Americans are baffled and worried about the direction of our politics. For most of us, throughout our entire lives we essentially understood how American politics was supposed to work. We knew what it meant to be a Republican or a Democrat. We knew what to expect from our leaders. We didn't always like our politicians, and we didn't like every Congress or presidential administration, but we felt confident that, although they might enact some policies we didn't like, they'd keep the country moving forth on the same expected course. Whichever party and whichever candidate won, we felt secure that everything would be okay. Now we're not so sure. The nation faces an ever-increasing array of difficult challenges, but very little is getting done. Our national political culture is mainly defined by fierce anger, political polarization, and tribalism. There's the slow seepage of scary outrage, hate, and resentment into the culture, where political opponents aren't mere friendly adversaries but immoral enemies to destroy by any means possible. There's the near extinction of the moderate wings of both parties. There's the sudden abandonment of once unchallenged norms. There's the never-ending battles over the culture war, the raw resentment of Red America against Blue America, and vice versa. American politics seems broken. We have good reason to be concerned.
What everyone can sense is we stand at an important turning point in history. We're ready as a nation to move past the old debates that have defined our politics for as long as any of us remember. We're ready to throw away the tired partisan divisions that presently define us, building new coalitions looking not backward but toward the problems of today. We're ready to embrace new solutions to our problems—not symbolic ones, but a flurry of real reforms that can rebuild and remake our nation. We're ready to renew our parties, our politics, and America. We have been for some time. Yet so far, no one has stepped forth to do it, leaving a vacuum at the center of our politics for everyone's worst impulses to fill. Instead of leading America toward renewal and reform, everyone seems eager to ride on top of the crest of a wave that's about to crash into the shoreline.
An era really is ending. Our party system actually is nearing its conclusion. The problem is, we seem completely unprepared to build America's next party system and launch our next great debate. Instead of seizing the challenge before us to lead America into a new era, we seem trapped instead in patterns and ways of thinking that make it difficult, if not impossible, for us to revitalize our politics. Unhappily, unless something changes soon, we know how this will end. Our era isn't heading toward a new era of forward-looking reform as we all hope. It's going to end like the Whigs.
THE LAST PRESIDENTS OF THE FIFTH PARTY SYSTEM
The American people enthusiastically elected Barack Obama in 2008 in an election unlike any recent campaign. Obama captured the nation's attention on a promise of “Hope and Change” ushering America into a new era of postpartisan politics.1 He talked about how there was no Red or Blue America, only the United States of America.2 That yes, we could change everything that troubled us about the stagnation in American politics.3 That the future would be dramatically better than the present if we only cast off the outmoded thinking holding us back and moved forward together. Republicans complained that people treated Obama not like a politician but a celebrity, but that was always wrong. Every major presidential candidate is a celebrity. Obama inspired a commitment and exhilaration usually reserved for religious figures and rock stars. There were those iconic posters by artist Shepard Fairey.4 There were the fan videos, like the popular “Obama Girl.”5 An estimated 1.8 million people flooded into Washington to see Obama inaugurated, packing into the National Mall for a ceremony that uncharacteristically felt more like a national festival than the sober swearing in of a president.6 The Nobel Committee awarded him nothing less than the Nobel Peace Prize less than a year into his first term on the strength of what he was expected to do.7
By the time Obama ran for reelection, that euphoria was gone.8 Not only wasn't the country united, it was more divided than before. The Tea Party movement had exploded across America.9 Republicans shouted furiously that Obama was a socialist working to destroy the country. Progressive activists, believing Obama had continued many Bush-era policies and governed like a moderate Republican, felt betrayed.10 America hadn't suddenly started solving all its problems. For the most part, Republicans in Congress and the Democrats in the White House refused to work together at all. Not only hadn't America entered a new age of transformation and national redemption, everything had gotten worse.
Pundits have come up with a lot of explanations for why the Obama euphoria happened—from Obama's superior campaign team to social media to Americans thrilled to elect the first African American president—and why it so quickly burst—from united Republican opposition against him to a struggling economy to racial animus. There's truth in all those explanations, but none of them really explains the strange national eruption of jubilation nor its calamitous collapse. The key to understanding the Obama phenomenon lies not in conventional explanations but in what Obama promised and what he was actually able to deliver. Without realizing it, Obama promised America he would be the first president of America's next party system. Instead, he governed as one of the last presidents of the system that was falling away.
As president, Obama claimed three great accomplishments. First, he managed the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, stabilizing the banking system, implementing industry “bail-outs,” and passing a large stimulus bill.11 Second, he worked to withdraw American troops from Iraq.12 Third, he threw his weight behind the dream of every Democratic president since the 1960s, passing a national health insurance bill.13 In addition to these three larger efforts, Democrats under Obama spearheaded various efforts in federal agencies; sought to raise the federal minimum wage; rhetorically supported the failed “Arab Spring”; and supported immigration reform to provide a path to citizenship for many of those who had entered the country illegally.14 When all was said and done, the Obama administration in practice—whether you like its accomplishments or not, and whether you judge it competent and successful or not—looked a lot like every Democratic administration of the last fifty years. Its legacy amounts to stimulus spending on traditional Democratic priorities, expanded access to health insurance, pulling back forces from a foreign war, and administering the agencies of government in accordance with traditional Democratic priorities. These weren't major philosophical shifts. They weren't unexpected bold ideas. The record of the Obama administration turned out to be the traditional Democratic agenda one had come to expect from post–New Deal Democrats.
