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 assumption after another about how politics in America works. With each new surprise and with each norm broken, American politics becomes progressively angrier and more unsettled. Americans no longer know what to expect next from their government. New movements keep butting into the public square and more and more of the unwritten rules that governed American politics for decades are falling away. Increasingly worried about their future and their country's future, many people 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 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 where 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 naturally occurring cycle, we know how they will happen, why they will happen, and approximately where they will happen. We watch the pressure build for years as massive tectonic plates grind up against each other. As they press, their hooks and grooves inevitably catch and tear. All the while, the people who live on 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 becomes too much. The two great plates rip past each other, rending the earth above. Structures topple, bridges fall, and the landscape is reconfigured. In a moment, lives get disrupted and the entire shape of the earth is changed. Then, the pressure gone, the plates rest comfortably once more. With time, people forget it even happened—until the cycle repeats and it happens again.

Having lived our entire lifetimes inside a stable part of a larger cycle of destruction and rebirth, we mistakenly believe the world we know has always existed and will last, unchanged, forever. In fact, this stable system of two parties 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 national debate. 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 about how American politics is broken. The next realignment is coming. 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 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 New Deal 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—that the Democrats' agenda of New Deal liberalism is “big government,” violating liberty and undermining the nation's virtue. The specifics of this never-ending war have changed from time to time, as political warfare moved from field to field. Issues, policies, and political leaders have come and gone. States painted red on political maps shifted over time to blue, while blue-colored states became red. Yet as far back as most of us remember, Republicans and Democrats have each essentially represented the same ideologies, attracted similar coalitions of people, and advanced consistent 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 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 five distinct sets of political coalitions over its history, each completely unlike the others. During their long reigns, these parties would sometimes win and sometimes lose. Demographic groups, or even entire bases of support, might switch allegiance with the ebb and flow of issues and candidates. Ideologically, however, each party during each era remained consistent, invoking the same principles and promoting the same ideology. Then, over a short period of time, each of these stable party coalitions 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, such as the Depression-era Republicans. Some became infected with new people and ideas, like the Democratic Party that a populist third party captured in the late 1800s. Whether by collapse or renewal, when the upheaval ended America had two major parties that stood for different principles, attracted different coalitions, and advanced different agendas than their predecessors. 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 a shift in loyalty by some demographic group from one party to the other is a “realignment”—they might call rural voters trending to the Republicans a realignment, or northeastern voters trending to the Democrats a realignment, or the recent monumental shift in the “Solid South” from a virtual lock for Democrats to a virtual lock for Republicans a realignment. Political realignments aren't about this kind of shuffling of voters from one political team to its opponent. Nor are they about which party wins more elections or controls which offices or institutions. They're a 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 new paths toward political power. Realignments 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. In realignments, ideas, principles, and ideologies are tossed completely up for grabs, and the parties that emerge look nothing like what came before. The next realignment won't be good or bad for Democrats or Republicans, nor for 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.

It's remarkable so few people know about political realignments because they're a well-established part of political science scholarship. The idea goes back to a 1955 essay called “A Theory of Critical Elections” by Vladimir Orlando Key Jr., one of the most famous political scientists of the first half of the twentieth century.1 Key was writing in the aftermath of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, which had just dramatically ripped open America's politics, and he realized the transformation of America's two major parties in the 1930s was hardly a unique event. He noticed a similar pattern in the election of 1896, in which William Jennings Bryan brought the populist movement into the Democratic Party, launching America's energetic Populist and Progressive Era. Key theorized that American parties don't change gradually over time. They change in sharp and noticeable breaks when one national election suddenly creates stark new divisions in the electorate.² Soon after, the scholar E. E. Schattschneider echoed Key's work and the theory of political realignments was born.³

