Scott Appelrouth - Envisioning America and the American Self: Republican and Democratic Party Platforms, 1840-2016

This book explores the Democratic and Republican Party platforms from 1840 to 2016. As the only official, institutionally sanctioned document espousing the parties views on the state of the nation, the platforms present to the party faithful a diagnosis of what ails the country and the promise of possessing the necessary cure. In doing so, they offer more than a listing of specific issues in need of redress through legislative action, and moreover serve as a form of national storytelling through which political parties forge their vision of America and of what it means to be an American. Using topic modeling as an entry point into the documents, the author moves to consider more closely two related themes: those of how the platforms narrate the American self and individual freedom. With consideration of the extent to which the parties envision the self as an isolated economic actor or as an individual with a range of duties and obligations to a broader community, the spheres of action that they consider focal points for individual autonomy, and the extent to which they view liberty as freedom from restraint or freedom to act, this book sheds light on the historical trajectory of the growing fracture in American politics as well as the points of convergence across the two parties. Moreover, positing that behind their divisive rhetoric, both share a fundamental vision of what it means to be a person, the author argues that perhaps their seemingly intractable differences are more a matter of degree than kind.

Scott Appelrouth is Professor of Sociology at California State University, USA, and coauthor of Classical and Contemporary Sociological Theory, Sociological Theory in the Classical Era, and Sociological Theory in the Contemporary Era.

Scott Appelrouth

First published 2019

by Routledge

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2019 Scott Appelrouth

The right of Scott Appelrouth to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Appelrouth, Scott, 1965 author.

Title: Envisioning America and the American self : Republican and Democratic party platforms, 18402016 / Scott Appelrouth.

Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018059247 (print) | LCCN 2018061745 (ebook) | ISBN 9781315107738 (Ebook) | ISBN 9781138092044 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315107738 (ebk)

Subjects: LCSH: Republican Party (U.S. : 1854)PlatformsHistory. | Democratic Party (U.S.)PlatformsHistory. | Political cultureUnited StatesHistory. | IndividualismPolitical aspectsUnited States. | Party affiliationUnited StatesHistory. | United StatesPolitics and governmentPhilosophy.

Classification: LCC JK2356 (ebook) | LCC JK2356 .A74 2019 (print) | DDC 324.273/013dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018059247

ISBN: 978-1-138-09204-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-10773-8 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Many thanks to Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal at voteview.com for granting permission to use their data to construct the figures presented in .

Platforms were retrieved from the American Presidency Project compiled by John Woolley and Gerhard Peters and hosted by the University of California, Santa Barbara. www.presidency.ucsb.edu/data/platforms.php.

I thank California State University, Northridge and the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences for their support. Many thanks to my colleague, Scott Kleinman, who provided crucial programming assistance in developing the topic models that guided my research.

The turn of the calendar page that brought in a new millennium marked more than a temporal milestone. The liberal consensus that dominated Western politics for over half a century and that provided a basis for international cohesion is besieged by the mainstreaming of formally marginalized political views. With Britains Brexit vote, Donald Trumps election in the United States, and the increasing popularity of nationalist, far-right parties across Europe, the relative political stability of the West is giving way to an insular worldview where perceived threats both foreign and domestic are grist for the mill of fear. Though the Cold War may be over, it has been replaced by a narrative where war is seemingly everywhere and endless. In the United States, trade wars, class war, and the wars on religion, terror, and women have produced a climate where enemies abound. Corporations, unions, foreign nations, Muslims, feminists, immigrants, black and brown people, the United Nations, even the press and ones own government are branded as conspirators against the well-being of the righteous and hardworking. The apocalypse is near.

Today, fears of the coming collapse of Americas governing institutions are stoked by media headlines, cable news outlets, talk radio, Twitter feeds, and alternative online news sources where no conspiracy is too unbelievable to spread. Who could forget the so-called Pizzagate, conspiracy that dominated the news cycle for a time during the 2016 presidential campaign in which Hillary Clinton was said to be running a pedophile sex ring in the basement of a pizza parlor? And alongside their claims that climate change is a hoax perpetrated on the American people by the Chinese, some Republicans, both in and out of Congress, are now alleging that a deep state comprised of the FBI and the nations intelligence community are secretly controlling the government and spying on citizens. Not to be outdone, current U.S. President Donald Trump took to tweeting that former President Barack Obama wiretapped his offices, one item on an ever expanding list of evidence-free claims. Even tragedy is grist for conspiracy as students protesting in the wake of the mass shooting that left 17 dead in a Florida high school were branded as either actors or unwitting teenagers organized by Leftists bent on undermining freedom, while Wayne LaPierre, head of the National Rifle Association, in his usual tempered manner, labeled ensuing calls for stricter gun control as a socialist plot to eradicate all individual freedoms (quoted in Peters 2018). It is no surprise that in this environment, media pundits and academic scholarship routinely paint an American landscape colored by increasing political polarization due to the purging of centrist politicians and the rise of an electorate increasingly divided over social, cultural, and economic issues. Alongside such claims are historic lows in approval ratings for Congress, though the picture is getting brighter: its 9 percent approval rating in 2013 had climbed to 20 percent by January 2019 (Congress and the Public n.d.)!