It's not surprising that the Obama administration hadn't broken with conventional politics. Obama's White House included the same power brokers, the same think tanks, the same staff, and the same interest groups who had traditionally supported Democrats. None of them were intellectual radicals looking to forge new unfamiliar ideologies, and few were political radicals looking to explore unfamiliar new ideas. They naturally did the same things they had done over their entire careers. They championed the same issues. They listened to the same voices. They fought the same battles. Democratic elites essentially read the mass enthusiasm for Obama and the strong Democratic majorities in Congress not as a mandate to rethink new challenges but as an opportunity to politically advance the traditional Democratic Party wish list. Yet Obama hadn't promised to govern as a traditional Democratic politician. He promised to throw away old ways of thinking, break through the walls of Red and Blue America, and usher in new solutions—“yes we can”—to update and renew his party. America didn't know exactly what they expected hope and change to mean, but, whatever it was, politics didn't really change. The same groups of people were still fighting about the same issues and employing the same ideologies as before.
Without realizing it, Obama implicitly promised America he would bring about the next great political realignment. He promised he wouldn't just be a good administrator of government, or a champion of New Deal liberalism, but he would forge a new agenda from scratch like Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Clay, or William Jennings Bryan—and he probably had a fair chance to do it. Without knowing it, the American people were eager for the realignment Obama implicitly promised. They too wanted to move away from the tired New Deal debates. They also hated the stale Red State–Blue State divisions. They too wanted a “postpartisan” government—not a government that stopped operating with two clearly distinct political parties but one that debated different ideas in a different way. What Americans hoped for, often without realizing it, was that Obama would be the first president to move past these partisan divisions, ushering in a government that finally left behind the debates of the Great Depression. When that didn't happen, Americans hoping for a new future naturally felt angry and cheated. No wonder the national mood was frustrated, let-down, and a little bit scared.
The window is open and has been for years. America is ready for a realignment. The only question is whether America's leaders will deliver a realignment through a party renewal or whether they ignore the pressures long enough so that it happens on its own in a collapse.
THE CONDITIONS FOR A REALIGNMENT
All three conditions that signal a coming realignment are in place. First, the great debate of the Fifth Party System era—our debate over New Deal liberalism—is over. Sometime in the middle of the 1990s, the American people reached a consensus over the New Deal debate. They agreed with Franklin Roosevelt that the American state would now take on new responsibilities in economic management, health, safety, welfare. They agreed with the conservatives that those responsibilities had limits. Despite the wild political rhetoric to the contrary, in practice the New Deal debate is over and has been for the better part of twenty years. The New Deal debate and the agendas it created are anachronisms. The America they address no longer exists. Its economy is completely different, no longer centered around mass-producing factories employing armies of unskilled men. Its cultural landscape is different, the one-earner and one-homemaker nuclear families of the middle twentieth century replaced with today's more varied conception of families. Its society is different, with increased diversity and more openness to difference. Its geostrategic situation is different, with the Cold War now a memory and an unstable multipolar world emerging in its place.
Second, a legion of new issues and concerns has risen to which no one yet has answers. New technology, new economic models, vast cultural transformation, new ideas, changed global competitors, and more all combine to create new issues that Americans want and need to be addressed. Few yet understand these new concerns, fewer have solutions to problems that are still unclear, and no one has a framework to properly think about this transformed world. The world is changing and no one in authority seems to have a plan, much less a solution. Our parties, constructed to debate the problems of a world that no longer exists, are ill equipped to debate the problems of the current world. They increasingly hold fractious coalitions together by force of habit, inertia, and tribal loyalties. There are no great projects on the horizon because Americans demand solutions to problems the parties can't even begin to think about, much less solve.
Third, America increasingly faces national disruptions. The most powerful among them is the furious great awakening coursing through the nation. Awakenings always turn politics more divisive. People immersed in awakening fervor see politics not as a field for negotiating over differences, but rather as a great crusade to transform the nation according to one's conception of morality. Awakening crusades denigrate the idea of politics as a series of imperfect negotiations. They celebrate the idea of politics as total war, with elections becoming opportunities to wrest control of the state from enemies. In the grip of an awakening, American culture becomes moralistic, agitated, zealous, and confrontational. America elevates moral and symbolic issues to the highest importance while it neglects practical matters as too boring and prosaic, since the battle between good and evil outweighs the importance of simply making things work. Awakenings encourage radically ripping things down to rid them of evil, clearing ground to build new utopias. Awakening fervor helped bring down the Whigs. It inspired the populist revolt and progressive reforms. It helped fuel Jacksonian Democracy. Awakenings are the ultimate complicating factor leading to realignments.
