REALIGNERS

A sharp assessment of American political history and the arc of its pendulum, which tends not toward justice but toward the wealthy.

“If there’s an abiding winner in the long history of American democracy,” writes history professor and Dissent co-editor Shenk, “it’s the people with money.” The uber-wealthy are usually more or less in the background, but they back members of what the author calls the “democratic elite” who span the distance between rulers and the ruled. It’s these people, Shenk suggests, who have been responsible for conjuring realignments whereby political gridlock or monopoly is broken, if perhaps only temporarily. James Madison’s early alliance with Alexander Hamilton fell apart over who would govern, with “the opulent” Hamiltonians believing that democracy was doomed because the people could not govern themselves. The situation with Hamilton ended badly, but the struggle for power between what would become Republicans and Federalists, and then Whigs and Democrats and New Grangers and all the rest, would endure—but not, Shenk notes, before those early Republicans strangled the Federalists through a realignment that essentially gave them a lock on the electorate and “liberated Americans from the burdens of partisanship.” The burden would soon enough be reimposed, only to see new realignments, era after era, notably with Franklin Roosevelt’s building a power base among the working and middle classes while forging racial unity, something that Donald Trump would do in reverse. Most realignments end up failures, notes Shenk, as does everything else: Politics has always been an exercise in crisis management. Still, at the close of this catalog of tangled maneuvering (as when Obama won the elite for the Democratic Party while losing much of the working class), Shenk foresees other possibilities were the two dominant parties to realign to vie for those forgotten workers and a multiracial coalition to emerge to “jolt the legislative process back to life.”

A novel, intriguing reading of how power politics works—and, with a little imagination, might work.