Read an Excerpt
From Chapter 1 - Introduction
The Next Realignment Is Coming
Americans are alarmed about their country’s politics and for good reason. Each week that goes by brings another stunning event in a long ongoing trend—the gradual but consistent shattering of one after another assumption about how politics in America works. With each new surprise and with each norm broken, American politics becomes progressively angrier and more unsettled. New movements keep butting into the public square and more and more of the unwritten rules that governed American politics for decades fall away. Americans no longer know what to expect next from their government. Increasingly worried about their future and their country’s future, many Americans are anxious. They should be. America’s parties are in the process of breaking apart and everything we think we know about how its politics works is about to change. We’re preparing for the next realignment.
Political realignments are part of a historical cycle built deep into the political structure of the American republic. They’re much like earthquakes that occur on known fault lines in the earth—the places in which two of the continental plates floating over the planet’s surface rub against each other. We can’t predict exactly when a quake will happen but, because quakes are part of a long natural cycle built into the structure of the earth, we know about where they will happen, how they will happen, and why they will happen. We watch the pressure build for years as these massive chunks of continent grind up against each other. All the while, the people who live on top of these floating continents go about their lives. People go to work, buy groceries, and play in the park, forgetting all about the powerful force slowly building underneath their feet. One day, the pressure suddenly becomes too much. The two great plates rip past each other, tearing the earth above apart. Structures topple, bridges fall, and the landscape is reconfigured. In a moment, lives get disrupted and the entire shape of the earth is radically changed. Then, the pressure gone, the two chunks of continents rest comfortably in their new position once more. With time, people forget it even happened—until the cycle completes and it happens again.
Having lived our entire lifetimes inside a stable part of a larger turbulent cycle of destruction and rebirth, we mistakenly believe the world we know has always existed and will properly last forever. This stable two-party system built around familiar ideologies is now in the process of collapse. That’s why American politics has become so turbulent. That’s why new movements and ideas have been crowding uncomfortably into the public square. That’s why America’s parties are struggling with feuding coalitions no longer willing to put aside their differences for a common agenda. That’s why it’s been so long since anything important in government has gotten done, leading to the never-ending complaints that American politics is now broken. The next realignment is coming and, depending on our choices as we navigate it, it will reorder everything we think we know about America. That’s what this book is about.
What's a Realignment?
For the entire life of virtually everyone alive today, American politics has always meant the same old war between Democrats and Republicans. As far back as we all remember, the fundamental battle lines of American politics haven’t changed. Democrats have championed the ideology we call modern liberalism—that expert-driven reforms can create national progress to benefit ordinary Americans and the least well off. Republicans have championed the ideology we call modern conservatism—holding the Democrats’ agenda of modern liberalism is “big government” that violates our liberty and undermines the nation’s virtue. The specifics of this never-ending war have sometimes changed over the years as political warfare has moved from field to field. Issues, policies, and political leaders have come and gone. Political maps marking states “red” have turned “blue” and the other way around. Yet to the edge of what most of us remember, Republicans and Democrats have always essentially represented the same ideologies, attracted similar coalitions of people, and advanced similar agendas of ideas. It wasn’t always thus, nor will it ever be.
Just on the other side of our historical memories lie other versions of major American parties completely unlike anything we’ve ever known. These parties were neither liberal nor conservative in the way we now use those terms. They united coalitions of people who, to our minds, come from opposite poles of the political “spectrum.” In fact, America has had four distinct sets of political coalitions over its history, each completely unlike the Democrats and Republicans we know. Each stood for a distinct political ideology that was neither conservative nor liberal in the way we use those labels today. During their long reigns, these parties would sometimes win and sometimes lose. Demographic groups or even entire bases of support might even switch allegiance with the ebb and flow of issues and candidates. Ideologically, however, each party across each era stayed the same, invoking the same principles and promoting the same party ideology. Then, over a short period of time, each of those stable systems burst and two new coalitions emerged from the chaos. Some parties outright collapsed, as with the traumatic disintegration of the Whigs or the sad whimpering away of the Federalists. Some parties the people cruelly abandoned, like the Depression-era Republicans. Some got infected by new ideas and new people, like the Democrats that got swallowed by a third party during the late 1800s. Whether collapse or renewal, when the process completed America had two major parties standing for different principles, attracting different coalitions, and advancing different agendas than before. American parties change in sudden and catastrophic bursts.
Scholars call these sudden changes in America’s parties “realignments.” It’s a term that’s often misunderstood. People like to say that a shift in loyalty of some demographic group from one party to the other is a “realignment”– people might say rural voters trending to the Republicans is a realignment, or northeastern voters trending to the Democrats is a realignment, or the recent monumental shift in the “Solid South” from a virtual lock for Democrats to a virtual lock for Republicans is a realignment. Political realignments aren’t about voters shuffling back and forth from one political team to its opponent. Nor are they about which party wins more elections or controls which offices or institutions. Realignments are the total remaking of the existing two-party framework, redefining America’s parties from their foundation as factions and interests abandon old alliances and struggle to find new partners to chart a new path towards political power. They reorder the most basic political divides in America, changing how we see ourselves and how we define the national tribes that make up our nation. The ideas, principles, and ideologies of the parties go completely up for grabs, and what emerges looks nothing like what came before. Realignments have little to do with the ordinary tit for tat of campaign politics. Not only won’t the next realignment be good for Democrats or Republicans or conservatism or liberalism, it will destroy them all as new parties with new beliefs viewing our problems in new ways spring up from the ash.
