To take this discussion a bit more global...

Political parties are not, of course, limited to the discourse of politics in the United States. In truth, the United States actually has a rather unremarkable width to the political spectrum, with the two major political parties mostly being located in the middle of that spectrum. Other countries exhibit far greater ranges.

The political spectrum of course goes from the far left to the far right. As an example, we can take the case of Mexico. In Mexico, we have a variety of political parties, most of which have distinct ideological positions and occupy discrete places onthe political spectrum. AMong these are the : PARM (Partido Autentico de la Revolucion Mexicana), PAN (Partido Accion Nacional), PRI (Partido Revolucionario Insitucional), PSUM (Partido Socialista Unido Mexicano), and the PTM (Partido de Trabajadores Mexicanos). Roughly, their political ideologies are far right, right, right of center, left, and far left.

Of course, there are many other examples. Political parties in parliamentary systems usually include some version of the greens, social democrats, standard conservative, chrisitan democrats, communists, socialists, and anarchists, plus the occasional "weirdo" political party. All of these parties, for example, can be found in both the British and German] political arenas.

An addendum sparked by themusic's note: You couldn't be more wrong. In most multi-party countries, significant differences exist between the political parties. This is especially true in countries that have proportional representation.