Our world has always been one of Republicans and Democrats standing for the same things Republicans and Democrats have always represented. Almost everyone alive today has lived their entire lives inside this single party system, established back in 1932. Since it's been this way as far as we remember, it's difficult to even comprehend this familiar and seemingly solid framework that has governed our entire lives suddenly and with little warning coming to its end, much less soon. Yet there was no great break in history in 1932 making our present party system immune from realigning pressures. The four realignments and five party systems of American history are therefore more than just history. They're also important lessons. The stories and points of data we can lift from them can help us understand, in our own political era, how and why our own parties will come apart and what challenges and choices we might face as they do. As Mark Twain reportedly warned, “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”1 Based on what we know from the history of America's prior party systems and realignments, our familiar old Fifth Party System is coming to its end. What sort of realignment, however, will our next one be?
Every realignment is, of course, unique. Nothing in history is set in stone before it happens, and human events are always unpredictable because people aren't automatons. Each realignment takes place at a particular moment in history with a particular collection of challenges and a unique cast of characters having different talents and personalities. Past realignments therefore have all been very different stories ending in very different ways. The 1896 realignment that ushered America into the Populist and Progressive Era was optimistic and constructive. America went through an exciting presidential campaign that unleashed new ideas, which then launched an eager new era of national reform that turned America into a prospering great power. The collapse of the Second Party System, on the other hand, was a horror. It unleashed almost a decade of political uncertainty, violence, ugly movements, and national trauma that ended in a bloody civil war. In between those two completely different stories was America's bungling through the Era of Good Feelings and the sad disintegration of the progressive Republicans during the Depression leading to the New Deal. Looking at these very different stories, however, we can see that American realignments seem to follow two distinct patterns. One is a collapse in which America tumbles into years of uncertainty and turmoil before new parties eventually rise from the rubble of the fall. The other is a swift and hopeful party renewal, as America rapidly reforms its parties for the problems of a new age. The difference between them, moreover, lies not in external factors. It lies in our choices.
America is heading toward a realignment no matter what we do. The important question is what we intend to do about it. It's our decisions as America transitions from its Fifth Party System to its Sixth that will decide not only what sort of realignment this will be, but also what sort of new parties rule our future. If we heed the lessons of our past, we can influence the next realignment to ensure America's future is a hopeful one we want—and not a dangerous one we don't.
HOW WE KNOW A REALIGNMENT IS COMING
Three familiar signs have always appeared when an American party system is coming to its end. What's more, these signs make sense because they're essentially indications that the bonds holding America's political coalitions together are weakening while powerful forces pulling at their seams are gaining strength. When all three signals appear, they're heralds that the political ideologies holding together America's existing party coalitions are losing the power to unite half of America around compelling agendas promising a better future. All three of these signs, moreover, have already appeared.
First, parties always crumble when the great debate that defines a party system fades away because party factions no longer share a common purpose worth putting aside other disagreements to work as a united front. Whenever the great debate of an era turned stale, America's parties have always begun to stagnate, corruption flourished, and the next realignment arrived soon after. When America resolved its debate over the early republic, American politics turned empty and its parties fell into empty mudslinging campaigns and personal attacks, until the aimless Federalist Party discredited itself and imploded. When America resolved the Jacksonian debate in the middle of the nineteen century, the Whigs and Democrats—now nominating military heroes with no interest in policy to run empty campaigns of sloganeering and election hoopla—floundered until, after an electoral battering in 1852, the Whig party collapsed. When America resolved the Civil War debate after Reconstruction, America's parties stumbled through years of ineffectiveness and corruption until a populist explosion and William Jennings Bryan rose to demand reform. When America moved past the Populist and Progressive Era debates over the abuses of industrialization, it got the feel-good parties of the 1920s running campaigns on prohibition even though it was already the law, parties that finally disintegrated in the catastrophe of the Depression.
