> On Jun 16, 2011, at 10:12 AM, Wojtek S wrote:
>
>>
>> [WS:] As opposed to third parties which, as we all know, achieved
>> stupendous political successes in the US history.
>
> Maybe they weren't "stupendous," but the crushing of the Slave Power
> and the addition of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the
> Constitution weren't exactly trivial, either.
There's a need to clear up this enduring myth about the Republican Party. Contrary to popular belief, it was never a "third party" in the modern sense. When we speak of "third parties" today we are talking about small parties that confront the entrenched duopoly of the two major parties. The GOP never faced that situation. It came into being after one of the two major parties - the Whigs - had already collapsed for reasons that were mostly unrelated to the GOP's main issues of slavery and sectionalism.
At the moment of the GOP's birth, the party system was in a state of total flux as a kaleidoscope of alternative parties were scrambling at the state and local levels to establish themselves as the anti-Democrat successor to the Whig Party. At that moment, the most successful was the nativist American Party (the Know-Nothings), but the AP was a brand new party with a fatal flaw (it was sectionally split). The GOP cemented its status as the defunct Whigs' successor by winning this competition.
It should be obvious that this situation has nothing at all in common with the position of, say, today's Green Party or Socialist Workers' Party.
SA