In the years that followed, more scholars built on Key's work. They too noticed that America always has two strong national political parties, each within striking distance of a majority. For generations, these parties stand for a consistent set of principles bound into established party ideologies. They attract similar voters and advance similar policies. Then something happens and that stable system rapidly falls apart and gets reforged. Walter Dean Burnham, who became something of the adopted father of the realignment theory, proposed a progression of distinct “party systems” punctuated by one of Key's critical elections.4 Each of these American party systems, Burnham found, had stable voting patterns with little deviation until a critical election arrived, bringing high intensity, increased polarization, and transformations in the agendas of the parties. In other words, although people assume great change must always come gradually, that's not how American political party systems change at all. They snap, triggering an explosive national upheaval. According to Burnham, “eras of critical realignment are marked by short, sharp reorganizations of the mass coalitional bases of the major parties which occur at periodic intervals at the national level.”⁵

In 1973, James Sundquist, a former speechwriter for Harry Truman turned scholar at the Brookings Institute, provided the final important piece to the theory of realignments in his book Dynamics of the Party System. Navigating through the history of three American party systems to explore how they rose and fell, Sundquist found what mattered most was issues and ideas:

In each of those three periods of political crisis—the 1850s, the 1890s, and the 1930s—the existing rationale for the division of voters between the parties gave way to a new one. One or both of the major parties was radically changed in composition and character. The voting blocs that came together as coalitions to make up the major parties were rearranged. Thus the line of party cleavage sliced through the electorate in a new direction, shifting the party structure on its axis. When things settled down, the change had been so profound that in retrospect, as noted earlier, a new party system can be said to have replaced the old.⁶

From all these scholars, and the many others building on their works, we know several things about how American political parties operate. For long periods of time, political parties stay basically the same, attracting similar coalitions and standing for a consistent set of ideas. Then they suddenly break, whether through one sharp “critical election” or a longer period of disruption, unleashing an unstable era of turbulence and change. New parties arise in the turmoil, attracting different coalitions and standing for different ideas. Most important, what defines these parties and the breaks between them is the rise of new issues and ideas.

It's generally agreed that American politics has moved through five distinct party systems punctuated by four realignments. There's some disagreement on precisely where to place the dividing lines, but there's rough agreement on what each of these five distinct party systems are. America's First Party System arrived when President George Washington's treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, and his secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, discovered they had clashing visions about what the new republic was supposed to be. Hamilton and his partisans, the Federalists, wanted to build a strong commercial republic with a strong central government to rival the great powers of Europe. Jefferson and his supporters, whom we now call Democratic-Republicans, thought America ought to be an agricultural nation of independent yeoman farmers with decentralized authority closer to the people. What Hamilton thought essential—banks, a national currency, a strong army—Jefferson believed were threats to republican government. By Thomas Jefferson's presidency, the American people effectively concluded America could be both. Its debate essentially resolved, the First Party System fell into decline until a weakening Federalist Party blundered, lodging a collection of overzealous demands during the War of 1812 that got it branded a pack of traitors and secessionists, resulting in the party's swift collapse.

After a brief “Era of Good Feelings” in which America attempted to function without parties or partisanship, a Second Party System emerged after the messy election of 1824. The nation split once more into two camps, one group supporting John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay and another coalescing around Andrew Jackson. Jackson was a rough man of the people and military hero who raged against banks and elites and believed America ought to be a popular democracy that empowered ordinary Americans using common sense. Adams, Clay, and their supporters feared Jackson was an uneducated tyrant and demagogue whose rowdy populism threated America's modernization and national greatness. Jackson's followers became the Democrats. The Adams and Clay faction took on a name honoring the patriots who fought against British tyranny during the American Revolution, the Whigs. In the decades that followed, Democrats and Whigs sparred over banks, modernization, tariff policy, and western expansion, but as proxies for another great debate. Was America meant to become a dynamic and meritocratic republic of industry and progress? Or was it to become a popular republic in which ordinary people using common sense charted their destiny without deference to elites? As America entered the 1850s, it resolved that debate too. America was both a popular republic and a dynamic one, a republic of the people that eagerly embraced modernization, building, growth, and reform. At the same time, a new debate rose as the nation expanded west and religious revivals erupted. Was it moral to allow slavery to expand further into new territories? In 1852, a Whig Party now divided over slavery collapsed. The electorate battered the Democrats two years later. America plunged into nearly a decade of turmoil, violence, and scary new movements like the Know-Nothings. Eventually a new party organized around fighting slavery's spread emerged, the Republican Party. Over the next few years, this new party built strength until, in 1860, it won a presidential election. America spiraled into a civil war. A Third Party System began.

