The Two Americas: Our Current Political Deadlock and How to Break It

Preface

Sometime after one in the morning of America’s extended Election Day, about ten top campaign aids to John Kerry were huddled in a very small room, just off the war room of John Kerry’s Washington headquarters. Some sat at the table that nearly filled the room and others stood against the walls, but all listened intently to the speaker phone where the top operatives from Ohio reported on the vote count. The issue was the current margin for Bush, the yet unreported votes from Franklin, Hamilton, and Cuyahoga counties, and the number of provisional ballots. Some in Ohio thought the margin could get down to as low as 30,000, but that estimate kept rising as the official vote count became more complete. The Bush lead was stuck at around 130,000. The big issue was the provisional ballots, real votes cast for Kerry or Bush but held up because of some problem with the list or a challenge at the polls. In recent elections in Ohio, four out of five were eventually considered valid and counted. Under the new federal election law, these would be counted over the next 10 days. But in this early hour, we could not get the exact number, as the count and the ballots were kept in each county courthouse. Some in the Ohio headquarters thought there were 250,000 or more ballots outstanding, mostly from heavily Democratic Cuyohoga county. Campaign workers were feverishly canvassing the counties. After some delay, the state director got back on the phone and reported, deadpan, only 150,000 ballots and just 25,000 from Cuyohoga. Somebody asked him to repeat the numbers, but everyone knew the meaning, as the mood became very dark. Nobody discussed the numbers. Somebody said he would call the Senator in Boston.

Had 60,000 Bush voters in Ohio come to a different conclusion and switched to support Kerry, he would be the president. Four years earlier, 300 Florida voters had that kind of power in their hands. Then, I witnessed Al Gore, his family and campaign team in a small room deep inside Nashville’s War Memorial take in the reality of Bush’s sinking Florida lead, triggering the vice president’s call to Bush to recant the concession. Still vivid for me is Bill Daley, his campaign chairman, now alone at the podium speaking to those gathered in the plaza and to the world, our campaign continues.

With these two historic elections behind us, there is no escaping the reality of our divided country. We are trapped in an ugly parity that drives both parties, each tantalizingly close to tasting the fruits of victory, to more intense battles that leave the country more divided and its citizens forced to choose between contending cultures and, increasingly, between Two Americas.

I am frustrated with the politics of parity, first of all, because I believe the Democrats, including myself, could have done more with their moment to win the public’s confidence, with important consequences for the country.

I am also frustrated with the diminished politics that parity fosters. The Republicans hold on to office with an uncertain mandate at home and limited public support, use their power ruthlessly to entrench their incumbency, and use cultural issues equally ruthlessly to scare voters and deepen the divisions. The Democrats, short just a handful of seats or Electoral College votes, encouraged by modernizing trends, maneuver and seize tactical opportunities rather than challenge the Two Americas.

My frustration with the current divide, however, is more personal. Some years ago, I decided that cultural politics is not very good for the Democrats or the nation. I never quite understood why I pulled back and became a conscientious objector to the culture war. I grew up fully a child of the age, indeed, a poster child for the postmodernists. I started as just a little speck in America’s new diversity, moving at age five to Washington, D.C., not to a power neighborhood, but to an inner-city black one. Three years later my family moved into a Jewish neighborhood bursting to be middle class, until we bought a house in the suburbs when I was in high school. My first immersion in politics was the civil rights movement and the March on Washington. I was an exuberant Young Democrat for Hubert Humphrey; I joined the antiwar movement and picketed the White House, and I volunteered early and labored hard for George McGovern. As a professor, my first book was about the politics of inner-city poor neighborhoods, and the second was about racial and ethnic conflict, mainly in the Deep South and South Africa, with excursions to Israel and Northern Ireland, wherever the trail of culture politics was still hot.

My head, however, was taking a different road. While I worked to break down the ethnic and racial barriers in society, my research took me face-to-face with real people struggling to advance their interests or just survive, some bigoted, some not, but through their actions raising the barriers higher. The white steelworkers in Alabama and the white mine workers in South Africa, whatever their awful role in excluding blacks, were not without social democratic impulses.