The awakening may be the greatest disruptive force now acting in politics, but it's not the only one. As America's parties stopped offering compelling answers to new problems, others crowded into public view with their own new answers. A new “Alt-Right” emerged, one that sounds nothing like traditional conservatism. A new equity movement often called the “social justice left” emerged, a confident and confrontational movement with a different perspective and different priorities than traditional New Deal Democrats. A new movement has emerged seeking to curb mass immigration. So has a countermovement rejecting the morality of abstract borders. A resurgent socialism may be emerging, one rejecting capitalism as a just economic system. More new movements, moreover, are certain to come. What makes these movements disruptive is they're not the usual interests or advocacy groups fighting for public agendas within the traditional New Deal debate. They have completely different philosophical foundations, and therefore sit completely outside it. As they gain traction, they batter the traditional divides themselves.
Added to all that are the disruptive political figures that inevitably emerge as the walls of a party system begin coming down. Few figures have been as disruptive of late—triumphantly rejecting the traditional divisions of American politics and its norms—as the current president, Donald Trump.
SCRAMBLING COALITIONS AND COURTING COLLAPSE
America's political leaders aren't blind. They can see the discontent across America just as well as everyone else. They, too, know America is changing. They can see Americans are worried about new issues. They can see new movements taking form. In response to these existential pressures, you would expect them to be working desperately to innovate new agendas, combat the trends dividing their coalitions, and locate new allies to sustain majorities. Yet they've done the opposite. Instead of adapting their agendas and ideologies to address a changing world, they've sought to leverage these disruptions as political fuel in order to generate a short-term advantage within the crumbling Fifth Party System. To the extent they address new issues, it's to cram new concerns into familiar party frameworks. To the extent they address new groups and movements, it's to coopt them as foot soldiers in the fading debate between New Deal liberalism and modern conservatism. To the extent they address people's fears and anger at an increasingly unstable and unpredictable world, it has been to harness the discontent for a few immediate votes not to actually solve their problems.
One of the greatest symptoms of the deterioration of our politics has been the decline of the people we call political moderates. Through the beginning of this century, both the Democrats and the Republicans included many of these supposed “moderates” in their ranks. These moderates won elections, influenced their parties, and played key roles at the highest levels of government. Then came years of campaigns of marginalization by both party activists and party leaders—denouncing the moderates as traitors, weak, unprincipled, RINOS (Republicans in Name Only), neoliberal sellouts, or worse. Over time, the moderate wings in both parties that once flourished dwindled until, today, they're widely considered at best beleaguered remnants and at worst extinct. Many presume the moderates faded into irrelevance because American politics has become more “polarized,” and they were “centrists” at a time in which both parties were moving “farther” to the “left” and the “right.” The problem with this explanation is, as we know, the left-right spectrum doesn't actually exist. Since there's no single spectrum of human political opinion, there's also no middle point between liberalism and conservatism for “centrists” to occupy. Nor is it compelling to say our parties have moved “farther” to the left and right since we don't even know what it means for something to be “left” or “right,” other than its something the people we've already labeled “left” or “right” happen to support. Something else is going on.
One of the defining features of a realigning era is drift. The existing party ideologies increasingly become ineffective vehicles for maintaining active coalitions, yet nothing compelling has yet arisen to replace them. Parties, however, must continue to win elections so they can maintain their status and power, so they have no choice but to discover new means to attract voters to the polls—which can mean campaign hullabaloo, popular personalities, appeals to identity, and the airing of resentments. Among the tools on which our parties have increasingly relied to attract and energize votes are appeals based in partisan identities outside the core New Deal debate. These appeals aren't based on principles, policies, or ideas. They're not attempts to solve new problems or found a new debate. They're attempts to harness raw emotions like anger and identity to drive voters to the polls, most often not even to support the party but to vote against its opponents. Increasingly, many of us have even begun to believe these ancillary partisan identities are in fact the true core of our parties and thus the definition of their “base.” The most potent of these are the culture war and tribal Red and Blue identity politics.
Among the reasons the Fourth Great Awakening has proven particularly divisive is it splintered into two opposing movements, each drinking deeply of the same awakening spirit yet holding starkly different visions of what morality requires. Most awakenings create one interlocking movement to reform America. This one created two, one countercultural and the other of Christian revival, and then sent them to war against each other. Each side saw its agenda as not just better but as the foundation of justice and morality. Each saw its opponents as not simply people with different priorities, but as actual advocates for evil. Each was eager to take on divisive issues tearing at society's most painful spots, willing to rush into the maw of crisis in the belief that hard times today were a fair price for a better tomorrow. Neither was willing to compromise because they were fighting over matters of good and evil. The Fourth Awakening essentially lit two rockets, each racing toward the other, launching a great “culture war.”
