Thread:ML4E/@comment-35176527-20181224193040/@comment-21519-20181228014551

I don't think that's what was going on. We take Republicans and Democrats for granted these days, but during the Antebellum, though there was usually a two-party system (and God help you if you couldn't get a major party to coalesce around your favorite issue), the parties were seen as temporary alliances: they came together to push for a given position on the key issue of the day (ratification of the Constitution, or assumption of state debt, or establishment of a national bank, or whether to treat Britain as a friend or a foe, or westward expansion, or regulation of slavery in newly acquired territories) and, when that debate had run its course, went their separate ways if they didn't happen to agree on the next big issue as well. The Whigs had done this in the 1859s, and 1869 seemed to be the Democrats' turned. Had the war not intervened, I think Breck's followers would never have returned to the Democratic fold. In fact, from analysis of primary sources, some of them seem to have been deliberately trying to sabotage the Democrats, undermine their ability to oppose the Republicans successfully, and then claim some grievance against the incoming Republican administration that would justify secession.

I can't think of a Canadian analog but, in Westminstrian terms, it might be something like the ERG withdrawing from the Conservative Party after they failed to bring down May at the 1922 Committee earlier this week, and setting themselves up as a hard right party, perhaps absorbing whatever remains of UKIP. If you want an analog of something that actually happened, maybe the moderate Labour MPs who formed the SDP after Michael Foote won the leadership election, to the extent that they thought their alliance with the Liberals had a chance of supplanting Labour as Thatcher's main opposition.