As America emerged from that civil war, the Third Party System settled in. Republicans now represented the interests of the North while Democrats represented those locked out of power—mainly Southern business interests, farmers and laborers particularly in the South, and new urban immigrants locked out of the Northern Republican establishment. These parties debated issues like tariff policies and the patronage system that traded federal jobs for political support. These were again proxies for another great debate—resentments still lingering in the war's aftermath.

Over the following years, as the scars from war wounds gradually faded, troubling new problems arose. Rapid industrialization began minting millionaires like Rockefeller and Carnegie, creating a “Gilded Age” that destroyed the profitability of the small-town family farms that had long served as America's middle-class economic backbone. People streamed into immigrant-packed cities to take work in dirty and dangerous factories, laboring fourteen-hour days in ghastly conditions. An angry populist movement broke out, particularly in rural areas and in the West, and an economic panic threw America into one of the most punishing economic depressions in its history. In 1896, a thirty-six-year-old former congressman named William Jennings Bryan delivered a barn-burning speech at the Democratic National Convention and came out the nominee. He threw out the old Democratic Party platform, pushed out the old party leadership, and replaced its creaking ideology with a populist platform. The Democratic Party now transformed into a populist party that claimed to represent farmers and working people crushed under the power of the elite. In response, the Republicans transformed into a good-government party of pro-business moral reformers. Their clashing visions of moral and social reform—populism and progressivism—launched a new great debate over how best to respond to the downsides of industrialization. A Fourth Party System began. Under this new party system, America implemented a flurry of dramatic reforms like banning child labor, imposing clean standards on food and medicine, imposing maximum work hours, creating public schools, banning the “demon rum” of alcohol, creating public parks, and extending the right to vote to women. By the 1920s, these reforms had alleviated many of the worst abuses of industrialization, while the religious revivals that drove many into the arms of progressive reform had cooled. America was a rich, powerful, prosperous nation on an upward boom. Then, in 1929, this confident and thriving America plunged into an economic catastrophe, the Great Depression.

By 1932, the end of President Herbert Hoover's first term in office, many once-middle-class Americans were now crowded into tented refugee camps relying on charity to eat. National unemployment reached about 25 percent. The Democratic nominee for president, New York governor Franklin Roosevelt, swept into the White House promising America a New Deal. In office, he assembled a team of experts to combat the crisis, pulling ideas from everywhere—from the Democratic Party's populist tradition but also from Republican progressives. These experiments coalesced into a novel governing ideology holding that America could harness expertise and rational planning to drive national progress that benefited working people and the least well off—New Deal liberalism. Roosevelt's opponents, both former Democrats and former Republicans, banded together to stop the New Deal's advance. Some of them believed the New Deal violated personal liberty, while others believed it undercut the virtues necessary for the republic's success. Taking over the remains of Hoover's now all-but-dead Republican Party, they blended their criticisms into a new Republican Party ideology—modern conservatism. A Fifth Party System began and it continues on today.

WHAT REALIGNMENTS ARE ABOUT

Realignments and party systems remain the dominant way we look at politics in America.7 In recent decades, however, the theory has raised some discontent. Since every previous American party system lasted about four decades, give or take one or two election cycles, the original realignment theorists naturally presumed realignments must come about every thirty or forty years.⁸ During the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, many political scholars and politicians therefore expected a realignment must be around the corner. Decades had passed since America's last realignment in 1932. Burnham suggested a realignment was surely on its way.⁹ Richard Nixon even built his 1968 electoral strategy around the belief that he could spark such a realignment, as his aide Kevin Phillips hinted in his blockbuster 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority.¹⁰ Yet despite all the disruptive political change of the civil rights movement, the Great Society, the counterculture, the Vietnam War, the Goldwater campaign of 1964, the violence of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the rise of a New Left and a New Right, the election of Richard Nixon and his Silent Majority, Watergate, and the Reagan Revolution, the predicted realignment never came.