For years, these two moral crusades rode like passengers on top of America's parties. The parties chiefly fought over the issues of the Fifth Party System's great debate, concrete policies like tax rates and budgets and regulations that Americans could debate, compromise, and resolve. These matters were the ones America had to get right so people had work, food, a place to live, personal safety, healthcare, and care for their children. On top of this pragmatic debate over the core issues of government, however, this secondary culture war debate engaged over more exciting and morally affirming battles—reforms, crusades, and dreams, along with people's deepest anger and resentments. It was almost as if America's parties had two competing identities, one official—the two great ideologies of New Deal liberalism and modern conservatism—which governed the core issues of government, and then, lurking underneath, a growing shadow identity—the culture war divide that grew out of the awakening. So long as the New Deal debate dominated, these awakening movements promoted their issues and supported their chosen party as auxiliaries. Then the New Deal debate faded, clearing the political field for these remaining issues, the stark moral culture war disputes.
The culture war is about two clashing moral crusades, so it rewards the intense, zealous, crusading, passionate, furious energy that tears party systems down without concern for what comes next. By its nature, it's a zero-sum fight that can never be resolved, only won or lost. As the culture war replaces normal politics, it has turned it angry, zero-sum, moralistic, and destructive—while also discouraging the sorts of pragmatic and innovative reforms that renewing our parties would entail. The culture war debate, invested in a narrow but powerful set of moral beliefs and issues, can't sustain a party system alone because it isn't interested or capable of addressing the full scope of bread and butter issues a party system ideology requires. Its crowding out regular politics, however, has made it difficult, if not near impossible, for America's political leaders to engage in the messy and pragmatic experimentation and negotiation necessary to develop any other new agenda of ideas. Much of what we've falsely labeled “polarization” is in reality just the growing influence of this awakening moralism since the core Fifth Party System debate was essentially resolved.
For many Americans, what now marks you as part of the liberal or a conservative tribe isn't your attachments to the official Fifth Party System's New Deal philosophical commitments but rather your position on culture war issues like abortion, environmental purity, social justice, or personal morality. This is increasingly true at even the highest level of our party councils and among powerful party activists, particularly those who became involved in politics not through regular party organizations but through the awakening movements. Having risen to power and authority, they sincerely believe their parties are, and ought to be, coextensive with the awakening movements to which they're truly loyal. The problem is, while sometimes these two identities, New Deal and cultural warrior, match, often times they don't. While each awakening movement made its home inside one of the New Deal parties, each also sometimes draws on ideas from outside them. The “liberal” side of the culture war, based in moral progressivism, sometimes clashes with populism and is friendly to liberty. The “conservative” side, based in a moral conception of the virtue of national improvement, sometimes clashes with liberty and is friendly to populism. Defining conservatism and liberalism around the culture war unwittingly elevates some voters who don't even fully agree with their party's formal ideological commitments as more “pure” than voters who actually do. Put plainly, some of those who consider themselves part of each party's most committed “base” don't actually believe fully in their party's official ideology—and then seek to enforce their alternative version as the true one.
The culture war, however, isn't the only alternative identity that has risen to take the place of our great debate. Others have begun to define their political identity less in terms of ideologies and ideas and more in terms of the identity politics of “Red” and “Blue” America. For many, as the New Deal debate has declined, conservativism and liberalism have become not rival political philosophies but rival cultural attitudes. What makes you a conservative or a liberal isn't your views on public policy, but rather your lifestyle choices—whether you watch PBS or NASCAR, whether you prefer a Prius or a truck, whether you listen to country or indie rock, whether you eat kale or prefer Chick-fil-A, and whether you admire the Ivy League and France or despise them. These stereotypes are broadly useful in defining likely supporters. These markers, however, have nothing to do with one's views on politics, issues, agendas, or approaches to government. At best, they conform to cultural stereotypes of rural and Southern versus urban and Northern culture, and one's position on the culture war.
The sorts of cultural traits we associate with conservative politics—rural, traditional, religious, sensitive to perceptions of East Coast snobbery, and glorifying “real American” tastes in music, sports, and hobbies—are in reality just identity markers of traditional working-class America. The traits we associate with liberal politics—urban, secular, socially conscious, and glorifying the “refined” tastes in music, sports, and hobbies common to the educated and wealthy—are lifestyle habits of the modern professional and executive class. Defining liberalism and conservatism this way means dividing America around the age-old resentments of regionalism and social class while pretending the divisions are about principles and ideas. Worse, substituting cultural markers to define who is a conservative and who is a liberal for philosophical ones—people who look like “us,” act like “us,” live where “we” live, and live like “we” do—prevents America's parties from acting as institutions meant to govern—to ensure that we're safe, that we have jobs, that we have enough to eat, that our children get educated, that our medicines are safe, that we have working roads and bridges and airports to allow us to thrive—and turns them into expressive performances for airing trivial resentments that have nothing to do with running the country.
