We have always had two major political parties. That doesn’t mean that they have been the same since the formation of parties, but only two at a time has been the rule. When the Republican Party was formed, the Whigs disappeared practically overnight. The third party in the Election of 1860 was the Constitutional Union Party, they didn’t go very far, did they? I’d love to see the Republican Party go away, but I’m not willing to hand a victory over to the Democrats as the price of the bargain.
the whigs did not disappear overnight. They fractured into the the consitutional union party and the gop. The dems fractured into the northern dem and sountern dems. Each party ran its candidate. the GOp formed from the ashes of the whigs.
The similarities to today are profound. the Tea party is what the GOP was in 1856 or the Whig holdouts whihc remains to be seen but a fracture has occurred it will not end until one or the other is defeated.