Are We Due for a Realignment?

So, this has been a pretty crazy election. Right? No real argument there. So crazy, in fact, that Nate Silver just tweeted an interesting little observation. There have been six major "realignment" events in American political history, during which the dynamics of partisan politics have been reforged and new coalitions have emerged to define electoral conflicts for a generation or two: 1792, 1828, 1854, 1896, 1932, and 1968. The average interval between realignments has been about 35 years; indeed, three of the five intervals have been precisely 36 years. The last one was 48 years ago. That is indeed the longest reign that a single "party system" has ever had. Sure makes it seem like we're due for one, and sure enough, politics has gone crazy. Maybe we're in the midst of a realignment!



Except... what's to realign? And, is it really true that we have the same alignment now as we did in, say, 1975? I don't think so. These realignments, you see, they're pretty subjective. Especially the last three, which haven't involved an actual change in the identities of the two major parties. And, as I believe Nate Silver himself would argue, identifying these realignments with individual years or elections is a fallacy: they're the product of more gradual shifts which, perhaps, become explicit at specific times. Let's look at each of them in turn.

1792
This is not so much a "realignment," since it was the first one. It created the First Party System, featuring Alexander Hamilton's Federalists against Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans. And it does make sense to locate its formation in 1792, perhaps more than any other realignment can be identified with a single year. That being said, this divide tracked the Federalist/Anti-Federalist divide from the ratification debates just a few years earlier. So it was really more like a five-year period during which these initial parties were formed.

1828
This was Andrew Jackson's ascent to power, and the beginning of Second Party System, which pitted Jackson's Democrats against the Whigs--a party initially defined by their opposition to said Mr. Jackson. Except, placing the market here covers up several decades' worth of partisan shifts that took place as the First Party System died and the new one was forged from its ashes. After Jefferson's world-historic victory in the Election of 1800, and especially after Hamilton's untimely death in 1804, the Federalists basically shriveled up and died. This process was basically complete after 1816, when their opposition to the ongoing War of 1812 started looking real bad once that war was concluded on basically positive terms. (Well, they were perceived positively at least.) James Monroe's election in 1816 brought about the so-called "era of good feelings," when everyone was officially affiliated with the Jeffersonian party. One-party rule being unnatural in a democracy, however, that didn't last long, and as soon as Monroe himself left the stage you saw the outlines of the Second Party System emerging in 1824, with Jackson opposing John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay (plus William Crawford, whom no one really ever seemed to care about). And Jackson won the election! At least, he won the most votes, the most states, and the most Electoral Votes. But it wasn't a majority, so it went to the House, which chose Adams as President, seemingly as part of an alliance with Clay. Four years later Jackson was back for revenge, and that's why 1828 is identified as the moment of realignment, but it had been in the works for a long time.

1854
This one is also more or less fair. The thing is that the Second Party System was never very stable. You had the Whigs and the Democrats, but neither party was especially well-defined. Both had distinct Northern and Southern factions, once Jackson's defining presence left the stage it all got blurry. All along you had things like the Liberty Party or the Free Soil Party carrying the torch of abolitionism, and while the Democrats were clearly the party of slavery, the Whigs were never an anti-slavery party. Eventually they collapsed, and after a brief flirtation with the "American" Party, a.k.a. the Know-Nothings, you got a bunch of former Whigs and Free Soilers and Know-Nothings coming together to form the Republican Party. Interestingly, 1854 is not a Presidential election year, but rather is the year of the Republican Party's founding; by 1856 they were the Democrats' main opposition in for President and obviously by 1860 they elected their first President. I think it's basically correct to say that from 1828 through 1852 we had a single "party system," it was just a really messy one.

1896
Now this is interesting. If you just look at a map, the period from 1856 through 1888, things look pretty stable. The Republicans are the dominant party, and they consistently win the North while the Democrats dominate the South like nothing we'd ever seen before. That leads to mostly Republican victories, and indeed no Democrat wins a majority of the popular vote during this period (or for a long time thereafter, in fact), but Grover Cleveland sneaks his home state New York and a couple of its neighbors and manages to win the White House for the Democrats in 1884. Oh, and the South briefly went missing in 1864, funny how that happened. Indeed, I think the coalitions of the two parties were fairly consistent throughout this time; people with more detailed historical knowledge than I could say some things about the ethnic/religious make-up of those coalitions.

