50 The two-party system
parties. When important problems of a potentially divisive nature arose, such
as the Vietnam War, or civil rights, the tendency of the national leaders of
both parties was to move towards a middle course, avoiding extremes. There
arose what has been described as a consensus of ideas, a broad agreement upon
the basic attitudes towards the political system and political problems, which
was shared by the vast majority of the American people.
This consensual basis of American politics had a number of important re-
sults. First, it allowed particular issues to be discussed as isolated problems,
to be solved empirically without reference to any set of fundamental princi-
ples, so that within the accepted limits of what was considered an ‘American’
solution, compromises could be found both within and between the parties.
Second, as a corollary to this, it made possible the cross-party voting that was,
and to a degree still is, so characteristic of the American legislature. Here
constitutional and ideological factors reinforced each other. Congressmen
when casting their votes do not have to worry about governmental instability
of the sort that would result from cross-voting in a parliamentary system.
Legislators can make up their minds on the merits of the proposals in front
of them, or they can respond to constituency or other pressures. American
senators and congressmen therefore have voted against their party leader-
ship with a frequency and a regularity that would be intolerable in a more
ideological context. Party loyalty is a factor in the legislator’s behaviour,
but it is valued for its results rather than as an end in itself. Furthermore,
consensus politics leaves much more room for the play of personalities in
politics than when there is a strong ideological background to the division
between the parties. Third, it created, in the American context, a positive
need for outlets for extremist views, outside the party system, on the part
of those minorities, either of the left or of the right, who felt that Ameri-
can society needed fundamental change, but could see no hope of obtaining
it through the established parties. The moderating effect of the two-party
system, appealing as it does to the vast majority of Americans, can drive
dissident groups into extremism and violence to achieve their ends. Most
important of all, however, the ideological consensus provided an umbrella
that made possible a two-party system of the American kind. The parties
have important electoral and organisational roles to play, but they are not
in any sense tied to nicely wrapped-up packages of political policies. They
can divide on organisational and electoral matters without their organisation
being disrupted by differences on questions of policy. On policy questions,
as we shall see, the divisions within the parties have often been as great as
the divisions between them, but this was tolerable in the American context
in a way that would be inconceivable in Europe. The ideological framework
allowed the two-party system to evolve and to operate.
Liberalism and conservatism
In recent decades, however, this apparent absence of ideology has receded. To
many Europeans, America has come to be a bulwark of conservatism in the