Our parties have only reinforced these troubling tendencies through today's dominant mechanism for thinking about electoral tactics, the “base strategy.” Until fairly recently, the conventional wisdom was that American elections were fought over the “center.” Political campaigns believed their most important task was persuading undecided “swing voters” in the political “middle” to trust them with the government. There is, however, another way to win a majority of the votes cast—changing the composition of the electorate in your favor by increasing the number of your partisans who actually show up at the polls. Under this base strategy theory of elections, the best way to win campaigns isn't to persuade the uncommitted, but to identify your party's most committed “base” and ensure they cast a vote.15 Get-out-the-vote efforts are as old as politics, of course, going back to the days of precinct captains from political machines ensuring their patronage-blessed residents turned up to pull the lever. In recent years, however, base mobilization has come to dominate the thinking of campaign operatives across politics, shifting the goal of political organizations from persuasion to reliability and accountability.16 The base strategy can only guarantee a few extra percentage points, so it can't help when a party nominates a bad candidate or runs in a bad year or runs a bad campaign. In an election with two pretty evenly balanced parties—which a stable party system is structured to create—it can, however, statistically guarantee the few extra points that can turn a losing campaign into a victory.17
The base strategy is tactically smart. Persuading people is an art and therefore unpredictable. Many voters don't even pay much attention to politics—particularly voters with weak partisan identities—picking candidates for reasons wholly unrelated to governing, such as with whom they would prefer to share a beer. Months of campaigning to the uncommitted can be destroyed by a bad photograph or poorly timed news event creating “bad optics”—a widely distributed video showing a candidate bobbing about in a tank wearing a silly helmet, or windsurfing in a tight wetsuit, or jubilantly shouting into a microphone. Identifying committed partisans and encouraging them to show up on election day, on the other hand, is the kind of management science a campaign can execute reliably, statistically guaranteeing a certain percentage of additional votes. The base strategy reduces the importance of things a candidate can't control, giving the candidate a path to victory the campaign can regulate and manage.
Although it may be tactically effective, the base strategy is also dangerous because it actively discourages desperately needed innovation and ideas. You persuade undecided people to support you with issues and arguments. Policy and ideas of substance aren't how you create urgency among people who already don't care enough about politics to vote. You inspire partisans too unmotivated to vote with strong emotions like fear, anger, and alarm. Traditional campaigning was about convincing people with policies and ideas. Base thinking prioritizes making people angry, outraged, and scared. The widespread adoption of the base strategy has changed the way our parties speak, the way they argue, and the way they relate to the entire electorate. It changed the message our parties send America about for whom they stand and what they represent. While the base strategy might be an effective short-term method for chasing votes in an era in which traditional issues are losing power, it's yet another force making America's political culture more angry, tribal, and irrational while encouraging political leaders to disregard the issues and ideas that could lead toward a party renewal. It actively discourages parties from doing the hard work they need to do to renew themselves for a new era, pushing instead toward the sort of raw anger and antagonism that can rip party systems down.
A larger problem with the base strategy, however, is it also falsely presumes that parties have a “base” at all. We don't know what “liberalism” or “conservativism” even mean other than whatever the people we call liberals and conservative tend to like. Parties therefore don't actually have a “base” consisting of more “pure” partisans to energize. What parties have are pockets of voters they can more easily identify as likely supporters using the available tools of analysis—cold statistics, generalizations, and numbers. In the modern campaign, these tools are often very sophisticated and accurate. Parties through “microtargeting” can enhance voter files with other databases, mailing lists, public records, and consumer marketing data collecting individual purchases and preferences to predict likely supporters.18 These tools work, however, through generalizations, demographics, and data. They therefore overvalue supporters who are most visible and easily identifiable and undervalue supporters more difficult to demographically stereotype and thus identify. It's almost impossible to use these methods to accurately identify what people philosophically believe or why they care about the issues they do, much less at a time in which those ideologies are already losing power. They're quite useful, however, to identify people active in the politics of the culture war or who reflect the stereotypes of Red and Blue identity. The dominance of base thinking in our parties further encourages them to define their “base” around these alternatives—and then to act on it, encouraging these alternative definitions to become true.
The people we've labeled moderates, ultimately, aren't actually moderates. They're mainly people who philosophically belong in one party but align differently on the ancillary politics of the culture war and the Red-Blue cultural divide, and so they're getting pushed out of the party in which they properly belong. The Republican “moderates” who once thrived in the party were generally urban, upper class or close to it, perhaps from the Northeast or West Coast, and, as it's conventionally put, “economically conservative and socially moderate.” They believed in free markets, limited government, and low taxes, yet often showed discomfort with parts of the Republican cultural agenda.19 They were, in other words, ideologically committed to fusion conservatism—mainly liberty conservatives (thus “economically conservative”) who liked tax cuts, wanted “smaller government” with reduced regulation, while supporting Burkean calls for personal responsibility and caution toward social radicalism. They showed discomfort with parts of the Republican cultural agenda (thus “socially moderate”) that sprang from the awakening religious revival. They also often lived among Blue State Democrats in suburbs and urban areas, sharing Blue cultural tastes in products, music, sports, and media.
