America's Historical Party Systems
Introducing A Series Of Critical Intersectional Zero-Sum Analyses
Looking through all my active article drafts, I think this is the best place to pick back up since hitting Backlog Zero. After all, this Discourse is about fixing America without indulging ourselves any delusions of grandeur or narrative; and in order to understand how to fix America, we need to understand how we got to where we are today.
However, my original idea for a single piece was woefully inadequate to the sort of detailed analysis CIZST demands. I’d have loved to be able to do a big glossy summary, but it just wouldn’t do justice to the topic.
So, instead, I’m going to split this up into pieces on each party system. Using Wikipedia as our “neutral source”, since the nomenclature is of course an active point of debate, that gives us six eras, plus the current transition period we find ourselves in.
The core of our analysis will be the partisan results of each major election within each era. We’ll look at statewide and national trends, particularly those in swing states, and seek to explain and predict key events based on the dynamics present and their degree of “zero-sum-ness”. This, in turn, means we’ll have to those identify key events and dynamics! We’ll have to be very explicit about what rules each electoral system is using. And we’ll look at what narratives were popular before and after our key elections, and why they either failed or were spot-on. Finally, since this is an intersectional study, we’ll look at demographic breakdowns to identify precisely who is making these historical decisions.
One risk here is “overfitting”. My explicit goal is not to turn this into a comically absurd mess like Strauss-Howe. CIZST is not, nor does it purport to be, a mathematical equation. For Foundation fans out there, it’s certainly not psychohistory — something we’ve been pretty explicit about. Rather, we want to use CIZST within its proper context as a tool: It’s an explanation of how the zero-sum-ness of political dynamics operate on the substrates of identity and geography to influence political outcomes.
Another risk is that we’re just not writing a full history book here. Sorry guys, but there’s only so much research I can actually do! But what I can promise is that I’ve read a lot of books about this and other topics over the last several years, and I think I have a pretty good handle on how to interpret the summaries I’ll be using as my main sources. However, this risk has also been factored into the project itself: It’s the reason why we’ll be diving deeper into key events, which are far easier to research once we’ve identified them.
The first article will come out next week about the First Party System. This was an era where the very first parties were arising. Factionalism and sectionalism ruled more than pure partisanship. And, like the first several of our eras, slavery and patriarchy were the order of the day. The main politically-relevant intersections were between North and South, Anglo-Saxon and new immigrants of German and French (among others) descent, and along remnants of discrimination against the Scots-Irish.
I’m excited for this. See you next week!