When a great debate fades away or gets resolved, America's parties no longer share a common purpose worth putting aside other disagreements to work as a united front. They no longer share a common vision for the future, a common enemy to fight, or a common fear to root out. They're no longer capable, or even interested in, solving the problems Americans want and need resolved. Their existing agendas and policy toolkits lack the tools to address new problems. Their aging ideologies even lack the language or framework to think about them. American politics naturally stagnates. Parties become mere vehicles for status-seeking and career advancement. Corruption and graft flourishes. There's nothing left to hold vast, fractious, and often conflicting factions together other than tribal loyalty, habit, careerism, and inertia. When a great debate is resolved or dies, parties built around it become weak and empty shells vulnerable to collapse.
The second sign of an impending realignment is the rise of new problems. America creates parties and party systems to solve its most pressing and difficult challenges at a certain moment in history. Only something that compelling and powerful could possibly hold half the nation together in a political coalition at all. Whether these issues concern new technologies, economic transformations, cultural change, new patterns of living, religious revivals, or the spread of new ideas, parties have to transform to address a changed world or die so others can. It's rare, however, that coalitions built to solve one set of problems are capable of devising solutions to the very different problems of the next age. Coalitions united around one era's concerns rarely share a common interest or perspective around the next. Nor are officials and partisans who built careers inside old frameworks inclined to throw away ways of thinking and orthodoxies that brought them past success. When the world changes and new issues arise, parties either adapt or outsiders come along offering the solutions people demand.
Whenever significant new problems have arisen outside an existing era's great debate, America's parties began to stumble, outsiders willing to address the new issues emerged, and a realignment inevitably followed. As the ideals of the American republic settled in, a new generation of Americans demanded full participation in its politics. Andrew Jackson provided what the people demanded. When the spread of slavery and the rise of a powerful abolition movement brought the issue of slavery to the fore, people demanded a party that would commit to ending slavery's travesty. A new Republican Party emerged to provide what they demanded. When industrialization disrupted the lives of America's working and middle classes, people demanded policies that would protect them from this peril. William Jennings Bryan provided what the people demanded. When the Great Depression shattered people's faith in America's institutions serving in a modern world, people demanded radical policies that would end the Depression and restore their faith in the republic. Franklin Roosevelt provided what the people demanded. As new problems emerge that our parties can't or won't address, it's just a matter of time before someone or something comes along to spur the necessary innovations.
The third sign of a coming realignment is a disruption striking the system hard enough to finally knock the old system down. Parties sometimes stumble on for a surprisingly long time with a fading agenda, weak coalition, and no answers to the problems to which people demand solutions. So long as nothing strikes the decaying system hard enough, stagnant parties can coast for quite some time through inertia. The parties of the early republic plodded along for years until the Federalists collapsed, and then the Era of Good Feelings reigned for years more until Jackson finally emerged. The Whigs and Democrats faded for almost a decade before the Whig implosion, and then almost another decade passed until the Third Party System settled in. The Third Party System parties spent almost twenty years locked in corruption and inaction until Bryan emerged. The Populist and Progressive Era parties lost focus after the First World War and lingered until the Depression. Even when nobody would think to create them anew, and even when it would be impossible to rebuild them given how much the world has changed, weak and ineffective parties can stumble along powered by habit so long as it remains in everybody's self-interest to cooperatively prop up the ineffective and widely disliked status quo.
