Critical realignment theory is a synthesis of perspectives emanating out of political science and history that suggest the existence and impact of “critical elections” as major determinants in the practice of democratic politics. These elections are said to mobilize new voters, bring new issues to bear, promote a new class of political elites, and most profoundly, alter the distribution of voter alignments in a sudden and durable manner. Critical realignment theory is one of the most profound developments in empirical political thought and stands out as a cross-disciplinary phenomenon between political science and political history. It also served as the initial theoretical contribution for an entire subfield within American political science – now known as American political development. This subfield employs systematic historical analysis in theoretical and methodological ways in order to study American politics.
Most scholars today believe the United States has undergone a cycle of Six Political Party Systems due to Realigning Elections.
- First Party System
- Second Party System
- Third Party System
- Fourth Party System
- Fifth Party System
- Sixth Party System
Some observers, including myself, believe 2016 marked the beginning of the Seventh Party System and the next electoral shift.
I predict both major parties will fracture and new organizations (if only in name) will be created. Like the country at-large, the Democrats are very fractured and divided. Disillusioned Progressive Democrats, suspicious of seeing their presidential primary choices sabotaged by DNC machinations, and tired of only being considered impotent, marginalized tokens who are fed faux symbolism rather than substantive policy implementation, may form their own party; #NeverTrump Republican neocon remnants of the Bush, McCain, Romney, and McConnell factions will either form their own party or desperately try to hold title control of the institutional GOP; grassroots multiethnic working and middle class populist Trump supporters will either be forced to form their own party or fight the #NeverTrump dinosaurs in a bloody internecine war; and establishment crony corporatists and welfare/warfare statists in the present Democrat party will hold onto the party machine.
The big Wall Street financial donors behind establishment corporate state Democrats will never suffer a Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren candidacy so I see the progressive faction likely splitting off and forming a Progressive Party (as they did in 1948 with Henry Wallace). It’s all about retaining control of the party machine, appointments, patronage, etc.
Where these Progressives will get the massive funding sources to undergo extensive ballot petition campaigns and concerted legal action to place their candidates on 2024 November ballots is an open question.
The Wallace campaign in 1948 was a covert tool of the Soviets and the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA).
Ultimately we must never forget that despite any surface political realignment what we are dealing with here. These are vast vertically integrated criminal cartels which have existed and evolved since the birth of the American nation-state to prey upon, plunder and oppress the everyday populace of the United States.
11:18 am on February 6, 2020