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What This Book Is About
This book is about political parties, realignments, but most of all the future of America. It’s about how our parties got the way they are. What built them, and who built them? Of what are they really made? What are the ideas and philosophical principles that sustain them, and what do those principles really hold? It’s also about the powerful forces tearing at our parties’ hearts. How do realignments work? What causes them and what shapes them? Why was the utter and traumatic collapse of the Whigs so different from the launch of the Populist and Progressive Movements? How does the periodic eruption of a national spirit of moral reform—eras of religious revivals and dramatic social movements called awakenings—plunge America into moral crusades and national reform? What forces are already quietly cutting the ties that bind America’s political factions, and how are these forces combined in a potent mix, pushing America’s parties toward collapse? Most of all, it’s about America’s future. The choices we make as we navigate this disruptive change will forge new ideologies for America’s parties, affecting what problems we address and how, and ultimately redefining America as a nation just as the liberal and conservative divide defines it today.
To explain what drives realignments, the book delves into the history and stories of America’s past party systems—Hamilton’s Federalists and Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans, the Whigs and Jackson’s Democrats, the Civil War parties of North and South, the Populist and Progressive Era parties that reformed America out of the Gilded Age, and our New Deal era parties of today. Most important, it explores the great debates of history in which the American people sparred over how America should change, what it should become, or how it should address new problems and concerns. In retelling the story of American history through this lens, it proposes a better theory about what realignments are and why they occur. It demonstrates how with each realignment an old system is swept away in a moment of crisis. The people of America then create new alliances proposing new solutions to a grand question looming over America at that time and place. Their rivals, thrown into opposition, respond in the same way. They form a new party system to wage that debate over years of elections and policy experiments until it's ultimately resolved. Eventually, America changes again. Old problems fade, new technologies erupt, and new troubles arise. Over time, parties perfectly designed to wage a critical debate decay into anachronisms. Parties get old and brittle, no longer able to offer compelling solutions to current problems, until they break—clearing the way for new coalitions prepared to engage in new debates relevant to the future and not the past. Each realignment thus casts away aging parties obsessed over the problems of a long-gone era, uniting different people, often former enemies who now have more in common than before. These new alliances are capable and eager to solve neglected problems the previous parties weren’t built to ever address, unleashing new vibrant eras of reform. In fact, realignments are part of the fundamental structure of the republic and the American political system is built around these periods of collapse and rebirth.
By casting light on our present New Deal party system, the book also provides us with the tools we need to better see the seams and cracks now tearing our familiar New Deal party system apart. The story of modern politics isn’t just the story of liberals and conservatives sparring over offices hoping to push America “left” or “right.” It’s a story of a debate, one launched amid the devastation of a depression and world war over how to adapt the American republic to the modern industrial economy. That debate has reached its end while new problems demanding solutions our parties can’t or won’t provide are emerging everywhere. It’s simply a matter of time until those decaying coalitions crumble and new alliances emerge to address the new problems of America. The only question is how. Realignments are always whirling eras of turmoil, breakdown, and uncertainty, as old patterns fall away and people have to find their way anew, but not every realignment is the same. Some are traumatic like the one that followed the chaotic implosion of the Whigs. Other times America quickly channels the destructive energy of a realignment into building something new, as it did during the Populist and Progressive Era of the late nineteenth century. American realignments can also become conduits for reform that clear the way for fresh ideas and new approaches necessary for national renewal. The choices we make as our parties inevitably reform will decide what sort of realignment this will be and the divisions that will define us over America’s next era.
We live at one of history’s great turning points. Monumental change really is afoot. An old order really is falling away and a new one is emerging. We don’t know what the future looks like, other than it won’t follow the rules of the decades behind us that continue to frame our understanding of the world. The anger, the bitterness, the dysfunction, the inability of our parties to grapple seriously with the difficult problems the nation faces—they’re just tremors. They’re symptoms of the beginning of the greatest shift in American politics we’ve known throughout our lives. Our parties haven’t significantly changed since the days of Packard cars, the manufacturing economy, rotary telephones, and radio plays. Our era has stayed stable for so long—with “liberal” Democrats fighting the same war with “conservative” Republicans—it started to feel permanent. That time is at an end. The decisions we make as we navigate this realignment, however, will determine our future. Realignments always present America with a choice. We can choose to renew our parties before they inevitably collapse, ushering in a new political age with refreshed parties built around updated ideologies, to ensure the national divisions that rule America’s new era are ones that make America better, stronger, safer, and more prosperous. Or we can do nothing until a powerful storm outside our control rips the system apart, hoping whatever happens to emerge from the rubble doesn’t lead the nation down dangerous towpaths into a darker era serving no one. We should make these choices with open eyes and our shared interests as citizens fully in mind. If we’re wise, we can renew our politics and our parties, launching a new age of national renewal restoring what so many Americans in this troubled time now believe is lost—the promise of the American Dream.