The Democratic “moderates” who flourished in the Democratic Party until quite recently—now increasingly marginalized within the party as hated “neoliberals”—were usually pro-business and Wall Street–friendly Democrats from the professional class who strongly supported progressive social policies but were uncomfortable with populist rhetoric demonizing corporations, attacking business, or valorizing the working class.20 They weren't sure about labor unions, found too much top-down regulation problematic, and believed business can be a good partner to government. “Blue Dog” Democratic moderates, once popular in rural districts and the collapsed Solid South, alternatively believed in a Democratic agenda supporting working people but were uncomfortable with parts of their party's social agenda.21 They supported the traditional New Deal agenda, diverging only on culture war issues like same-sex marriage, traditional family structures, abortion, or climate change. These “moderates” usually lived among Republicans in rural areas from the collapsed Solid South and shared Red lifestyles and tastes.
The people labeled Republican moderates and Democratic Blue Dogs are essentially people in the correct party based on the New Deal debate who disagree with their party on the ancillary issues of the culture war. The people labeled neoliberal “moderates” are the reverse, people philosophically at odds with some of their party's beliefs based in the New Deal debate, yet who accept all of its positions on the culture war. As the core Fifth Party System debate fades, leaving these secondary movements to drive votes, people have been leaking into the “wrong” party. Populists and people open to populism are leaking into the Republican Party based on the issues of the awakening religious revival. Liberty conservatives and people open to liberty politics are leaking into the Democratic Party due to the moral politics of the New Left. New Deal liberals with Red State tastes are leaking into the Republican party based on cultural identity. Fusion conservatives with Blue State tastes are leaking into the Democratic Party for the same reason. As the parties chase “base” voters in a tactical effort to win a few more short-term campaigns, they're reinforcing this pushing and pulling of voters out of the party in which they philosophically belong. Most alarming, many, including those within party leadership, appear to believe these wrongly sorted voters are in fact more “pure” members of the party's “base” than the correctly sorted ones they carelessly dismiss as “moderate” sell-outs.
This drift is further amplified by generational misunderstandings. Many people have come to presume younger voters—the millennial generation and now also post-millennials—are rising New Deal liberals who will increasingly empower the traditional Democratic Party agenda through the “coalition of the ascendant.”22 It's true that younger Americans strongly stake out what most Americans not so long ago considered radically “liberal” positions on many contentious social issues, such as same-sex marriage, marijuana legalization, and politics that foster social inclusion.23 They support a more active government and tipped the issue of same-sex marriage from unthinkable to the law simply by coming of age. Younger Americans also report a significantly more favorable impression of the Democratic Party than the Republican Party—a party brand they disproportionately seem to viscerally dislike. Yet younger voters also disproportionately lack faith in most institutions, including government, and hold business in surprisingly high regard as a potential problem-solver.24 Millennial culture seems to revere start-up companies, entrepreneurship, and disruptive innovation. It's not obvious that, just because younger voters disproportionately dislike Republicans and support the liberal view on the most-visible social policy questions, they necessarily also support New Deal liberalism as a governing ideology. Just like any generational cohort, what younger voters share isn't a common political philosophy but a shared life experience.25
American politics today is still mostly defined by the perspective of the baby boom generation. The baby boomers have dominated American culture since they came of age in the 1960s, and they continue to control the heights of many institutions today, including America's parties. Generation X, on the other hand, as a small generational cohort, had no choice but to adapt themselves to a boomer-dominated world when they came of age. It's therefore sometimes easy to forget that the baby boomer worldview, which has influenced the way we frame American politics so strongly for decades, isn't the universal American experience. Boomers presume the normal state of America is a nation with strong institutions, broad-based prosperity, and the cultural norms of post-Second-World-War America. Younger voters grew up in a different America, one less dominant with weaker institutions and more political disorder. Boomers remember America before the civil rights movement, but younger Americans only know an America in which bigotry is ugly and reviled. Baby boomers hear war and think Vietnam, but to younger Americans war means Iraq and Afghanistan. Younger Americans don't remember pensions and lifetime jobs; their Dad's job got outsourced to Asia. Younger Americans don't remember trusting Walter Cronkite; their news anchors were models who cared about pop stars and “news you can use.” Because they grew up in different times, baby boomers and younger Americans live with a completely different mental picture of the “normal” state of America.
Younger voters holding the exact same principles as their elders often reach radically different conclusions about policy because they apply their principles assuming different facts about the world. What to older Americans looks like radical “liberalism” is often to younger voters simply observing basic facts about life in the more tolerant and multicultural America they've always known. At the same time, younger Americans are also less trusting of national institutions because authority in their lives has appeared less competent and less trustworthy. Younger voters are less interested in ripping down institutions than building stronger competent ones that actually work and that function with integrity. While they might be open to a stronger and more competent government, that doesn't mean they trust government implicitly to solve problems. In their lives it's been pioneers behind companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Apple who actually changed the world and made things better, not politicians or agencies and departments beholden to powerful market incumbents. It was a private risk-taking entrepreneur, Elon Musk, who demonstrated the possibility of a real-life network of electric vehicles while also restoring humanity's push into space—feats we might think government ought to have pursued, but didn't.