My research in 1985 on the defecting working-class Democrats of Macomb County, Michigan, was a turning point. While stunned by the scale of the anger and racial antipathy of the Reagan Democrats, I tried to convince my party that these were real people, workers with families, living in neighborhoods and going to church, skeptical of big business and supportive of broad social insurance programs, who had to be part of the Democratic narrative. At the time, others were becoming alert to the dangers of the emerging cultural divide and the possibilities if Democrats could somehow transcend them—political leaders like Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas; social commentators like Mary and Thomas Edsall, who wrote Chain Reaction; and E. J. Dionne, who wrote Why Americans Hate Politics. But all of us were either swept up or pushed rudely aside by the accelerating and polarized cultural politics of the 1980s and 1990s that gave us the 2000 and 2004 elections, which is itself just a symptom of a greater impasse.

I decided to write this book to figure out the new rules, the new configuration of voters, and new opportunities, so that none of us have to settle for its ugly choices. I do not believe the Two Americas is a very healthy place, even though plenty of people like myself, Democratic and Republican, will figure out how to win power in our divided world.

The Republicans learned their lessons well, but they are now invested in continuing and deepening the cultural divide. I joined the Kerry campaign in its last two months in hopes of helping tip the balance in the election, but with little hope for a new politics. This book is intended to empower the people who still hope for One America.

*   *   *

I got the opportunity to tackle this challenge only because much earlier some uniquely talented leaders, first Senator Chris Dodd and then Senator Joe Lieberman, put their faith in me before I deserved it.

President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, and Senator John Kerry are special leaders and a big part of this book’s story. They served this country proudly, and I never forget that I am on this stage, playing whatever role, because of them.

While I have concentrated my attention for this work on America, my perspective on social democratic possibilities and leadership has been shaped by my work for President Nelson Mandela, Prime Minister Tony Blair, Chancellor Gerhard Schröeder, Prime Minister Ehud Barak, President Thabo Mbeki, and President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. They have more than a passing interest in what transpires in America.

This book would not have been possible without the generosity, progressive idealism, and pragmatism of Steve Bing, who, together with other stalwarts, took a chance on Democracy Corps and stuck with it. Most of all, he accepted the core idea that quality research, widely disseminated and discussed, creates the basis for effective action.

James Carville and Bob Shrum are my colleagues in Democracy Corps and so much else, both in America and abroad. James may sound like an in-the-trenches partisan on TV, but there are few like him who can see the big picture. If not for Bob Shrum, I would not have had the chance to work for Al Gore in 2000 or be witness to such eloquent political speech. In fact, while underscoring what made this work possible, I would never have had the chance to work with Bill Clinton from the beginning if not for Frank Greer.

My entry to the 2004 election came through Wes Boyd, then Eli Pariser, and the whole MoveOn.org phenomenon that trusted me to help their millions of members join this process in a powerful way. Bill Zimmerman and Pacy Markman produced remarkable media. I was privileged that Harold Ickes of the Media Fund and Steve Rosenthal and Ellen Malcolm of America Coming Together allowed me to serve as chief strategist for their historic efforts. Mary Beth Cahill and Gerry Salemme opened up the Kerry campaign for last hand on deck to make a difference at the end.

My partners at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research are both voluntary and involuntary collaborators in this book. Al Quinlan, always sensitive to the nuances, knows how to win, and with Jeremy Rosner and Anna Greenberg have shaped my thinking, advanced their own innovative research and writing, and created a company where such work is normal. They unleashed a whole staff that made this book their own life’s work. From the management team, Edie Nardecchia made sure we had the resources to manage and analyze the massive amount of data; Joe Goode, our chief operating officer, made sure the rest of the company did not collapse.

Philip Gould has reinvented social democracy in Europe and is my collaborator in Britain; Tal Silberstein and Gadi Katz are like collaborators at GCS and in so many countries in the world. They have all indulged the Americans who, once again, are obsessed with ourselves. They fully understand that the process of global change starts here.

Mistique Cano worked on the manuscript with the intensity of a coauthor and led the support team at GQR that created and managed the research and databases at the core of this book. Mistique brought great talent, a creative spirit, and personal commitment to producing a book that I hope allows her to feel more than proud of the product. Pitching in to get the job done were analysts and programmers like Missy Egelsky and Andrew Mercer, and a succession of talented interns, including Jeff Crouch, Rebecca Horwitz, and Rachel Weiser. Chris Doray at Floodlite produced graphics that, I believe, bring the data to life. Finally, Tim Jensen, the head of programming at GQR, took on this book as a second job. He did magical work and made it look easy.

Democracy Corps has taken on a life of its own, with Jim Gerstein as executive director, Karl Agne now as an established analyst and commentator, and Matt Hogan as the driving force that makes everybody else look good, including me.

