Northern Democratic Party

The Northern Democratic Party, originally known as the Democratic Party and also known in abbreviated form as the NDP, was a political party of the United States, lasting from 1824 to 1991.

Nineteenth century
The Democratic Party formed in 1824 when the Democratic-Republican Party split over the choice of a successor to follow James Monroe as President. Until the First Civil War, the Democratic Party contended with the Whig Party, with its most notable President being Andrew Jackson. After the Republican loss in 1CW, the Democratic Party became the permanent majority party. As the Confederacy's permanent majority party was also known as the Democratic Party, President Samuel J. Tilden renamed his party the Northern Democratic Party. As the postwar Republican Party grew more and more progressive and populist, the NDP grew more and more conservative under presidents like Adlai E. Stevenson I and Grover Cleveland.

1900-1930
The second Republican loss in the Second Civil War in 1906 led to the NDP becoming even more dominant, with notable Presidents Nelson W. Aldrich and Calvin Coolidge adapting the U.S. to survive despite the Confederacy's continued embargo. As the Republicans were controlled by the socialist Midwest Syndicate from 1916 to 1940, socialism became the NDP's strongest attacking point. The presidency of Norman Thomas showed the NDP that socialism had a wider following than expected in the U.S., but Warren Harding's smear machine lowered the socialists' reputation as Thomas lost his re-election bid in 1928.

Warren Harding to Walter Reuther
The NDP's biggest triumph came as Harding, now President, won the Third Civil War. However, four years after the war's end, Harding's own reputation had been ruined by the Teapot Dome scandal of 1938, and in 1940 the populist Republican Burton Wheeler was elected president. Wheeler's triumphs in World War II restored the Republican Party to the national stage and ended not only the Midwest Syndicate's control of the party but all of socialism's influence. After years of soul-searching, the NDP regained its composure and attacked the Republicans now for being soft on communism. The NDP was returned to the White House when brilliant young labor leader and civil rights activist Walter Reuther defeated incumbent President Harry S. Truman in 1952.

Under Reuther, the U.S. Army was set to clean up the mess in Korea and continue on the path to civil rights. Reuther was wildly popular in most of the United States, but a visit to ex-Confederate Virginia resulted in his assassination in 1955. His successor, Joseph McCarthy, was a virulent anti-communist, and he quickly escalated the war in Korea and forgot all about civil rights.

The NDP under Joe McCarthy
The now-conservative establishment of the United States refused to recognize how much of a mess Korea really was, and with a lack of charismatic Republican candidates, McCarthy was re-elected in 1956 and 1960. However, civil unrest grew more and more, and by 1964 the Republicans were itching to face someone besides McCarthy. To their surprise, McCarthy ran for a third term and narrowly won. The next four years were marked by violent riots, both against the war and against segregation. With an uncooperative Congress, McCarthy was deadlocked, but he refused to push anything other than his own agenda. The May Day Riots of 1968 all but ended his hopes for a fourth term, and now with a mess in Vietnam as well as Korea, he became the first sitting President to lose his party's primary elections. The NDP, having abandoned McCarthy like they abandoned Herbert Hoover in 1932, nominated moderate Richard Nixon for President after a contentious convention which pitted the old establishment following McCarthy against mainstream conservatives following Nixon against a smaller group following Ronald Reagan. Nixon named Reagan his running mate, but narrowly lost the general election to Republican Gene McCarthy.

Decline
During the 1970s, the Republicans dominated politics with repetitive successes in domestic and foreign policy. The NDP was in limbo - former running mates Nixon and Reagan were battling for control of the party. Nixon wanted the party to moderate its platform to appeal to more people, but Reagan believed true fiscal and social conservatism would work if used with intelligence. Nixon argued that most of Reagan's followers were radical evangelicals who sought to persecute non-Christians, and though he would be proved correct years later, Reagan denied it. In 1972, Nixon's chances at the presidency were sunk by the Wheeler Plaza scandal, and he was forced to resign from politics. Reagan sought jail time for Nixon, who was found guilty by the Supreme Court, but President McCarthy pardoned him. Reagan was the sole leader of the NDP from then on, and his unbending conservatism drove moderates into the Republican fold, making the NDP smaller and smaller.

Expulsion from politics
During the 1980s, Reagan and his intellectual conservative ally William F. Buckley witnessed religious demagogues win elections all across NDP territory. Reagan finally realized that Nixon had been right. He and Buckley failed to win the presidency in 1980 and 1984, and could see that the superevangelicals were slowly usurping the party. Reagan retired from politics in 1987, and Buckley had to contend with evangelical Pat Buchanan for control of the party. In an attempted show of unity, Buckley named Buchanan his running mate in 1988, but the plan failed to win the presidency. Buckley, tired of fighting a lost cause, retired from politics in 1989 and focused on writing. Under Buchanan, the NDP grew more and more radical, and the party chairman, Silas Whitaker, transformed it into a violent group, bombing and burning down several Republican buildings. Buchanan, appalled, denounced the "tragedy" the NDP had become, and left the party. In 1991, President Joe Biden declared the Northern Democratic Party a terrorist organization. The few remaining NDP officeholders became independents by default, and the party's headquarters in Syracuse was abandoned. As a political party, the NDP had ended, after 167 years.

Terrorist group
Silas Whitaker's terrorist group continued under the Northern Democratic Party name, but all the former NDP politicians decried his actions, including big names like Nixon, Reagan, and Buckley. Under Whitaker, the NDP also had dealings with Confederate President Jesse Helms's administration. Helms, a self-described "Yankee hater," was interested in aiding Whitaker's cause, and agreed to meet with him secretly in Baltimore in 1993. When a scheduling conflict arose and Helms couldn't make it, he sent Vice President J.B. Stoner as his proxy. Acting on intelligence received from spies in Baltimore, U.S. President Gary Hart ordered a raid on the meeting place, not knowing that the Confederate government was in any way involved. The raid resulted in the deaths of Whitaker, Stoner, and other NDP leaders, and in retaliation for his Vice President's death, Helms declared war on the United States, starting the Fourth (and last) Civil War.

With Silas Whitaker dead, the terrorist NDP split into several regional splinter factions, which had all fizzled out by 1997. Amid the most destructive war ever fought on the North American continent, the last vestiges of the party of Jackson, Aldrich, and Reuther disappeared.

New Incarnations
In 1996, social conservative politicians formed the Traditional Party to oppose Gary Hart's re-election bid. Pat Buchanan and Bob Dole led the party, but it lost overwhelmingly. Nonetheless, the Traditional Party fielded candidates in 2000 and 2004 as well, and lost both times. In 2006, the Traditional Party merged with other state-level social and fiscal conservative third parties to create the Democratic Party. The new Democratic Party was the moderately conservative party that Richard Nixon had aimed for in the early 1970s. Though its presidential ticket in 2008, Mitt Romney and William Howard Taft IV, failed to do much better than their Traditional Party predecessors, political commentators noted that the new conservative party held a lot of promise, as it appealed to a wide range of constituents, and that the Republican majority couldn't last forever. Republican leaders took this in stride, welcoming the competition and the "new birth of conservatism." President Barack Obama, elected in 2004 and re-elected in 2008, said in a speech, "The Republican Party has been without serious opposition since the late 1970s. There's been no one to tell us if we're right or wrong. Now that we've got some fresh new ideas, I think America's going to have a diverse, healthy political environment."