Trump responds to former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's closing remarks during the first Republican presidential debate. Photo / AP
Trump responds to former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's closing remarks during the first Republican presidential debate. Photo / AP
If anything's constant in American political life, it's the stable two-party system, although it is jostled occasionally by third-party presidential challengers such as Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996 or Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.
Yet, more rarely, at times of extreme political flux, this society has broken up into four parties.
In 1948, the first post-World War II presidential election year, Republicans ran against three Democratic party factions - Harry Truman's pro-New Deal, anti- Communist majority wing (which won), a Southern-based segregationist offshoot led by Strom Thurmond, and pro-Communist bolters headed by former vice-president Henry Wallace. The latter two polled more than 1.1 million votes each out of 48 million cast; Thurmond got 39 electoral votes.
In 1860, as the country and its political parties came apart over slavery, the Republicans, northern and southern Democrats and a residual Whig body called the Constitutional Unionists fielded candidates for the White House.
All four gained electoral votes; Abe Lincoln's victory gave way to the Civil War.
Might we be headed toward another four-party moment? There are two reasons to say "yes".
The first is the argument presented in conservative scholar James Piereson's provocative new collection of essays, Shattered Consensus.
As the title suggests, Piereson believes - with many other political analysts - that the United States' current political malaise represents an unstable new normal - that the formerly consensual postwar political order has "at length produced a sorting-out of Americans into conflicting and sometimes hostile political, social and geographical groups. The most obvious historical precedent we have for such a configuration is the one that developed in the 1850s".
Causing this breakdown, in Piereson's view, are the mounting inefficiency and the cost of government, which fuel conservative demands for radical shrinkage of the state, coupled with decreasing productivity and perceived unfairness of the economic system, which fuel a liberal demand for radical expansion of the state.
Long gone is the optimistic Keynesian belief in managed capitalism which, according to Piereson, supported the centrist two-party politics of the postwar era.
Even recent signs of economic recovery, including a low 5.3 per cent unemployment rate, can't seem to revive confidence in either government or business.
The second reason to speculate on a four-party moment is the course of the current presidential campaign, which has been more about the internal struggles of Republicans and Democrats than the differences between the two parties.
In each party, the source of division is an ideologically purist voter "base" (left-wing Democrats, right-wing Republicans) fed up with what it sees to be the past corrupt compromises of the party "establishment", which it believes takes its votes for granted.
This dynamic is especially pronounced on the Republican side, where the Tea Party movement against "Republicans in name only" started at the end of the George W. Bush Administration.
GOP unrest is so advanced that even a candidate who isn't that conservative - Donald Trump - has managed to exploit it, probably only temporarily, through sheer force of defiant attitude.
But the surprising success of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders' left-wing campaign against presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton - he's leading in the latest New Hampshire primary poll - shows there is populist unhappiness in Democratic ranks as well.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. speaking to nurses during a visit to the National Nurses United office. Photo / AP
The usual methods of co-optation by which Republican and Democratic politicians have maintained cohesion in their big tents are proving remarkably ineffective.
GOP candidates' concessions to the right seem only to feed the demand for more; ditto for the attempted leftward movements not only of Clinton but also of former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley.
In short, a lot of the energy in politics now comes from those who reject politics, at least politics as we know it. They insist on simple solutions to complex problems - whether it's Sanders' call for free state college tuition, paid for by a tax on stock traders, or Trump's promise to build a wall along the Mexican border, paid for by Mexico.
The likely scenario for 2016 is that Republicans and Democrats will hang together, though the specific ideological agendas that will emerge from their primaries is still very much up in the air. The incentives to avoid party crack-ups are overwhelming; and the resources at the disposal of establishment Republicans and Democrats remain formidable.
Not even Piereson extends his analogy between present-day party politics and those of the 1850s to include a threat of civil war.
Rather, he foresees, all too plausibly, "an extended period of stalemate as each party blocks the agenda of the other, and a majority fails to form over any single approach to national challenges".
It would take a crisis to break the impasse, Piereson writes - a sobering thought after the number of crises we've already been through.
Trump's wall claim 'untrue'
Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto's Administration said there's no truth to United States presidential candidate Donald Trump's assertion that the nation would pay for a wall along the border between the countries.
"Of course it's false," said spokesman Eduardo Sanchez. "It reflects an enormous ignorance for what Mexico represents, and also the irresponsibility of the candidate who's saying it."
Sanchez said the Government hadn't taken Trump's statements on the campaign trail as serious proposals. The majority of Mexicans in the US followed the nation's laws, and immigrants made up an important part of the American workforce, Sanchez said.
Trump has said Mexico is sending rapists and criminals to the US.
On Wednesday, Trump again reiterated his assertion that Mexico would foot the bill for a wall sealing off its northern border with the US.
"We're not paying for it," the billionaire told Fox News host Sean Hannity.
"You know how easy that is? They'll probably just give us the money."