This new edition was made possible by the work of Sam Weston, my project coordinator at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, Inc., and leader of the new team that oversaw the analysis of the 2004 election and the final chapter. He brings a nuanced understanding of our elections and deep professionalism to this work, despite his roots in New Zealand. He was aided by Matt Hogan and John Brach.

A number of organizations sponsored research and freely made it available for this book, believing that we all benefit from a better public understanding of the Two Americas. Behind those organizations are committed people: Bill and David Harris (Children’s Research and Education Institute), Bob Borosage and Roger Hickey (Campaign for America’s Future), David Hawkins (Natural Resources Defense Council), Bobby Muller (Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation), and Arch Gillies, who began supporting my work when he was head of World Policy Institute. Many of these people offered inventive policy ideas for the book, as did Janice Gruendel, Scott Lilly, Will Marshall, and Bob Boorstin.

Obviously, I take responsibility for what I have written here, but there are some colleagues and friends who went to great lengths to keep me from making egregious errors and who pushed me to get the story right. Apparently, the promise of a happy ending for the book kept them coming back for yet more chapters.

Douglas Sosnik, Samuel Popkin, and David Mayhew provided such rich commentary and shrewd guidance on the whole manuscript that the book would have been greatly diminished without their handiwork. I only hope I paid sufficient attention. David Axelrod, Nick Butler, Robert Dahl, Rahm Emanuel, Philip Gould, Anna Greenberg, John Podesta, Theda Skocpol, and Ruy Teixeira critiqued major portions of the book.

I want to thank my publisher, Thomas Dunne of St. Martin’s Press, who left the Greenberg book proposal sitting for a couple of weeks on the corner of his desk before suddenly saying one day, I want to do this. Sean Desmond, my editor, made it real, saving me from myself and getting the book focused, but also giving me the space to say what was important. I am no Hillary Clinton, but that in no way deterred Bob Barnett from working doggedly to get this in the right publisher’s hands.

Freda Amar is fully in charge of my professional life, and through a very intense year, has operated with grace and kept everyone to a very high standard. She made this a better book and me a better person. My project coordinators, Annemarie Spadafore, and for the critical crunch at the end, Sam Weston, had the difficult job of making sure all our clients, as well as St. Martin’s Press, were well served.

*   *   *

I have been able to carry on my work because our family takes so much pride in what each of us gets to do on his or her own and what we all get to do together. We cannot wait to share news with each other. I am proud of what our children, Anna, Jonathan, Kathryn, and her husband, Ari, are doing, each in his or her own world, and I never doubted their pride in this book, done at last. We all prayed or just willed, successfully, as it turned out, that Kathryn and the new baby, Rigby, would make it to the New Year and to many, many more.

Rosa DeLauro is my wife, stepmother to our kids, and my congresswoman. Rosa and I share everything—our family, our ambitions and hopes. Neither of us would embark on anything important in our lives, whether in the Congress or on a book like this one, without sharing it every step of the way. Even as she battled to get drug prices down or get low-income families tax relief, she made the time to share her views and made the space I needed to complete this book. The Two Americas was completed within days of our twenty-fifth anniversary, and I joyfully dedicate it to her.

PART I

The Politics of Parity

America is divided.

We live during a moment in history when the two big political parties have fought to a draw, reflecting the intense partisanship of our times. The loyalties of American voters are now almost perfectly divided between the Democrats and Republicans, a historic political deadlock that inflames the passions of politicians and citizens alike. This is a deepening divide, giving us the Two Americas, with immense consequences for our politics. The leading politicians of both parties instinctively believe that they are as likely as the others to win. The fact is, the parties are so evenly matched that the slightest shift in the political winds could blow the balance. A handful of new votes, maybe in just a single state, could bring wholesale change in which one political crowd has control of the government of the United States of America.

That the Supreme Court—itself divided 5 to 4—was forced to end the counting of votes and decide the 2000 presidential election underscores the poignancy of this new American reality. The fact is, 50,992,897 Americans voted for Al Gore and 50,458,002 of them voted for George W. Bush. On that day in November, 48.4 percent of the nation aligned with one party and 47.9 percent aligned with the other.

This produced the vivid maps of America, divided between the red Republican states and the blue Democratic ones. Colored blue was the whole stretch of states up the Pacific coast and the ones on the Atlantic, from the Chesapeake Bay up through New England, around the Great Lakes and the upper Mississippi. And even more vivid was the vast, almost uninterrupted expanse of red America—the states running across the whole of the South and lower Mississippi, but also America’s immense plains and mountain West.

