# Fifth Party System The Fifth Party System (c. 1932–1968) was defined by the **New Deal coalition** assembled by [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]]: Northern urban workers, labor unions, white Southerners, Catholics and Jews, African Americans (newly migrating to the Democrats), and farmers. This coalition made the **[[Democratic Party]]** the majority party for a generation and established an activist federal government — Social Security, labor rights, financial regulation, and later the Great Society — as the baseline of American governance. The **[[Republican Party]]**, locked out of the presidency for two decades (broken only by Eisenhower), largely accepted the New Deal framework while its conservative Taft wing resisted. The coalition's fatal internal contradiction was race: the alliance of Northern Black voters and white Southern segregationists could not survive the Civil Rights Movement. The **[[Dixiecrats]]** revolt of 1948 was the first crack; the [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]] and the [[Southern Strategy]] completed the rupture, producing the [[Sixth Party System]]. ## See Also - [[Democratic Party]] · [[Republican Party]] · [[Dixiecrats]] - [[Fourth Party System]] · [[Sixth Party System]] - [[Southern Strategy]] · [[Realignment]]