Political Parties in America
In addition to links to national and political party websites, this section provides information about party history and how parties function in American politics.
23 May 2008
The Wall Street Journal has pitted former Democratic vice presidential candidate (turned independent in order to retain his seat in the Senate) Joe Lieberman (D-CT) against Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE), who was amongst the pack for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. At the center of their argument: what path is today's Democratic Party following?
A provactive analysis of the party system by W. Daniel Hillis, a physicist and computer scientist and Adjunct Professor of MIT at the Media Laboratory. He contends that even with imperfections, a two-party system is preferable to a multi-party system.
Seattle freelance journalist David Neiwert has penned a thoughtful, and award-winning, essay on what he calls pseudo fascism in America, "something that looks and talks and sounds like fascism, even when it is decidedly not fascism." In the introduction, he says it began as "extended review of Robert O. Paxton’s 2004 book, The Anatomy of Fascism" and "pretty quickly grew into something else."
In November 1963, American historian and Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Hofstadter presented a lecture at Oxford which is the basis for this essay, published in Harpers in November 1964. It begins: "American politics has often been an arena for angry minds..." Although there is a focus on Senator McCarthy, Hofstadter reviews political rhetoric from the 18th century through the 1960s.
