loss to know just what contemporary politicians would have had to write in order to convince Remini and others of his school that slavery represented a central issue, if not the central issue, of national politics at this time. Alternatively, one is left to wonder whether the modern chroniclers of the Democracy are not still engaged in the same project of distracting attention from the issue by means of artificial class appeals as their historical subjects--and if so, why." https://books.google.com/books?id=lPR28UNIXgEC&pg=PA215)
 
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