POSTSCRIPT TO MY COMMENT

"When the parties were most divided we had the Civil War, an unmitigated disaster for all Americans, many of whom in the North never knew it until the Civil Rights Movement 80 years later.

When the parties were most together, we had the so called vital center, flagrantly giving away, over many decades, all average and lower class Americans' hope for prosperity, in order to conduct the liberal international economic order globalization after WWII.

Either way, either together or apart, our two party system, and the iffy separation of powers classless structure it rests on, has betrayed the hopes and dreams of average and lower class Americans, false though those hopes and dreams may well always have been, of fulfillment."  Bozon comment excerpt

 

I inadvertently left out the much more common third situation, the state of affairs when the parties were neither sharply divided to the breaking point, nor united closely around a vital center.

 

Nevins describes this third state of affairs rather well in the early volumes on The Civil War.

This has been the typical and intended state of the American political system generally.

The system was not designed to do very much very fast or very effectively. They were rebelling, after all, against those tendencies in European monarchical and imperial states.

 

The best word to describe it, the one Nevins often uses,  is
' drift '.

 

Like the other two situations I discussed, drift disproportionately benefitted, and harmed relatively less, the better placed interests in American society, to the relative detriment of middle and lower so called class interests, although it is really a misnomer to speak of classes, in the old sense, in America. Let's just call the less well placed interests just that. How about that?