During the stable decades of a party system, every major player in politics—party leaders, potential candidates, activists, donors, and voters—unwittingly coordinate to defend the ideologies and coalitions that provide them a well-known path to power. The savvy thing for everyone who wants to build a career in politics or who has an agenda of policies they want enacted to do, whatever they personally think about the two existing major parties, is to pick the party closest to their views, work within it as best they can, and conform their public persona to its agenda, beliefs, and orthodoxies. It's also in their self-interest to attack as threats anything challenging their party's orthodoxies—the fragile compromises and agreements that hold the party's existing coalition together—even if in secret they might prefer them over the status quo. Since everyone is quietly cooperating to maintain, and even defend, the existing party system's coalitions and ideologies, those parties appear sound and unassailable. Decaying and aimless parties can therefore stumble on for quite some time, propped up by self-interest and careerism, creating the illusion of party strength and inevitability. Yet this invisible bulwark has one obvious vulnerability—if anything pops the illusion, there's a run on a political party just like a run on a failing bank. When an illusion is the only thing holding a party system together—not a compelling agenda of exciting ideas about the future—lifting that illusion brings it tumbling down. Which is exactly what makes weakened political parties vulnerable to sudden collapse.
Disruptions that inject danger and chaos into American politics happen all the time. Some build up slowly in the background for years, like the religious revivals that intensified abolition and inspired the Progressive Movement. Others fester, like the economic changes that ate away the prosperity of America's family farms. Some shock the world suddenly, like economic panics and depressions. Some are disruptive policy choices, like the Nullification Crisis, the launching of the Mexican-American War, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, or the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. Some are disorderly and zealous political movements, like Jacksonian populism, the abolition movement, the Know-Nothings, or the Populist Movement. Some come with outsized and headstrong personalities smashing against the system, like Andrew Jackson or William Jennings Bryan. The specific reasons each American party system failed after so many years drifting at sea are all unique. There were one-time personalities, social movements, policy failures, religious revivals, events, and more that combined into a distinct and combustive mix that, when suddenly ignited, burned the old system down. Something or someone, however, always arrived to light the match, and when it happened these walking-dead parties quickly incinerated.
Eventually, something, or some combination of somethings, always arrives to make the major stakeholders inside the party question whether it truly remains their most useful vehicle for winning elections and enacting agendas. They question whether they still need the party to advance, or whether the party is still a useful path toward power, or whether they really want to bond politically to factions they never liked, or whether a better alternative reflecting their true beliefs and desires might actually be possible. When such disruption strikes at the right moment, making a party look factional, weak, disgraced, or discredited, stakeholders realize there's no longer much to gain by remaining married to allies they don't like, trapped in orthodoxies in which they don't believe, and working for stale agendas unrelated to the things they care most about. Like waking from a stultifying dream, everyone suddenly sees the world with fresh eyes, free to consider new ideas, new issues, and new alliances that actually excite them. The bubble pops and the entire stale older comes crashing down. Like Humpty Dumpty, it's impossible to put the system back together in the same way.
When all three of these factors—the end of the last great debate, the rise of new problems, and disruption—emerge at the same time, we know from experience a realignment is soon to come. The only question is how America chooses to respond. The decisions we make when the time for a realignment arrives determines which of two distinct types of realignments occur. Here, we have a choice, one with real consequences for our future.
COLLAPSE OR RENEWAL
Some realignments are quick and purposeful, as America quickly transforms and enters a new era of forward-looking reform. This happens when, in a moment of stagnating parties and realigning pressures, America's leaders leap into the fray to drag America's parties into a new age. For example, as America headed into the 1890s, it looked as if the nation was on the verge of a national breakdown. The Gilded Age offered wild opportunities for those positioned to take them, but decimated the middle-class family-farm economy that was America's backbone. Old parties still squabbling over the Civil War were wholly incapable of thinking about, much less addressing, the sweeping changes of industrialization. People got angry. They lost trust in America and what seemed to them its ineffective institutions. A populist revolt demanded radical reforms. You would normally expect this story to end with years of social turmoil, the outbreak of radicalism, possibly violence, and perhaps much worse, as angry Americans tore down a decaying system and then fumbled through the task of building something new. Had nothing intervened, something or someone would have inevitably ripped those useless old parties down. Then somebody intervened.
