Political Parties through the Lens of De Tocqueville, Part 1

This is part 1 of a reposting of a paper I wrote in the Spring of 2008 for Jon McFall's Democratic Political Philsophy class at Rutgers University. Certain points have been redacted for clarity, and will be noted with a *

In his farewell address, closing out eight years of a non-partisan presidency, George Washington warned against the factions he saw bubbling underneath the surface of American politics. Despite this warning from arguably the greatest Statesman of the early United States, political differences led to the creation of multiple parties in the United States. Beginning with the Federalists and Republicans, factions began to dominate American politics. 
Republicans evolved into Democratic-Republicans. Federalists died out in the 1810s, with Democratic-Republicans taking dominance over American political life. An internal schism within the Democratic-Republicans led to the political dominance of the Jacksonian Democrats in the 1820s and early 1830s. Whigs countered the Democrats in the 1830s up until the 1850s, producing two elected presidents, neither one particularly durable. Divided over the issue of slavery, the Whigs gave way to the second dominant party of modern American politics, the Republican Party. 
While there have been significant challenges to the American two party system (in particular, Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party and H. Ross Perot’s independent campaign in 1992), No two parties have ingrained themselves in American history quite like the Democrats and the Republicans. But with such power comes responsibility to the American people, and an ideal to hold America towards. What this paper will explore is whether or not either one of the current major political parties comes close to upholding classical American democracy within the vein of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. If so, which one upholds these values more closely?
However, before comparing the parties to the ideals, it is best to define the parties’ platforms, ideologies, and constituencies. In the interest of nonpartisan objectivity, the Democrats will go first, under the rationales of longevity and alphabetical order (The Democrats having predated the Republicans by close to half a century and the letter D coming before the letter R.)*

The Democratic Party tends to hold center-left positions on the majority of its issues. For example, the party holds views that are pro-choice, mostly sympathetic towards LGBT issues, pro-gun control, and pro-regulation in terms of media. The Democratic coalition itself is relatively broad-based, ranging from a small minority of conservative Democrats to a large group of self-identified “liberals”, and it is the largest in the country, with 72 million registered voters as of 2004.
The Republican Party, on the other hand, tends to hold center-right positions on the majority of .its issues. It has a large degree of social conservatism in its majority. For example, a majority of modern (1980 onwards) Republicans hold pro-life views; they tend to be for the death penalty, they tend to be against gun-control legislation, and they tend to emphasize the role of the individual states in many questions of morality. There are approximately 55 million registered Republicans in the US as of 2004, which leaves them about 17 million voters behind the Democratic Party in terms of voters.