That red and blue map soon morphed into a constitutional exercise, when 271 electors did their duty in the electoral college and cast their ballots for George W. Bush, while 266 backed Al Gore. Had one small state changed from red to blue—indeed, had the county election supervisor of Palm Beach County, Florida, decided one fateful day not to use a butterfly ballot—America might have had a different president. But had a few thousand voters in Iowa, New Mexico, or Wisconsin made a different choice, blue would have become red in these states and again flipped the election’s outcome.

The virtual tie in Florida was a once-every-few-centuries proposition, the political staff of The Washington Post wrote, and so was a presidential election that hinged on a single deadlocked state. It was a longshot wrapped in a longer shot.¹ But for all the imagery of political operatives rushing to Florida, election officials holding ballots up to the light, and new heroines Theresa LePore and Katherine Harris on the national stage, 2000 is much more than an eccentric drama: 2000 is just the current moment in an era of political deadlock.

In the year and a half after the country was attacked on 9/11, I conducted 15 national polls and spoke with 15,045 voters. The surveys simply asked, Do you think of yourself as a Democrat, a Republican, or what? With the election debacle of 2000 seemingly well behind us, 46 percent of today’s voters still aligned themselves with the Democrats and 46 percent with the Republicans.² In the intervening period, terrorists mounted an attack on America, we responded with two wars and two regime changes, and the president and Republicans had a good congressional election, yet still the parties remained at parity in the public consciousness.³

In the most recent off-year elections, the Republicans took control of the U.S. Senate and enlarged their majority in the House of Representatives, seeming to deny this divided moment. With the Republicans taking control of all the national institutions—the Senate and House, along with the White House and Supreme Court—there was reason for a lot of hyperbole, and a number of commentators provided it. The day after the election, Washington Times columnist Diana West proclaimed it Mourning in America, crowing, They don’t color Democratic states blue for nothing. Pointing to the no gloating edict handed down by the White House, West wrote that there is no time to gloat, closing her column with the line, The Bush era, with its midterm mandate, is well under way.⁴ Democrats were suitably dejected and a few no doubt burned their copies of John Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s recently published book, The Emerging Democratic Majority.⁵

But such are the pathologies of this current era. After the 2000 election, the 100-member U.S. Senate was tied at 50–50 but was presided over by Vice President Dick Cheney, armed with the constitutional authority to break ties. However, the Senate came under Democratic control when one Republican turned independent, painfully dropping the Republicans to 49 seats. Nevertheless, the Republicans reclaimed the Senate in turn when the 2002 election gave them the princely majority of 51 seats.

In the House, the Republicans increased their majority from 50.8 percent of the seats in 2000 to 52.6 percent after the 2002 election—a meager 1.8-point gain. While intense efforts to protect incumbents make big changes much harder to achieve, a switch of only 12 seats out of 435 would shift partisan control. Such small gains and losses have big consequences in this moment of parity.

In 2000, as voters went to the polls to select their president and the Congress, they also elected state representatives and state senators. Here, too, the tally was even. In 2000, the voters elected 5,411 representatives to sit in the statehouses and gave the Democrats an edge, though barely. The main story was still partisan parity: slightly more than half of the legislators were Democrats (51.8 percent) and slightly less than half were Republicans (48.1 percent). In 2002, the Republicans gained the advantage, but by only a few seats. Despite the tilt to the Republicans, near perfect parity remained: 50.0 percent of the legislators were Republican and 49.6 percent were Democrats.⁶

After the state-by-state elections for governor in 2002, the Democrats took occupancy of the governors’ mansions in 24 states, while the Republicans held on to 26. The Democratic governors represented 54 percent of the population and the Republicans 46 percent.

The dead-even race for president in 2000 that took 36 days of recounting and litigation to bring to an end was produced by an America divided at every level.

The 2000 election is the culmination of a half century of American history in which no party has managed to dominate. Because of 2000, social critics and the political class, including people like myself, are compelled to root out the social trends and currents to gain some key to the future. But if one pulls back far enough, one sees larger contours to our current situation, an era that is very different from the earlier times in our nation’s history. The last fifty years is an era of no party dominance and has led us to our current parity and political turmoil.

What does it mean that no party has dominated the era?

