Are the major American parties ideological? That is, do they carry messages that are internally coherent, externally differentiated (from one another), and stable (through time)? Most observers would say no, perhaps with the qualification that they once were.

The decline-of-ideology jeremiad, one finds, has quite a long history. In the 1830s, Tocqueville complained, “The political parties that I style great are those which cling to principles rather than to their consequences; to general and not to special cases; to ideas and not to men.” America, he concluded shortly after the demise of the Federalist party, “has had great parties, but has them no longer.” In 1879, Woodrow Wilson, then an undergraduate at Princeton, went even further: “Eight words contain the sum of the present degradation of our political parties: No leaders, no principles; no principles, no parties.” A decade later, James Bryce charged that “Neither party has anything definite to say on [the] issues; neither party has any principles, any distinctive tenets. Both have traditions. Both claim to have tendencies. Both have certainly war cries, organizations, interests enlisted in their support. But those interests are in the main the interests of getting or keeping the patronage of the government. Tenets and policies, points of political doctrine and points of political practice, have all but vanished.”

After the turn of the century, under the stimulus of the Progressive vision and of crusading party leaders like William Jennings Bryan, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt, party politics was more likely to be portrayed as conflictual.