Identify and Outline the main divisions within the Democratic Party.

It is often said of the two party system of government in the USA that the party divisions are becoming increasingly polarised. However, division is seen not only between the two parties but within them with ideological intra-party divisions. These divisions are between the liberal Democrats of the left and the more conservative Democrats sometimes referred to as ‘Blue Dog Democrats.’ Liberal Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi who is the Minority Leader of the House of Representatives and representative of California's 12th congressional district has exhibited liberal views on most social and fiscal policy such as support for Gay Marriage. Liberal Democrats tend to represent States such as California or New England and be more socially and economically liberal than their conservative colleagues such as Ben Nelson from Nebraska. Nelson has favoured fiscally conservative policy such as low taxes and spending, and socially conservative policy, advocating anti-abortion and pro-gun views. Democrats such as Nelson tent to represent more conservative’s states and districts such as those in the south or the mid-west. Centrist New Democrats, such as Bill Clinton take a more moderate and Pragmatic position on most policy issues and were found in the Democratic Leadership Council. These strikingly different approaches to politics within the Democratic Party highlight the divisions within it. The division in the Democratic Party reflected in the Connecticut primary elections of 2006 with the defeat of Lieberman was between progressive Democrats who sought to hold the centre of American politics to reclaim the Congress and the White House from conservative Republican dominance vs. purist ideological Democrats. This could be stated, perhaps over simplistically, as the division between the pragmatic progressives and the purist left within the Democratic Party. In the 1960s, the Vietnam War similarly divided the Democratic Party. Anti-war Democrats worked and voted to oust an incumbent Democratic president because he had led the nation into a tragic war in Vietnam.The Democratic Party has made attempts to hold the different factions within the party with some success from the 1930’s to the 19 60’s. The New Deal coalition was the alignment of interest groups and voting blocs in the United States that supported the New Deal and voted for Democratic presidential candidates from 1932 until the late 1960s. It made the Democratic Party the majority party during that period, losing only to Dwight D. Eisenhower, in 1952 and 1956. Franklin D. Roosevelt forged a coalition that included banking and oil industries, the Democratic state party organizations, city machines, labour unions, blue collar workers, minorities (racial, ethnic and religious), farmers, white Southerners, people on relief, and intellectuals. The coalition began to fall apart with the bitter factionalism during the 1968 election, but it remains the model that party activists seek to replicate.