America's parties too often mistake ideological allies from this generation for opponents because they reach different policy conclusions than older voters might. Just because younger voters disagree on some policy questions doesn't mean they disagree on philosophical principles. Sometimes it just means they're applying common principles to what they see as a different version of the facts. Republicans are repelling philosophical conservatives from this rising generation, while Democrats are welcoming supporters who don't actually believe in New Deal liberalism. Millennials are projected to soon become the largest generational cohort in America.26 Without realizing it, both parties are further pushing voters out of the coalition in which they naturally belong and further destabilizing the party system.
All these various ideas and ways of thinking that have seized control of our politics in recent years are cooperating to push us away from a political revitalization and toward a difficult decline. They're encouraging angry zero-sum political thinking. They're causing us to fear opponents and catastrophize what ought to be normal disagreements. They're discouraging leaders from exploration and innovation. They're causing us to obsess over deeply personal and emotional issues we can never conclusively resolve, and to ignore all the festering problems that we can and must. They're pushing Americans out of the proper coalitions in which they officially belong, thereby destabilizing the existing party system. Together, they're encouraging us to do everything we can to rip the guardrails of our existing party system down, yet without providing new frameworks necessary to solve our problems in the future. What's frustrating is everything America's parties are doing is tactically smart to win immediate electoral advantages. Yet it's also a long-term strategic disaster almost perfectly designed to push an already-crumbling and irrelevant system toward a catastrophic collapse.
Our parties are drifting. The ideological binds that hold our political coalitions together are weakening. America is waiting for someone, some group, or some movement to come along offering a fresh ideology sufficient to produce a compelling agenda for the future, thereby launching America's next great national debate. Yet instead of developing a new agenda of ideas and new ideological commitments that might reunite people around a new great debate, our parties are seeking instead to win votes through short-term mobilizations that are pushing people out of their proper alignment. They're behaving as if our present disruptions are mere opportunities to seize the advantage for one side or the other in this decaying debate. They're eagerly encouraging the anger, distrust, and radicalization in the system, not as motivations to devise new solutions but as opportunities to drive empty turnout. In the chase for short-term votes, they're destabilizing the old system that sustains them without providing something new that might launch a new system for the future.
We know how this all ends. Instead of shoring up and bolstering the crumbling walls of their party coalitions, our parties are blindly chipping away at their foundations. At a time of deep instability, America's parties refuse to innovate. Instead of renewing themselves for the future, they remain trapped by their past. They ignore the new issues obsessing Americans, choosing instead to tactically maneuver under the old rules to win elections. Oblivious or indifferent to the long-term strategic consequences, they encourage the strong social forces already pushing their parties toward collapse. They're acting like parties too often act near the end of party systems, treating politics as an empty game for capturing offices instead of as a mechanism for debating the problems America wants and needs to have solved. The present situation in America looks a lot like the politics of the 1840s and 1850s, right before the traumatic Whig collapse. Which brings us to the destabilizing administration of Donald J. Trump.
THE AGE OF DONALD TRUMP
Donald Trump's campaign in 2016 was, in many ways, the mirror image of Barack Obama's 2008 campaign. Obama had been hopeful. He spoke of uniting Red and Blue America. He drew a picture of a positive future for America. Trump in 2016 drew a picture far more grim. He attacked his enemies harshly as the cause of all America's problems. He drew a negative picture of America as a failing nation in need of “Making America Great Again.” Where Obama was calm and measured, Trump was brash and unpredictable. Where Obama embraced America's institutions and navigated its traditional channels of power, Trump attacked them. Where Obama worked within the existing party structures and orthodoxies, Trump worked outside them and assaulted them. Trump, a man with no real political record, defeated a field that included many of the best-known and most accomplished politicians in America, people with lifetimes of high-level political service between them. He dismissed them all as losers and failures and promised to fix their mistakes as only he knew how.
Trump was no rote Republican politician railing against big government as Republicans had done since 1932. He had little interest in the old New Deal debate at all. He promised a total revolution. He would throw out every political blueprint, all the dogma and orthodoxy that had supported generations of Republicans and Democrats, and he would experiment with radical new approaches based solely on his instinct. He would break all the old rules down, throw out all the expectations, and directly upturn issues no other politicians even wanted to touch—immigration, global trade, the rise of China, America's foreign commitments, and more. Trump promised to throw out the New Deal Party system and start anew. His supporters loved him for it, and he won an election that no one thought he could, not based on his charisma or background but despite of them.
Trump's campaign was, on its surface, completely unlike Obama's. Yet, in the ways that mattered most, both campaigns tapped into the same political energy. Both recognized that Americans were unhappy with the status quo. Both saw new issues and movements the rest of the political class had neglected and understood they could harness them politically. Both saw a hunger in America for something different from the traditional Republican-against-Democrat debates, and both offered people the hope that something major would change, without ever specifically explaining what or how. Without even recognizing it, both implicitly promised to toss away the New Deal Party System and lead a realignment. Yet neither had a plan as to what that realignment would be, nor was either truly prepared to bring it about.