But beneath the surface the Republican Party did change quite significantly: right after the Civil War it was a pretty Radical party, dedicated to Reconstruction and enforcing civil rights. But in 1876, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes made a deal whereby the votes of three contested Southern states would go to him and in return he would back off of Reconstruction. The Republicans increasingly became a much more conservative bunch, shedding their Radical tendencies and focusing more on their pro-business outlook. Oh, and imperialism. That gave us two basically conservative parties, and naturally this led to the emergence of the Populists in 1892, a left-wing (on economics at least, if not civil rights) protest movement that managed to snag some electoral votes. Then in 1896 the Republicans, led by William McKinley, rejected the Populists and the Democrats absorbed them by nominating their champion, William Jennings Bryan; arguably this set the stage for the next century, and then some, of partisan political history. Certainly it spelled the end of the Third Party System. This is the last clear line of demarcation, and I will therefore take up the next two realignments together.

1932 & 1968: or, the Twentieth Century
Because you see, while the 19th century really did break pretty neatly into three distinct party systems, with a brief anomaly during the Monroe Administration, the 20th century was really just one long, gradual process of adjustment and rearrangement. And I don't think it's so easy to draw clear lines through different points of that process. Here's the basic story. After McKinley beat Bryan twice, the populists were replaced by the Progressive movement, a more urbane, refined version of liberal politics. And the Progressives did take over both parties, at least in part. This created something not unlike the Second Party System, wherein both parties had serious internal divides.

Indeed, for the Democrats, these divides were basically geographic, just as they had been half a century earlier. Southern Democrats remained, largely, the conservative heirs to John C. Calhoun, though perhaps with some willingness to entertain liberal economic policies if they didn't come at the cost of white supremacy. That latter model would be exemplified by Woodrow Wilson, one of the two great Progressive Presidents. But Wilson also, for some reason, made strides toward swaying black voters away from the Republicans, whom they had loyally followed ever since, y'know, the Republicans fought a war to win their freedom. And between Wilson and Al Smith in 1928, the Democrats increasingly grew a northern, urban, liberal wing of their own. The Republicans, meanwhile, had no real southern wing, not at the time anyway; their divisions were purely ideological. You had on the one hand the Teddy Roosevelt-style Progressives, really the heirs to the party of Lincoln, and on the other hand the more pro-business, McKinley-style conservatives like Calvin Coolidge.

I don't even know that it's right to call 1932 a realigning event. The reshaping of coalitions had already largely come to fruition in 1928; it's just that Al Smith lost, while FDR won, and won big, and won repeatedly. But it was the same basic coalition: the Democrats' traditional base of Southern whites plus an increasing presence in the liberal northern cities and increasing success with African-American voters. That added up to like 60% of the country, and though Roosevelt could keep this mighty political empire together while he lived, once he departed the scene his party had a choice. It could revert to its southern roots or it could embrace its newfound northern liberalism. Perhaps even as late as 1948 there would have been time for things to revert to their old, Third Party System state, with northern liberal Republicans and conservative southern Democrats. But two key moments sent us toward the opposite world: Harry Truman's embrace of human rights over states' rights in 1948, and Lyndon Johnson's support of civil rights in 1964-65. After that, there would no longer be a place for the Dixiecrats in the Democratic Party.

That's 1968. Really, though, it happened in 1964, the first time that the relative electoral landscape between the two parties looked at all like it does today. (Well, it looked exactly like it does today for a long time, just inverted; '64 was the first time it looked like this with this alignment.) But from 1964 to 1968 and 1972 and 1980, you saw the emergence of a Republican Party that, for the first time, was able to supplement its northern, pro-business base with Southern whites. The racists had been turned loose by the Democrats, and it was probably inevitable that their opponents would decide to seize the opportunity. Indeed, first Goldwater and then Nixon and then Reagan did just that. And it turned out that that, too, was a pretty dominant coalition, at least for a while. Basically what the mid-20th century proved was that if you could unite Southern whites with a significant northern faction, you would win, a lot. The only Republican losses in this period came in 1976, when moderate southerner Jimmy Carter opposed the still-saddled-with-Nixon's-baggage Gerald Ford, and in the 1990s, at the hands of moderate Southerner Bill Clinton. Increasingly conservative Southern Democrats turned into conservative Southern Republicans; 1994 was the culmination of this process.