In this half century, our presidential elections have been uniquely competitive. The Republicans have won eight of the elections and the Democrats five, but that Republican edge is readily discounted. General Eisenhower, leader of the Allied forces, courted by both political parties, produced the two Republican victories at the beginning of the era. By 1954, the country gave him a Democratic Congress to set the domestic course. And the last election of the era, 2000, produced a Republican president but without a plurality of the popular vote.⁷

In two of the elections, the major parties nominated candidates perceived as extremist at the time—Barry Goldwater in 1964 and George McGovern in 1972—which resulted in offsetting, landslide majorities.

More typical in this era of no party dominance, the public has repeatedly produced razor-thin majorities and nail-biting election nights. The elections of 1960, 1968, and 2000 were decided by less than a 1-point margin. While 1984 was Reagan’s high point, it was bracketed by two competitive elections. In 1980, Ronald Reagan took the lead only in the final weekend before the election, according to most public polls,⁸ and won with just 50.7 percent of the vote, with an independent taking 6.6 percent, mostly moderate voters.⁹ In 1988, Michael Dukakis led George H. W. Bush by as much as 17 points in the polls, before faltering in the fall. In five of the postwar elections, including our last three, the winning candidate was unable to muster a majority of the vote. Indeed, because the era is so competitive, third-party candidates significantly impacted the outcomes in 1968, 1980, 1992, 1996, and 2000.

During only one period in this half century did one party hold the White House through three consecutive elections: Reagan in 1980 and 1984 and Bush in 1988.

And since 1952, when Dwight Eisenhower was elected the first post–World War II president, not only has no party dominated our elections, no party has dominated the ideas of the era. We live in an era without a hegemonic party that sets the fashion and common sense, whose identity and sense of purpose are aligned with the emerging challenges before a constantly changing country. This is why America in this period of political parity faces an accumulation of challenges, disconnected from our very passionate politics.

That has left us not just with political parity but with the Two Americas—the country divided politically and, increasingly, culturally, with distinct and counterpoised views about government, values, the family, and the best way of life. These Two Americas encompass coalitions of voters, virtually equal in size, leaving neither view of the world easily dominant, exacerbating the conflict and elevating cultural passions.

As we shall see, that is not the way it was and, most important, not the way it has to be.

Chapter 1

TOWARD HEGEMONY

Our country has certainly produced other very tight, inconclusive, and disputed elections—including the election of 1800 when Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied the Electoral College, which threw the election into the House of Representatives; 1824 when a four-way race allowed John Quincy Adams to become president with only 31 percent of the popular vote and fewer electoral votes than Andrew Jackson; 1876 when the Republicans had to negotiate away Reconstruction and the rights of blacks to vote in order to settle the Electoral College impasse; and the post-Reconstruction elections (1880, 1884, 1888) when all were decided by less than 1 percentage point. In the same decade, the congressional parties became locked in parity, with the Republicans finishing the decade with a two-seat majority.

But the contested elections, no matter how dramatic, do not characterize our history the way the elections of 1960 and 2000 characterize our current untamed era. For most of our history before 1952, one of the major political parties was dominant electorally and hegemonic in the area of ideas and policy, elevating some issues central to their purpose and identity and suppressing, when possible, those they cannot handle effectively. The hegemonic parties became associated with a particular direction for the country, resolving some important dispute or issue, and defined the nation in a particular way—before giving way to another party and usually a new set of issues and social cleavages.

This argument about party dominance and hegemony is minimalist in terms of the heated debates in the political science literature, though not minimalist in terms of our understanding of the current era. This analysis of party dominance does not require realigning elections—historic elections, like 1932, everybody’s agreed realigning election—where the deck is reshuffled for some decades to come. Nor does the argument of this book require the hypothesized patterns sometimes associated with realignment, such as surges in voter turnout, pioneering third-party activity, enhanced ideological polarization, or spans of unified party control of the Congress.¹

The country has periods of party dominance when the following is true:

1. One party wins the overwhelming majority of elections during a period. A party is dominant when it wins the presidency and is in control of the White House and the executive branch for extended periods, often decades. The party’s capture of the presidency is usually made possible by changes evident in earlier elections, but for our purposes, it is becoming the dominant national party that creates periods for potential hegemony.

2. The dominant party is associated with a set of ideas or beliefs, a position on a critical issue of the day, or maybe just a perspective about the proper direction for America. The dominant parties in these periods do not necessarily win election on these issues or ideas; voters may choose them for many reasons—spoils of office, stands on wars long past, settlement of some sectional issue. But their stand on important issues and on grappling with some national challenge is associated with their entrenchment in office and hold on the presidency.

