History and Hegemony

In a post providing a short history of ballot access restrictions imposed upon minor parties by the duopoly's bipartisan front, Foster Hall notes that:

The first wave of major restrictive barriers were passed into law between 1931-1951. Before then, ballot access was generally quite easy to achieve for smaller parties. Clearly, these barriers were originally intended to smash smaller parties that had electoral successes during the 1920s, 30s, and 40s (i.e. the Farmer-Labor, Progressive, Socialist, and Communist parties). In addition, the harshest laws were passed since 1969. The newer barriers targeted not just the old smaller parties, but also minor parties that developed in the 1960s' political upheavals and even more recent developments, like the Green Party.

One of the ways in which dominant ideologies establish their hegemony is by creating the appearance that relatively recent, historically contingent and politically determined phenomena are rather akin to 'facts of nature,' which are beyond controversy or dispute. The idea that the two-party system, in its current form, is not the product of its own auto-institutionalization via the active exclusion of all other political factions at both state and federal levels is both unhistorical and unphilosophical.