Abstract
American politics and government have often been said to be “exceptional”. In popular politics the term celebrates the supposed superiority of American government and society. In analytical usage, it refers to an argument supported by King that the pattern of public policy in the USA is exceptional compared to other advanced democracies in providing for a more limited role for government, at least domestically. To the degree that this claim has validity, a key explanation is the absence in the USA of a counterpart to the social democratic parties of Europe and Australasia. However, in recent decades, the Democratic Party has come close to playing the role of being a cohesive center-left party promoting social and economic reform. Ironically, the Democratic Party therefore now faces, like social democratic parties, the difficulties of retaining working-class support while embracing non-class-based reforms such as feminism, racial justice and environmentalism.
I wish to thank Matthew Maguire for his work on the statistical analyses in this chapter.
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Wilson, G.K. (2020). Exceptionalism, Contending Liberalisms and the Future of the Democratic Party. In: Crewe, I., Sanders, D. (eds) Authoritarian Populism and Liberal Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17997-7_8
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