The United States of America currently boasts of being the number one democracy in the world. This is a feature that is imminent given the open fact that its political scene is not as murky as that of other nations globally, the country has two major political parties: the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. These are the only parties that have governed the country alternatively ever since her independence. Currently, the country is under the governance of the Democratic Party following a two-term Republican reign.
The parties have to this day kept attracting varying politicians who in turn shape the policies that the parties ascribe to and governed by. Some of these policies result in politicians jumping from republican to Democratic part and vice versa alternatively and this is the trend that has characterized American politics. In the 1960s and 1970s, a majority of Americans, both political leaders and civilians moved their loyalty from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party a trend that led to the Republican Party reigning for a long time. This was this change of perception and preference was spearheaded by several pressure groups and for several reasons some of which are discussed below:
For a long time America stayed a capitalist economy, the market mostly consisted of the owners and nonowners to the means of production. The owners thus amassed a lot of wealth and this consequently led to the rise of the class system of societal stratification. This type of economy resulted in increased poverty and was a trend that was likely to stall the American development dream. When the Republican party started fostering for a more liberal market, one in which the government regulated the playing field by introducing public corporations, most citizens got attracted to the party and this was followed by a massive migration from the democratic party that was largely viewed as being full of capitalists.
Small and medium-sized investors formed the first group of the elite Americans to quit the New Deal coalition for the Republican Party because the type of economy that the Democratic Party propagated for would only favor the rich and the powerful who coincidentally constituted its management.
The other factor that led to the massive move from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party was the appreciation of the African American community in the country. The USA’s population is composed of diverse people of sundry backgrounds, key among them is the African Americans, a group that was taken to the country from Africa by the British colonial masters to work in the plantation as slaves. When America became independent, they could not be repatriated but the whites and Asians treated them as undeserving citizens of the land.
The intense discrimination led to the rise of several rights groups led by such iconic figures as Martin Luther king. When the Republican Party in the early 1960s introduced policies that catered for the interest of African Americans, the entire group pledged allegiance to the party with regions habited by the “blacks” such as the state of Illinois adding up to the first migrants from the New Deal Coalition to the Republican Party. Consequently, other Americans who felt the pain that the African Americans had gone through also shifted their loyalty to the Republican Party.