3. The dominant party’s hold on the presidency begins to give way when, among other reasons, it cannot handle rising issues or conflicts. The dominant party has a vested interest in the dominant issues and conflicts, where it has marginalized its opponents. But its consolidation of power around the old issues makes it unsuited to deal with new, emerging issues and divisions. Its hold on power may be destabilized and soon give way.

THE PERIODS OF PARTY HEGEMONY: 1800–1950

The Jeffersonian Republicans

The Jeffersonian Republicans, forerunners of the Democrats later in the century, held the presidency through six successive terms—two each for Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. It was hard to know in this new nation that the factions would soon evolve into parties, as Madison warned of them in Federalist Paper Number 10 and Jefferson described them as the last degradation of a free and moral agent. In some sense, the Virginia dynasty won dominance on the cheap; few voters actually participated in elections, about a third in the first decade of the nineteenth century, and party competition resembled more a fight among elite factions. Moreover, the Federalists, with no stronghold outside of New England and little support for their aristocratic posture, failed to compete from the beginning and fell into disrepute with New England’s stern opposition to the War of 1812. Electoral competition was effectively over by 1820.²

Democrats in the remainder of the century would look back to the Jeffersonian Republicans as formative figures—not just because of their revolutionary role but also because of the ideas they advanced for the new nation.

But Jeffersonian principles soon became the stuff of Democratic Party hacks and heroes, up until William Jennings Bryan took the stage. Jefferson stood against Hamilton’s statist ideas—for good administration and an expansive executive, for an empowered federal government, with a capacity for managing finance, taking control of debt and banking, and encouraging manufacture. Hamilton had wanted to unite the interest and credit of rich individuals with those of the state in order to foster economic growth. The Jeffersonians, in heated contrast, proposed to limit the intrusiveness of the federal government in the market. Instinctively, the Jeffersonians aligned themselves with the likes of the Whiskey Rebellion and thus with popular rule over federal authority. Jefferson set out his party’s core principle as equal rights for all, special privileges for none, thus ennobling the ordinary producer and landowner, and diminishing the status of the privileged, requiring deference. He heralded a civic virtue where free [white] men would make proper judgments about issues of public importance. His hope was for a nation of freeholders.³

Ignoring whether Jefferson and his successors consistently governed by those principles, their unhindered dominance and the evaporation of the Federalists settled some big issues for the new nation. Why did the first party system disintegrate? Jacksonian historian Richard P. McCormick answers his own question, Because the chief purpose for which it has been formed had lost its urgency. Perhaps Louis Hartz is right that politics in America was then left free to develop, but within the parameters of a Lockean consensus.⁴

Jacksonian Democrats

Andrew Jackson’s election in 1828 kicks off the second period of party dominance, putting the Democrats in the White House for six of the next eight elections, but this time with genuine popular engagement and real parties rather than factions or clans. Turnout jumped from 26.9 percent in 1824 to 57.6 percent in 1828. This was a tumultuous period, with the country swept by very big crosscurrents—the rise of manufacture and mills, large-scale immigration and the nativist reaction, and the extension of slavery into the frontier and the Free-Soil reaction. Andrew Jackson won the presidency as a populist figure, war hero, and vulgar man by Washington standards who allowed the multitude to swarm the White House. On the big questions of the day, however, for the resurgent Democrats, one observer noted, There was no clear-cut party stand. That Jackson himself had no discernible positions on these issues made it easier for the party leaders to construct a flexible agenda for the elections. As one political scientist observed crisply, It was not a tidy political event.

But the Jacksonian Democrats emerged with their gut sensibilities and philosophy of government and citizens consistent in content if not style with those of their adopted Jeffersonian forebears. They gained clarity in opposition to Henry Clay’s American system—where the government expanded credit, protected industry, and financed internal improvement—for the purpose of promoting America’s modernization. But while the Whig opponents proffered a government that should exert a beneficial, paternal, fostering influence upon the Industry and Prosperity of the People, the Democrats wanted to stop government from overreaching. The Democrats, as they put it, preferred the voluntary system; they desire to drive no man. Government, they believed, is inherently corrupt and bound to fall into the hands of the rich and powerful. Thus, President Jackson waged war and defeated the United States Bank, and President Van Buren deployed Democrats against the privileged banking corporations, the self-constituted, dangerous and irresponsible power. In that spirit, they opposed high tariffs that protect manufacture, arguing that this is really a system for plundering the laboring classes. The Democrats assumed to themselves a special guardianship over the principles of the Constitution, to block those who would expand government with a doctrine of expediency and general welfare.