After his election, some thought Trump could be another Andrew Jackson. He would lead a populist revolt from the executive branch, throwing out the elites and governing with strength for the benefit of the ordinary people who adored him. His campaign and his rhetoric drew on a seemingly new coalition, one capable of designing a new Republican ideology supporting a drastically changed Republican Party. Trump even put a portrait of Jackson up in the Oval Office at the suggestion of his then advisor Steve Bannon, who hoped Trump's presidency might be the spearhead of a top-down revolution remaking American government and its role within the world.27 If Trump were a different sort of man, that might even have been a possible outcome of his presidency. He attracted a potentially disruptive electoral coalition emphasizing different issues and speaking in a new voice. Franklin Roosevelt, moreover, who wasn't himself an intellectual or a wonk, didn't know what his New Deal would be upon his election either, and yet in office he led a comprehensive revolution of government that reshaped his party and his nation. Had Trump been a man obsessed with the substance of governing, or had he been an ideologue committed to a vision for America, or had he simply been a man seeking the immortality that comes from leaving behind a legacy of national change, he might have empowered others in his administration to lead the top-down revolution some in his orbit hoped he would lead. That isn't, however, who he is.
Trump, it turned out, had no interest in the yeoman's work of party reform or political renewal. While campaigning, Trump promised his supporters to address neglected issues they cared about. In office, he has so far mainly managed urgent issues while seeking to maintain his popularity and power. Instead of harnessing the discontent to push through new policies, he has leveraged that anger for tactical political advantage. As new ideas and movements bubbled up, he has stoked their fury without offering concrete change. Instead of reforming the system in a fundamental way, he has surfed the rising discontent to maintain influence, power, and popularity with his supporters. Instead of designing innovative policies, he has emphasized divisive symbolic issues tapping into people's deepest passions, but without actually improving things. He has alarmingly disregarded fundamental political norms that have governed America for generations, which has in turn prompted his opponents to violate even more norms in opposing him. While disruptive in tone and style, he left his party's entire Fifth Party System ideology completely intact. What's more, he has intensified the polarization, the Red-Blue identity politics, the moral crusading, and the politics of culture war. He has further pushed Republican moderates and younger Americans toward the Democratic Party, while pulling populist Democrats toward the Republicans. He has embraced every trend destabilizing America's parties and then lit a match.
The conditions disrupting American politics are obviously much bigger than Trump. These forces have been at work for many years. Many of America's leaders have done their part to contribute to them. Trump's election was simply the most recent result of these long-running trends, not their cause. Nor is Trump the only figure exacerbating the situation. Leaders across politics have long encouraged these trends in the short-sighted short-term desire for tactical victories. This has been a joint effort across both parties for years. Nor has anyone else emerged to innovate and renew our parties as they have slowly broken down. In fact, we have all contributed to the decline. Short-term tactical political decisions only work because we collectively reward them. We the people create and reward the activists, the new movements, and the public climate that has led to the politics of this moment. This is not just on one leader, or even the entire political leadership class. It's on us all. Trump, those rallying around him, his opponents, and their supporters—none of them are seeking to innovate or build anything new. In our blinded short-term focus on the battles of the moment, we're all working together to burn everything down.
The present moment doesn't seem headed toward a national renewal like the Populist and Progressive Era. Neither does it look like the heady days of the New Deal. At the moment, it looks a lot like the last days of the Whigs. New issues are unsettling politics. New movements are forming and moving into the public arena. Politics is getting hotter, people are getting angrier, and old norms are falling away. An awakening is coursing through the nation's veins, charging activists with moral certainty and the will to destroy their enemies in the name of justice and morality. The president is encouraging disruption within America's old party coalitions that's pulling people out of the existing party alignment without actually providing a new ideology or agenda that could support a new one. At every level of politics, from the grass roots, through the political class, up to the highest office, everyone is recklessly working together to pull the old system down—and no one with sufficient influence is yet working on innovating or building something new that's capable of sustaining a new party system to replace it.
Americans are eagerly marching toward political disintegration like the Whigs. Party system collapses are, of course, completely unnecessary tragedies. We can, if we had the foresight and the will, reform our parties before our party system implodes. As of now, however, it appears there's little appetite for such transformation. Everyone is throwing gas into the flames and frolicking in the heat. When the collapse comes, what happens next won't be easy. With the old parties shattered, disorder will rush in. A new era of national turmoil will begin, and it may last years. Extreme movements and ambitious provocateurs with radical ideas are likely to rise. Political battles may get messy, constitutional crises could arise, and violence might even break out once more. It's impossible to know for sure what will follow, which is exactly the point. Anything could happen. Party collapses open the doors to whatever forces—good or malevolent—choose to push through. Whatever happens, things will surely get worse before they get better. Worse can last a long time. Our near-term future looks to be many hard years of instability and turmoil unless we quickly change our course. We have a choice. This is what we're choosing.