The two-party system 49presidency, experience as the governor of a state being considered a better
apprenticeship. President Lyndon Johnson had been Democratic leader of
the Senate, but he succeeded to the presidency as a result of the assassina-
tion of John F. Kennedy and was subsequently elected in his own right.
The ideological content of American politics
The constitutional and structural aspects of the party system that we have
surveyed are understandable as far as they go, but something more is needed
to comprehend fully why America has a ‘two-party’ system. What is politics
about in America, and what role do ideas play in the working of the system?
What are the issues that give life to the political system?
The relation between ideas and political structures is always very complex
and nowhere more so than in the United States. Political ideas take differ-
ent forms and exist at different levels of consciousness. The term ‘ideology’
is usually applied to a system of thought in which a number of ideas about
the nature of the political system and the role of government are logically
related to each other, and developed as a consciously held guide to political
action. Socialism, communism and fascism are the prime examples of such
ideologies. In this sense ideology plays a very small, indeed an almost negli-
gible role in American politics. These ideologies have never been held by any
more than a tiny proportion of the American population and although there
are a number of political parties based upon these ideas, among them the
Communist Party USA, the Socialist Labor Party of America and even the
American Nazi Party, these organisations have never had a significant effect
on American politics, at any rate at the national level. This is often referred
to as ‘American exceptionalism’, the fact that American politics has always
been different from the politics of old Europe. Yet there is an important role
for ideas in American politics, and an understanding of the American ide-
ology, ‘Americanism’, is essential for a full understanding of the two-party
system.
The American ideology is fundamentally the ideology of Western liberal
democracy but, whereas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Britain
this set of ideas could almost be taken for granted, in the United States it had
to be continuously and consciously asserted. The apparent contradictions in
American life stemmed very largely from this felt need to impose an ideology
that has as its main tenets freedom of speech and freedom of political action.
The diverse characteristics of American society are such that many Ameri-
cans felt that the toleration of unusual behaviour or unusual ideas might
lead to the break-up of their society; there had to be a minimum conformity
enforced by society. Ideas that introduced the germ of a divisive force into the
community could not be tolerated.
Thus all tendencies towards a sharp polarisation of ideas were consciously
resisted. Both major parties shied away from ideological commitments, and
those issues that cut deepest into American society usually also cut across the