You lose me when you talk about Perot's mistake. Perot was paid off by the Clintons to split the Bush vote. If you'll go back and look, Perot dropped out of the race the week of the rat convention, and got back in when Clinton started dropping in the polls. Perot never wanted to be President.
I am sorry to hear you wasted so much time writing this drivel.
Nice effort.
I notice you didn't include the libertarians as their own party. They really aren't so much a party as they are a smug chaos. There is more firmness, stability, and moral clarity in a cup of tepid bilge water.
Parties are organized structures or on-going institutions. Clintonistas, Bushites, Deanites, Buchananites, McCainites, Naderites, Chomskyites, the Kennedy crowd, etc. are more fluid, less organized factions or the personal followings of individual leaders. Socialists, neocons, and paleocons fit somewhere in between. Such factions are less tied to individual leaders, but don't have the organization and continuity of actual parties. There will always be moderate-conservative Republicans and center-left Democrats, but if the "Bushite" and "Clintonite" labels have stuck, it's because these families have become dynasties.
Yet American politics are more complicated and confused than the two party system and most partisan arguments indicate. For one thing, divisions on economic issues don't line up exactly with the the fault lines on social and cultural questions. For another, people tend to assume that those on the other side are more united, more organized, and more passionate than they really are. In any random sample of people who identify themselves as Democrats or Republicans, one's apt to find a wide variety of opinions and views on current issues and very different degrees of political committment.