The Democrats sought to center America in the common man—the central passion of their politics. Jackson joined the planters and farmers to the mechanics and laborers in opposition to monopoly power, or more aptly, against the forces driving America’s commercial development. In his farewell address, Jackson used the pulpit of the White House to note that the success of these laboring people depends upon their own industry and economy and, together, they are the bone and sinew of the country.⁵

Their visions of the common man did not include slaves or Native Americans, who were mistreated and dispatched in this era with particular cruelty. That omission enabled the Democrats to build support in all regions of the country, establishing the patterns of support by 1836 or 1838 that would keep them in power for decades, until the Democratic-Whig system crashed against a number of issues that the major parties could not address, including the surge of immigration and unresolved issues of slavery.

The Democratic Party was constructed as a national coalition that would submerge sectional issues, that is, slavery. Every Democratic ticket from 1836 to 1860 was by design regionally balanced, one Southerner and one non-Southerner. The Democrats’ rules required then, and up until 1936, that the nominee win two-thirds of the votes at the convention, ensuring a Southern veto and presidential leadership that took no extreme position on sectional issues. With the Whigs operating under their gag order, the United States struggled through this period of frontier expansion, operating under the terms of a series of deals—the Missouri Compromise from an earlier period and the Compromise of 1850—to divide up the new states between free and slave. The political arrangements held in 1848 even when Martin Van Buren broke with the Democrats to head the Free-Soil Party. But the system of compromises brought neither a stable economic arrangement nor political peace, as third parties rose to take advantage of the silences.

The Republicans—America’s Party

The victory of the slave issue, John Aldrich points out, ended the Democrats’ dominance and, indeed, undermined both the national parties that depended on sectional compromise. With slavery the issue, the cleavage line changed and the parties became necessarily sectional. The new Republican Party won in 1860, based exclusively in the North. The pre–Civil War Democrats were perhaps our clearest case of a dominant party crashing, hamstrung before the emerging issues of the day.⁶

The Republican Party would become America’s party, winning the great majority of elections between 1860 and 1928. Its ascendancy was hardly unchallenged; the Republicans fended off the post–Civil War Democrats in very close elections in 1876, 1880, and 1888, the last without a plurality of the vote. Cleveland won the White House in nonconsecutive terms in 1884 and 1892; and the post-Bryan Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, defeated the faltering Republicans in 1912 and, with the promise to keep America out of war, won in 1916 as well. The essential voting patterns, established as early as 1856 and confirmed in 1880 when the South was reintegrated into the Union, largely held until the Depression of 1929. In the Deep South, no state voted Republican again until 1956.⁷

Lincoln established the Republicans as the party that held the nation together—in some sense, they took on the biggest challenge that had bedeviled the country since its formation. They had defended the Constitution. And in abolishing slavery and breaking the power of the Southern landed classes, they set the country irrevocably down a modernizing and industrial path. Republican leaders from Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt to Coolidge described their party as the American Party, ready to defend America. The Civil War was a reference point where Republicans could continually remind voters that they defended America’s virtues with force of arms. The great majority of the party’s presidential nominees were military figures, especially in this period after the Civil War.⁸

Of course nobody knew in 1856 or 1880 that the Republicans would be ascendant for so many decades. Indeed, with the chicanery of the Hayes-Tilden election and the dead-heat finishes in 1880, 1884, and 1888, both parties were driven to other means. The states of the Old South at the outset of the 1890s began enacting statutes to disenfranchise the black voter and to end the prospect of competitive general elections in the Southern states. The Republicans, for their part, in addition to waving the bloody shirt, constructed a system of Civil War pensions available only to veterans of the Union Army—one in ten voters concentrated in the Northeast and Midwest. The payments exploded from 1880 to 1910, when the Republicans were entrenching their position and fending off the Populists. The Grand Army of the Republic, 400,000 strong, backed the Republicans through all the election battles.⁹

The Republican Party was defined by its modernizing, unifying, and nationalist vision for the nation, but that became much more ideologically developed as the parties battled through the economic transformations of the late nineteenth century and turn of the century. This was a period of tremendous economic growth and upheaval, with America emerging as a manufacturing and industrial society. Between 1880 and 1910, national wealth increased 275 percent; the urban population grew from 28 to 46 percent; massive immigration brought downward pressure on wages, as one quarter of immigrants’ children aged ten to fourteen years were at work; farmers faced declining prices and monopolistic control of transportation and marketing. This was a time for the rise of corporations, holding companies, trusts, and monopolies, but also a time for deep downturns, including most of the 1890s, after the panic of 1893.¹⁰