Instead of dawdling until America's political coalitions eventually disintegrated, William Jennings Bryan captured the Democratic Party's nomination with a disruptive new agenda creating a new party ideology that addressed the problems of the future instead of the past. Bryan's campaign not only remade his own Democratic Party, it spurred a similar transformation of the Republicans. This 1896 realignment became the quickest and least disruptive realignment in American history. Because there was no party collapse, there was no vacuum for malignant forces to fill. Because the process happened deliberately and intentionally, Americans got to choose their new party ideologies carefully instead of accepting whatever emerged from the chaos of a collapse. The result was an era of reform and national prosperity. Bryan's realignment shortcut the regular process of collapse, chaos, and rebirth in favor of a drastic and swift renewal.
The New Deal realignment followed a similar path. The Fourth Party System parties were already floundering, meandering through the Jazz Age without compelling agendas. Then the Great Depression knocked America onto its back, creating dramatic demands for solutions neither party had the tools to provide. With America's parties unable to address the desperation sweeping the nation, many Americans lost hope in the very concept of democracy and liberal democratic capitalism. No one would have been surprised if the story ended not only with a party collapse, but even a populist revolt or the rise of a radical demagogue, as occurred in many European nations. Instead, Roosevelt's radical New Deal experiments created a new agenda and ideology for his party that restored trust in the republic and ushered in a new party system. Roosevelt's realignment was more unstable and scary than Bryan's, with its constitutional crises, Court-Packing Schemes, and Business Plots, but it nevertheless staved off the worst—the usual years of chaos, the rise of radical movements, and who knows what other dangers had the parties actually crumbled—to create two new parties prepared for a useful debate about America's future.
What's distinguishes this first model of political realignments from its alternative is it's intentional. In both the Bryan realignment in 1896 and the Roosevelt realignment in 1932, America's parties were clearly heading toward collapse. America's parties no longer had the ability to solve the problems they needed to address, or to hold together coalitions that no longer made much sense. It was only a matter of time until something or someone shattered those fragile coalitions and America's parties came apart. Yet instead of waiting until America's political coalitions collapsed, Americans came together to rebuild their parties around new ideologies and ideas before events forced change upon them. They renewed their parties first and ushered America into a new age. They created America's next party system through an intentional choice.
A second path realignments can take, however, is a sudden, uncontrolled, and disruptive collapse. Under this second model, when America's parties stagnate and realigning pressures loom, no one steps forward with an agenda of reform, so eventually those parties crash. In the rubble of the collapse, Americans then must muddle through the darkness, often for years, until eventually someone picks up the pieces to rebuild anew. The classic example of this second sort of realignment is the Whig Party collapse that caused America's Second Party System to disintegrate. For years, the stagnating Second Party System was ready to break. Instead of looking for ways to renew their parties around new issues, like slavery, America's leaders hunkered down into their familiar ideologies, hoping the crisis might pass on its own. Eventually, the Whigs collapsed and the entire party system tumbled with it. Nearly a decade of national turmoil followed as a result. Marginal and radical interests jumped into the vacuum to bid for center stage. The once-marginal Know-Nothings captured America's attention. Politics became violent. National disorder endured for a full eight years, until the Republican Party finally emerged as a new national party, at which point the nation plunged into a civil war. With no framework to channel the disputes and debates of democracy, the nation went mad.
The First Party System's collapse was a somewhat less catastrophic version of this second model. After the debate over how to organize the early republic that divided Federalists and Democratic-Republicans was all but settled, and then the Federalists discredited themselves with the Hartford folly, the Federalist Party crumbled. America wandered for years through the corrupt and ineffectual Era of Good Feelings until, eventually, Jackson and Adams went to battle for the presidency and the nation's mood got hot. Politics got vicious. Political debate got apocalyptic. A conspiratorial third party formed—the Anti-Masonic Party, which sought to break what they believed to be a Masonic conspiracy corrupting the republic—that competed seriously to become America's second major party. America remained in turmoil for years before Jackson's new party system settled in. The First Party System's collapse was milder than the Second's, but was similarly uncontrolled.
