Political parties in the United States.

José Manuel Suárez Mier *

My readers asked me to elaborate on the evolution of the political parties in the United States and from that historical vision to see what will happen today with an extreme polarization between parties and within themselves.

The first government entity in the US was the Continental Congress (CC, 1774-89), which was the only authority agreed by the 13 colonies, and from their Declaration of Independence in 1776.

The war of independence clarified the urgent need to improve this arrangement since the CC had the power to spend and borrow but not impose taxes or prevent states from putting obstacles and duties between them.

Thus arose the convention that drafted the Constitution in 1787. To achieve its ratification, it was necessary to undertake an intense campaign between those who supported it, the federalists led by Alexander Hamilton, and those who opposed it, led by Thomas Jefferson.

This is the origin of the political parties, the Federalist, from which came to the first presidents, Washington and Adams, and the Democratic-Republican, who wanted the US to be a pastoral Eden with strong states and a weak federation, opposed the industry, commerce, and banking.

When losing the presidency in 1800, and with the premature death of Hamilton, the Federalist party faded so that the Jeffersonians dominated the political scene until 1824 when they split, giving birth to the “modern” Democratic party supporting Andrew Jackson; the rest creates the Whig party.

Jackson injects radical populism into his government and party, culminating in his country’s worst financial crisis and overturning the party’s principles, now in favor of a strong Executive and a timid Congress, while supporting the Manifest Destiny through which the US would extend its dominion to all the North American continent.

In the background of this story is the original sin of the extermination of the Indians, in which Jackson participated with ferocity and the slavery that increasingly divided the country and was emerging as the problem that would split it in two.

When Jefferson’s party -with the schismatic figure of Jackson and the slavery politicking- was broken, the Know-Nothing** party was born from a secret, racist society, and against immigrants as its ideology, due to the supposed damage they caused to the economy -which sounds like Trump a century and a half earlier!-.

Between Jackson’s departure and the start of the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln founded the Republican party, the Democratic and Whig parties dominated but with few substantive differences between them, except on the increasingly pressing issues related to slavery, which finishes the Know-Nothing, whose main mission was to stop immigration.

After the Civil War, the parties are consolidated, the Republican against slavery and in favor of a modern, industrialized and vigorous country like the one conceived by Hamilton, and the Democrat, retrograde and all-powerful in the South, seeking that the end of slavery leads to a racist and segregated society.

In future installments, I will continue with this story, which will make it easier to see what may happen in the future of the United States now with divided and conflicting parties.

*Consultant in economics and strategy in Washington DC and professor at universities in Mexico (ITAM) and the U.S. (Georgetown and American) Email: aquelarre.economico@gmail.com

**Being a secret society, its members could not accept belonging to it, so when asked about it, they alluded to “not knowing anything,” “Know Nothing.”

This column is also published in Spanish on July 29, 2021, in the Excélsior newspaper, based in México City.