Some scholars theorized that America might have entered a period of “dealignment” in which its parties were simply decaying with no new party system forming in its place.11 Others questioned whether the realignment theory was ever correct at all. They pointed out that no realignment had arrived in the middle of the twentieth century.¹² They noted that statistical analyses of voting behavior is often muddier then the sharp breaks that realignments in theory ought to produce.¹³ They quibbled over the various indicia of realignments on which previous theorists relied, such as turmoil in nominating conventions or the rise of third parties.¹⁴ These criticisms, however, ultimately came down to variations of the same complaint—“The theory has not been able to account for what has happened over the past generation of American politics, despite the often frustrating search by scholars to locate the electoral realignment that was due in 1964, 1968, or thereabout.”¹⁵ Political scientists have been “waiting for Godot,” but “the political world stubbornly refuses to comply.”¹⁶

Those who lost faith in realignments forgot what they're actually about. American politics isn't a natural system like physics. It's the messy way the American people negotiate their differences in an attempt to self-govern their republic. At any given time, we face great and terrifying questions about what we as a people ought to do and in which direction we ought to travel. Politics is how we navigate those debates to collectively work through our most difficult problems. Party systems aren't really about which of two arbitrary organizations the American people give control of government at any one time. Nor are they just about which party controls which offices, or the demographic coalitions, or even the agendas of issues that parties promote. Those are just the effects and indicia and results of realignments. As V. O. Key himself first observed, realignments are in reality stark breaks in what the parties stand for and what they represent. In other words, party systems are national debates carried out over decades through which the American people work through their most urgent problems over time. Realignments are the moments in which an old debate is resolved and a new national debate begins.

The reason America hasn't had a realignment since the 1930s is the conditions to create a realignment hadn't yet arrived. The New Deal debate that began in 1932 wasn't yet resolved. Now it is. A lot has happened since this Fifth Party System began. America waged and won a Second World War. The nation emerged an unrivaled world power, enjoying years of peace and prosperity from Eisenhower through Kennedy's Camelot. Lyndon Johnson's Great Society hoped to harness the New Deal's ideals to solve thorny social problems like poverty and racial injustice. In the late 1960s and 1970s, America's economy stagnated. There were bloody street protests, riots, political assassinations, and dissent over the Vietnam War. There was stagflation, an oil shock, Watergate, and a hostage crisis with Iran. The Reagan Revolution brought Morning in America. The Contract with America reformed welfare as we knew it. President Clinton fought impeachment. On September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center fell. President Bush launched a War on Terror and went to war in Iraq. In 2008, America hoped for change, and the age of Obama began. In 2016, Donald Trump won the White House, beginning his norm-breaking presidency.

America has also changed a lot since this party system began. The industrial age ended. We no longer live and work in an economic system designed to mass-produce good-enough products for everyone. We live in a fast, agile, postindustrial economic system designed to custom-meet needs through the use of masses of data. The economy went global and Americans found themselves competing for work with people across the world. The Cold War ended. America no longer stands as the head of one great-power alliance fighting an ideological battle against another great-power alliance. It stands as the greatest power in a multipolar world in which it attempts to shape global norms while others work actively or passively to see it decline. The family and cultural systems that support postindustrial life are fundamentally different from those of industrial America. Families look different, people live differently, and people value different things. An explosion of new technology is changing the basic rules of how we communicate with each other and fundamentally altering power relationships between people and institutions.

As the world we first designed our parties to debate has transformed, our parties have naturally started breaking down. Across America, there's a sense that we face an onslaught of disquieting new problems but no one knows what to do about them. Not only does America's political system appear unable to accomplish much of substance, but few policies of either party even seem relevant to addressing the new problems we face. People demand change, yet no one can agree what that change ought to be. No one in either party seems to have a solid theory of what's happening or why, much less a credible plan to address it. Neither party has developed an agenda of innovative policies. When confronting new problems, Democrats mostly apply the ideals of New Deal liberalism, which the party first pioneered during the early twentieth century and refined during the years of the Great Society. Republicans reach back to their instinctive opposition of such policies as “big government,” applying the conservative ideals their party pioneered in the middle of the twentieth century and refined during the Reagan administration of the 1980s. Everyone seems to be waiting for the world to just go back to the way it was before, or for some magic to solve these scary new problems with a familiar solution. Yet no one honestly expects that to happen. Since no one is acting and nothing seems to be working, new people and disruptive ideas are creeping into the national debate. People are getting angry. Old norms are falling away. A real fear is spreading that these problems are in fact symptoms of a scary national decline. Perhaps the country really is starting to careen out of control, and perhaps the vague foreboding so many sense is the feeling of an era ending, just as it once ended for the French Empire and the British Empire.