The difference separating the first and the second models of political realignments is in how America's leaders respond to looming change. When parties become old and decayed, no longer offering forward-looking messages, it's merely a matter of time before they come tumbling down. America's leaders can decide to seize the moment, renew their parties, and usher in a new age of national reform. Or they can do nothing until some event, some crisis, some new idea, some movement, or some ambitious figure shatters America's political coalitions, and then struggle to pick up the pieces after the inevitable collapse. Put simply, we can either take charge of a coming realignment, sparking a party renewal by choice, or we can do nothing and wait for our parties to collapse before we begin the work of rebuilding amid the disorder our inaction caused. The difference between these two paths lies mainly in our choices—whether we rush into a party renewal to shape the future we want, or instead plunge our heads into the sand and wait for the inevitable collapse to arrive.
Every realignment is disruptive and sometimes scary. No realignment is easy or without risk. A realignment under the first model, however, is far more gentle than its alternative. It avoids the years of turmoil and chaos. There's no vacuum for scary movements to fill. There's no opportunity for demagogues or radicals to seize control by promising people things the dying parties can't provide. There's none of the uncertainty and struggle that makes politics so angry and hot that violence might erupt. There are no constitutional crises, and the republic is safe as we choose to move from one era to the next on our own well-considered terms. Most important, in a renewal under the first model, we pick the coalitions and ideologies that will divide us for decades to come by choice. We can ensure our next party system launches a useful debate about our future, rather than setting us against each other in ugly ways that lead to years of strife.
A collapse under the second model, on the other hand, is dangerous because it means years of chaos before the next realignment comes. In the interim, people and factions and movements can rush out of the dark to seize opportunity. A demagogue can rise. A horrible movement can seize power. Incompetents or the corrupt can win high office and squander the nation's treasure, good name, and legacy. Disastrous decisions can slip through the turmoil. Constitutional crises can erupt. Violence can take root amid the fire of chaotic debates. Radicals can jump into the fray. National disorder can overwhelm everything. Even under the best of cases, it can take years before stability is restored. Most importantly, it's mainly up to luck as to which movements and issues spur new parties to form, what ideologies they bring, and how they will divide us in the years to come.
There's no way to avoid a realignment when the time for one arrives. Our choices in navigating such a realignment, however, shape what sort of transformation it will be. If we move purposefully into change, refreshing the ideologies and agendas of our parties to make them relevant for the coming era, we can choose new parties we want while avoiding the usual cycle of collapse and turmoil that realignments too often bring. If we don't, before things get better they get worse. Possibly, much worse.
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE FIFTH PARTY SYSTEM
If we examine the story of our own party system, we can see the Fifth Party System is at the brink. The New Deal debate was a debate about how to reform modern industrial capitalism after a cataclysmic depression and world war. That debate is over and has been for some time. We face new problems. We now live in a postindustrial information-age global economy that increasingly looks nothing like the mass-production world around which we built our parties. The Cold War ended and a new multipolar world emerged to take its place. American culture has changed, looking very different from the postwar world we take for granted as “normal.” A host of new issues and concerns have risen, which our New Deal parties simply can't or won't address. At the same time, disruptive forces course through American politics. If we evaluate our own New Deal party system in light of everything we know about the history of party systems and realignments, we can see every condition for a realignment is now in place. The only question that remains is what sort of realignment it will be.
Will our next realignment be slow and difficult, or quick and purposeful? Will the parties that emerge from it be ones we have reason to dread, or ones that help us to debate a better future? Will the years ahead be ones of turmoil and instability, or the beginning of a hopeful era of reform? Will our next realignment be a collapse or a renewal? That's still up to us. If we understand the course of our own New Deal debate from its inception to today, we can better see why and how our Fifth Party System is about to break—so, when the time comes, we can ensure we choose a future we want and avoid one we don't.