But a funny thing happened along the way: the Republicans were now facing the same choice Truman had faced back in '48, and they were making the opposite decision. And that had consequences. Their northern liberal wing was becoming increasingly alienated. Bill Clinton's map was more dependent on the North than any Democrat's in history. Al Gore won only northern states, despite being from Tennessee. And then came 2006, the converse of 1994, when the northern Republicans got obliterated in Congress and replaced by liberal Democrats. In the wake of 2006 we've got what appear to be two consistent, coherent parties, very much along the same lines as those of the Third Party System, just in reverse. (The Democrats have also, by adding the growing Hispanic minority to their coalition, become strong in the Southwest.) And that's where we stand.

Here, then, is a more comprehensive list of realigning moments:

1792: birth of Federalist and Democratic-Republican Parties; birth of First Party System
1816: death of Federalist Party; birth of Era of Good Feelings
1824-28: collapse of Era of Good Feelings; hardening of Jacksonian Democrat/anti-Jacksonian Whig lines; birth of Second Party System
1844: emergence of anti-slavery parties within Second Party System
1852-54: death of the Whigs; birth of Republican Party; birth of Third Party System
1876: Republicans abandon Reconstruction
1892-96: emergence of Populist movement; birth of Progressive Era/Fourth Party System; first sign of Democratic Party's shift toward liberalism
1920: retrenchment toward conservatism begins
1928-32: emergence of New Deal coalition; birth of Fifth Party System
1948: Democrats reject Southern conservatism for first time
1964-68: Democrats reject Southern conservatism permanently; Republicans embrace Southern conservatism; birth of Sixth Party System
1994: death of Southern Democrats
2006: death of northern liberals Republicans; consolidation, maybe, of Sixth Party System?

And the thing is that each of the big realignments Nate Silver identified grew quite predictably, or almost inevitably, out of what had come before them. The First Party System grew out of the ratification debates. The Second Party System grew to fill the void left by the Federalists. The Third Party System grew to fill the void left by the Whigs, and to finally give anti-slavery politics a mainstream voice. The Fourth Party System reacted to the Republican's abandonment of Reconstruction and the lack of meaningful ideological disparity between the two parties. The Fifth Party System grew out of the conservative retrenchment of the 1920s. The Sixth Party System grew out of the Democrats' abandonment of their conservative roots, and therefore the lack of an existing party catering to the needs of racist Southerners. And we've spent a long time consolidating the Sixth Party System.

What's wrong, though, with the current state of affairs? We have two parties with clearly-defined ideological differences and that between them serve the entire political spectrum. There's never been a realignment under those conditions. What's always happened first is that something has upset the apple-cart and created an opening for something new to enter the arena. And we might be primed for one of those: not the kind of thing that future historians will recognize as a realignment, but the kind of thing that sets one of those up a decade or so down the road. What might that be?

If you had to guess, you'd surely have to say the break-down of the Republican Party, right? This year we're being treated to the spectacle of the most serious conflict to date between the Republican Party's patrician leadership and the actual voters who make up its coalition. But this is also coming at a time when that coalition is looking ever less viable, as white Christians come to make up a smaller and smaller portion of the electorate. Before long it just won't be possible to have an entire party catering to their needs, but as we're seeing with Trump, the current composition of the party is a serious obstacle to its becoming the kind of party that can broaden its appeal. So... who knows. I'd be shocked if, y'know, the Republican National Committee and what-have-you are disbanded any time within the next couple of decades, but it's long seemed like the Republican Party of 2040 is going to have to look very different from that of 2000. Right now it looks like the old party may kind of die before it can be reborn, and we might just be in the middle of its death throes.

Who can tell what the new one will look like?