"[Realigners] is fair in its criticisms, vividly written, impressively researched, and—best of all—delightfully out of step with present-day liberal orthodoxy . . . Highly readable." —Barton Swaim, The Wall Street Journal
"Like Hofstadter, Shenk is attuned to the divide between the rhetoric of [his subjects] and the reality of what they accomplished . . . [Realigners] is the book of a left that doesn’t want just to be morally right or to dissent from the peanut gallery, but that has a vision of winning and all that might come after." —Kim Phillips-Fein, The Nation
"Compelling . . . Shenk deftly maps out the genealogy of discord and those charismatic figures it birthed . . . Shenk snaps each piece of his narrative together like a jigsaw, highlighting emblematic characters." —Oprah Daily
"What Shenk offers is something else: a new way of thinking about the people who build the systems in which both the rulers and the ruled operate, and who take grassroots activity and harness it for long-term change." —Nicole Hemmer, Democracy
"Shenk offers a valuable framework for analyzing American politics . . . An astute and stylish history that speaks to present-day concerns over partisan polarization.” —Publishers Weekly
“This is an exhilarating book. Shenk sees clearly that democracy can change the world, but that most attempts end in tragedy rather than victory. From James Madison through W.E.B. Du Bois and Walter Lippmann, to Phyllis Schlafly and Barack Obama, his characters stand at this political fault line. Every chapter shines with insight, arresting detail, and vivid judgment. This is a work of political history worthy of a novelist, and a work of political realism that—just—shows how to keep democratic hope alive.” —Jedediah Purdy, professor of law at Columbia University and author of Two Cheers for Politics, This Land is Our Land, and other books
"Realigners announces the emergence of a bold, deeply informed, and highly original new voice in the world of American politics and its history, with special attention to the relationship between political elites and the broader public. Its closest antecedent is Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition, and like that iconic work it is beautifully written and argued, and filled with insights that will inform both specialists and a broader public that wants to know the origins of our current democratic dilemmas." —Eric Foner, professor of history emeritus at Columba University and author of The Story of American Freedom and other books
"Timothy Shenk’s Realigners bristles with historical insight useful at this moment of extraordinary peril for American democracy." —Randall Kennedy, professor at Harvard Law School and author of Say It Loud!
"For better or worse, Americans who want to transform their country have always needed to do the hard work of building coalitions and majorities. Tim Shenk's terrific history shows how to do that—and how to be an idealist at the same time. Today's activists and strategists have much to learn from earlier efforts, whether failures, successes, or the many bold historical experiments that fell somewhere in between. If you care about the past, present, or future of democracy, read this book." —Beverly Gage, professor of history at Yale University and author of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century
"Combining gripping narratives of political lives with structural insights into the longstanding impediments to democracy, Realigners is a sweeping exploration of how transformative coalitions in the U.S. have been built and lost. Beautifully written and filled with essential insights, it should be read and debated by anyone concerned with the state of American politics." —Aziz Rana, author of The Two Faces of American Freedom
"Realigners is an untimely book, in the best sense. In defiance of fashionable bottom-up social history, Timothy Shenk shows the centrality of leaders in American history, outsiders and insiders alike. In an age of gargantuan biographies, Shenk is a virtuoso of the miniature portrait and the significant vignette. And in an era of polarization and partisanship, Shenk shows that is possible to combine political engagement with respect for those who disagree." —Michael Lind, author of The New Class War
06/20/2022
Historian Shenk (Maurice Dobb) spotlights in this immersive account politicians and activists who have “a power that’s unique to modern democracies: the ability to form electoral coalitions that bind millions of people together in a single cause.” The “realigners” profiled span U.S. political history from James Madison and Alexander Hamilton to Barack Obama. Also included are Charles Sumner, whose fervent abolitionism captured the hearts and minds of his fellow Republicans; W.E.B. Du Bois, whose quest to “compel Americans to live up to their supposed ideals” laid the groundwork for the civil rights era; and anti-feminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly, “the First Lady of the American right.” The formation of white majorities at the expense of Black Americans’ political ambitions is a recurrent theme: Democratic Party founder Martin Van Buren fashioned an alliance between “the planters of the South and the plain republicans of the North” in the 1820s, while “Dollar” Mark Hanna and other Republican leaders accepted “the restoration of white supremacy” in the South with Jim Crow. Though Shenk offers a valuable framework for analyzing American politics, his choice of realigners feels somewhat arbitrary—Franklin Roosevelt gets sidelined in favor of Du Bois and journalist Walter Lippman in chapters on the New Deal coalition. Still, this is an astute and stylish history that speaks to present-day concerns over partisan polarization. Illus. Agent: Edward Orloff, McCormick Literary. (Oct.)
07/01/2022
Historian Shenk (George Washington, Univ.; Maurice Dobb: Political Economist) uses this biography to discuss the nation's "democratic elite" and how they forged powerful coalitions of voters—majorities in eras when a single party or ideology dominated U.S. politics. From abolitionists to intellectuals to politicos, these movers and shakers shaped party strategies as well as electoral shifts. President Martin Van Buren fashioned America's two-party system. Political kingmaker Mark Hanna inaugurated a generation of Republican ascendency until the Great Depression ushered Democrats into power for more than 40 years. African American statesmen W. E. B. Du Bois and Barack Obama, journalist Walter Lippmann, and activist Phyllis Schlafly each realigned the republic in very different ways. It is not always clear how these individuals are uniquely illustrative of his theme, but he tells their stories engagingly and ends with high hopes for the future. VERDICT A composite biography of political influencers since 1776, this book will deepen readers' understanding of the American democratic process.—Michael Rodriguez
2022-10-29
A sharp assessment of American political history and the arc of its pendulum, which tends not toward justice but toward the wealthy.
“If there’s an abiding winner in the long history of American democracy,” writes history professor and Dissent co-editor Shenk, “it’s the people with money.” The uber-wealthy are usually more or less in the background, but they back members of what the author calls the “democratic elite” who span the distance between rulers and the ruled. It’s these people, Shenk suggests, who have been responsible for conjuring realignments whereby political gridlock or monopoly is broken, if perhaps only temporarily. James Madison’s early alliance with Alexander Hamilton fell apart over who would govern, with “the opulent” Hamiltonians believing that democracy was doomed because the people could not govern themselves. The situation with Hamilton ended badly, but the struggle for power between what would become Republicans and Federalists, and then Whigs and Democrats and New Grangers and all the rest, would endure—but not, Shenk notes, before those early Republicans strangled the Federalists through a realignment that essentially gave them a lock on the electorate and “liberated Americans from the burdens of partisanship.” The burden would soon enough be reimposed, only to see new realignments, era after era, notably with Franklin Roosevelt’s building a power base among the working and middle classes while forging racial unity, something that Donald Trump would do in reverse. Most realignments end up failures, notes Shenk, as does everything else: Politics has always been an exercise in crisis management. Still, at the close of this catalog of tangled maneuvering (as when Obama won the elite for the Democratic Party while losing much of the working class), Shenk foresees other possibilities were the two dominant parties to realign to vie for those forgotten workers and a multiracial coalition to emerge to “jolt the legislative process back to life.”
A novel, intriguing reading of how power politics works—and, with a little imagination, might work.
