Democratic Party (1828-1933)

The Democratic Party was an major American political party in the First and Second Republics. Often characterized as classically liberal with populist elements and socially conservative, the party has it's origins in the Anti-Administration faction and Thomas Jefferson's Republican Party (not to be confused with the 1850s - 1933 Republican Party, or post-revolution Democratic-Republican Party), representing the interests of the plantation class that dominated the First Republic: opposing the abolition of slavery and supporting it's foundation, and the formation of a national bank, and focusing on physical expansion of the United States, in opposition to the urban bourgeoisie dominated Whigs. However, the party also used populist rhetoric to appeal to poor white farmers in the South and Midwest, particularly under Andrew Jackson. The Democratic Party finally fell from power in 1860, when the newly born Republican Party, created from a merger of the Northern, anti-slave elements of the collapsed Whig Party and the Free Soil Party, nominated Abraham Lincoln for the Presidency and won the election.The Democrats either supported the Second Confederation or at least, peace with it, during the Slavers' War, but upon Loyalist victory, was eclipsed by it's rival in the Republicans during the first half of the Second Republic on a national level, although it continued to compete with them effectively in the House and Senate. However, "Redeemer" governments within the former territory of the Second Confederation formed effective one-party states, disenfranchising their black and poor white populations alike. Towards the end of the 1800s, increasing tension developed between the "Bourbon" wing of the party, representing the interests of rich Southern landowners, most often white, and the party's populist and agrarian wing.

The Democrats would briefly taste power once more towards the end of the century and the beginning of the next under the leadership of First Secretary Woodrow Wilson, the architect of the developing parliamentary system within the Second Republic, and once more taking the office of the Presidency in 1916 under the National Unity Government during the Great War, but would be blamed for it's excesses and failure to combat the Bienno Rosso by their Republican rivals, and would be further wounded by the defection of their progressive wing as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, which would align itself with the Republican Party in the 1920s. With Jim Crow and the KKK coming under attack by the Republican and growing Worker's Party of America, the Democratic Party increasingly contracted to become a regional Party only winning elections in the South, with even this in jeopardy with the collapse of Jim Crow.

As the Republican Party drifted to the right upon the assassination of Leonard Wood to combat the growing popularity of the Worker's Communist Party, the remaining progressive wing of the Party rearrested it's dominance in force, nominating Louisiana governor Huey Long for the 1932 presidential election. Upon the victory of the WCP-DFLP Popular Front, the MacArthur Putsch marked the beginning of the end of the Democratic Party. Huey Long was the only Democratic governor to oppose the Putsch, for which he was liquidated, and the remaining progressives would align with the Provisional Government in the ensuing Civil War, while the majority of the Party's politicians aligned with the National Salvation Front. Upon the Red victory in the Second American Civil War and the formation of the United Republics, the Democratic Party fragmented: the Progressives, few in number but controlling the remaining Party apparatus, folded into the anti-putsch wing of the Republican Party to form the Democratic-Republican Party. Democrats that opposed the Putsch but also opposed the results of the Red May Revolution formed the True Democrats, while supporters of the Putsch joined MacArthur in exile in Cuba.