The election of 1896 was the hottest, Frederick Lewis Allen wrote, perhaps, in the whole history of the United States. The Democrats, breaking with their tradition of running fiscally austere, antigovernment nominees, chose William Jennings Bryan—the populist, evangelical candidate who would change the identity of the Democratic Party. His politics were rooted in the civic virtue and common man themes that carried the Democrats through the nineteenth century, but it included the premise that the country should be enriched from the bottom up: If you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them. Bryan also broke from the past as he sought to create a new Democratic Party organized against the emerging industrial order. He began with the farmers, some of whom had channeled their protests through the Greenback Party and antimonopolist leagues and, in the 1890s, the Farmers’ Alliance. He appealed to laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere, though his support was mostly confined to the West and rural areas, including the South. The Democrats wanted the government to break up monopolies, regulate the railways, introduce an income tax, abolish the industry-protecting tariffs, and shift the country’s currency from the gold standard to free silver.¹¹

For the Republicans, the battle against William Jennings Bryan through three national elections allowed them to emerge as the party indispensable to modernizing America. In their view, reminiscent of earlier Hamiltonian, Whig, and pre–Civil War Republican thinking, the government’s role was to promote the country’s growth and advancement, which in its crudest and most material form was a kind of mercantilism, which political scientist John Gerring defines as a general economic philosophy mandating the subordination of economic activity to the interests of the state and nation. Within this nationalist framework and in McKinley’s hands, the government was to create markets, protect American manufacturing behind high tariffs, and create a favorable climate for the surging big corporations. The tariff was the symbolic and real heart of their mercantilism, as this was the primary source of government revenue but also the principal weapon in the Republican economic nationalist arsenal. To stand with the Republicans on high tariffs was to support their route for industrializing America. McKinley imbued it with national aspirations that enlist all classes and raise the nation: I believe in it and thus warmly advocate it because enveloped in it are my country’s highest development and greatest prosperity; out of it come the greatest gains to the people, the greatest comforts to the masses, the widest encouragement for many aspirations, with the largest rewards, dignifying and elevating our citizenship, upon which the safety and purity and permanency of our political system depend.¹²

Embedded in the tariff was the idea that laboring people would benefit equally with the capitalists as the country grew. McKinley first won election to Congress after championing striking mine workers and opposing Chinese immigration. He was schooled in what would become an important theme in this period: There are no descended titles here; there is no way in the world of getting on and up, or earning money, except by work. Thus, faced with the populist challenge, McKinley could speak against division and for a unity of interests: We are not a nation of classes, but of sturdy, free, independent and honorable people…¹³

The Republicans associated themselves, without apology, with business and with the presumption that growing industrialization would improve the general welfare. Voters knew what they were getting, and Republicans mostly won the elections in this period by healthy margins. America, faced with what seemed an antimodern challenge, opted to accept the basic contours of this procapitalist agenda. McKinley’s campaign manager was Marcus Hanna, himself a wealthy businessman, who recruited virtually all of America’s top industrial magnates and assessed them a percentage of their assets to finance the campaign. McKinley attacked class divisiveness as unpatriotic and finished the campaign with a flag day that underscored the Republicans’ ability to associate a business-led prosperity with the American way of life.¹⁴

Calvin Coolidge at the end of this period of Republican dominance would make a similar case. He was the president for the 1920s, when incomes grew by 20 percent between 1921 and 1929 and the number of automobiles rose from 9.3 million to 23.1 million; by the end of the decade, there was almost one car for every family. But this was also a decade for speculative booms, with rising inequality. Coolidge, with Andrew Mellon, likely the wealthiest man in the country, as his secretary of the treasury, proceeded with an economic policy of aggressive tax slashing for the wealthy: they cut the inheritance tax in half, abolished the gift tax, and reduced the income tax to 5 percent. Like their predecessors in 1896, Coolidge and Mellon attacked those who seek to perpetuate prejudice and class hatred and pit one class of taxpayers against another. The Republican bargain, Mellon declared, was straightforward: In no other nation and at no other time in the history of the world have so many people enjoyed such a high degree of prosperity.¹⁵

Roosevelt’s New Deal Democrats

When the stock market crashed and the country went into depression, there was no more reason to vote Republican. Once again, the change in the issue and the choices changed the party. It was time for a party that could deal with the dire economic challenges