What everyone can sense, the reason everything seems to be careering out of control, is the conditions for a realignment have arrived and every indication says it's already on its way. Our parties are anachronisms, political coalitions and ideologies built to address another age's problems instead of those that now exist. We've lived our entire lives inside just one party system, thinking it's the natural way for things to be because it's the only system we've ever known. Yet our parties are still debating New Deal America, an America that no longer exists. Democrats continue to fight for the ideology of New Deal liberalism forged in Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Republicans fight against the “big government” the New Deal revolution wrought. The reason American politics seems so dangerous and uncontrolled is because the familiar party frameworks within which we organize everything have rapidly fallen away but we haven't yet replaced them with what comes next. The time has come.

Our parties are about to change. The only questions are when, how, and what happens next. Our decisions in the years ahead will determine not just how the remaking of our parties unfolds. We'll decide what sorts of parties emerge from the cycle of destruction and rebirth. Through it, we'll decide what sort of America will come to be.

WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT

This book is about political parties and realignments, but most of all it's about the future of America. It's about how our parties got the way they are. What built them? Who built them? Of what are they really made? What ideas and philosophical principles sustain them, and what do those principles really hold? The book is 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 recurring eruption of awakenings, national spirits of moral reform that periodically spark powerful religious revivals and dramatic social movements, continually plunge America into crusades for moral and social reform? What forces are already quietly cutting the ties that bind America's political factions, and how are these forces combining in a potent mix, pushing America's parties toward collapse? Most of all, this book is about America's future. The choices we make as we navigate these disruptive changes will forge new ideologies for America's parties, affecting which problems we address and how, and ultimately redefining America as a nation.

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, and how it should address new problems and concerns. Through this telling of the story of America, the book 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. Americans, facing new problems, form new alliances better suited to address the new problems of a new age. A new party system forms, one designed to debate the most pressing problem of the era ahead. Those parties then wage that new great debate over years of elections and policy experiments, until ultimately the questions we created them to address are finally resolved. Then America changes again. Old problems fade, new technologies develop, and new troubles arise. Over time, parties perfectly designed to wage a critical debate from a long-gone era decay into anachronisms. No longer able to offer compelling solutions to problems, they become old and brittle until they break—clearing the way for new coalitions uniting different people, often former enemies who now have more in common than they once had, unleashing vibrant new eras of reform. The American political system is built around these periods of collapse and rebirth.

Perhaps most important, the book provides us with the tools we need to better see the seams and cracks now tearing our familiar New Deal party system down. The story of modern politics isn't just a story of liberals and conservatives hoping to push America “left” or “right.” It's the story of a temporary debate launched amid the devastation of a depression and world war over how to adapt the American republic to the modern industrial economy. Understanding our own party system—how it came to be, the factions of which it consists, and the squabbling principles and idea it binds together into its dominant ideologies—is critical to understanding how and why it's coming apart and what's likely to emerge from its collapse. 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. Others quickly channel the destructive energy into building something new, such as the realignment that birthed the Populist and Progressive Era. American realignments can be destructive. They can also become conduits for reform, clearing the way for fresh ideas and new approaches necessary for national renewal. If we understand how and why our own party system is breaking down, we can better guide the next realignment to ensure America's future is one we want.

We live at one of history's great turning points. 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 beyond our control rips the system apart, hoping whatever emerges from the rubble doesn't lead the nation down dangerous towpaths into a darker era serving no one. 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 that it won't follow the rules of decades past. 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 in our lifetimes. 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—that it started to feel permanent. That time is at an end. As our parties break and new ones emerge, our decisions will determine what sort of parties these will be. We should make this choice 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 that will restore what so many Americans in this troubled time now believe is lost—the promise of the American Dream.