User:Gdantheman/sandbox

The Sixth Party System is a term of periodization used to describe a largely conservative Republican Party-dominated era of American national politics which eclipsed the relatively liberal Democratic Party-dominated Fifth Party or New Deal System in 1968 and lasted until 2008. There is some debate as to whether the new Party System was fully forged in the late-1960s (as the 'Silent Majority' was), 1980 (as the 'Moral Majority' and 'Reagan Revolution' did) or the early-to-mid-1990s (when the 'Third Way' and 'Contract with America' arose) but the various Democratic and Republican Party blocs prior to the election of Nixon have never reunited under one party at the House, Senate and Presidential level in any general election since.

With Democrats losing their traditional Southern white support due to the bipartisan passage of the Civil Rights Act under President Lyndon Johnson and liberal fatigue with the increasing death toll of the Vietnam War, the New Deal coalition would lose two of it's most important voting blocs: Southern whites and college intellectuals, the former largely to the Republicans and third-party populists and the latter to political apathy and cultural disenfranchisement. The assassinations of their icons Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King would permanently scar the progressive movement in the United States. White ethnic union-members in major cities, for so long a mainstay of the Democratic Party, would vote Republican in massive nubers for the first time, heeding twice-candidate Richard Nixon's populist calls to America's Silent Majority, weary of nightly news bulletins of the Vietnam War and urban riots in Chicago and Detroit.

Foreign policy would grow dramatically more unilateral and Imperialist (excepting a short lull in the mid-to-late 1970s) in the face of the Soviet Union and Islamic fundamentalism, whilst domestic policy would remain largely in the hands of a Democratic House and Senate until the latter fell in 1980 and then both in 1994. Social issues such as abortion, capital punishment, gay rights, affirmative action and euthanasia would polarize the nation and form new coalitions for both parties towards the end of the era. Republicans would win in seven out of ten Presidential cycles within the Party System, with Southerners Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton generally being considered moderate or centrist Democrats.