In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville describes two kinds of political parties: great ones and small ones. The former are those “attached more to principles…to generalities and not to particular[s],” to statesmen and not to politicians. They are the parties of founders. The latter are just the opposite: “generally without political faith,” these are the parties of disinterested politics, of policy more than of direction.
“America has had great parties,” he writes, though “today they no longer exist.” But much has changed since the early 1830s, when Tocqueville visited the United States. He did not live to see the Civil War, a conflict so well-suited to his description of great parties that the war itself reads like his definition made literal. Neither did he live to see the small parties that followed in its wake.
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