The nature of American politics 19states. Thus American political history has been strongly characterised by
sectional patterns of behaviour, in which the inhabitants of a particular geo-
graphical region, at all levels of society, have felt themselves united against
the conflicting interests of other sections. The most dramatic confrontation
of this sort was, of course, the Civil War in which North and South became for
a time distinct warring nations. But at a less dramatic level, sectionalism has
been a moving force in American politics throughout its history. The unity of
the section was dependent upon some common interest which set it off from
the rest of the country and which was of sufficient importance to unite its in-
habitants in spite of class or other internal divisions. Frequently this common
interest was economic, a crop or product upon which the whole livelihood of
the region depended, such as the importance of grain for the states of the
Mid-West, and of cotton and tobacco in the South. Thus throughout the nine-
teenth century agricultural sectionalism deeply affected American political
behaviour. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner described the sections of
the country as faint reflections of European nations. The extreme example of
sectional loyalty was provided by the presidential election of 1860, in which in
the whole of ten Southern states not a single vote was cast for the candidate
of the Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln.
In the last quarter of the twentieth century such extremes of sectional-
ism no longer exist, and indeed the United States has developed a sense of
national identity and unity that in its own way is more cohesive than that of
older nations in Europe. Yet sectional and regional factors continue to play
a vital role in the working of American politics, a role that can be observed
in the stubborn decentralisation of the party system, in the machinery of
elections and in the working of congressional politics. It is in the interre-
lationship between this unique brand of nationalism and the reality of the
decentralisation of political power that the special quality of the American
system is to be found.
The second model of political motivation is that which looks to the class
structure of society as the major determinant of political behaviour. Although
a number of political thinkers, such as Locke and Montesquieu, have em-
phasised this aspect of political behaviour, it was Karl Marx who saw class
as the ultimate explanation of people’s actions. Taken to extremes this is, of
course, quite incompatible with sectionalism as a force in politics. If political
loyalty is really a matter of social class, then regional loyalties will have no
part to play in the political system, and, to the extent that these regional
loyalties continue to exist, then class solidarity across the nation will be di-
minished. In fact, recent American political history is, in large part, the story
of the complex interaction of these two political motivations, with sectional-
ism declining as class-consciousness waxed. Each of these styles of political
behaviour has, of course, very different implications for the type of party
system one would expect to find. Indeed, if either sectional or class politics is
taken to the extreme, then party politics as we understand it would be ruled
out. There would simply be civil war, either between geographical regions or