For two decades now, national politics have been stuck in a wobbly equilibrium, swaying a bit toward Democrats, then Republicans, then back again. Yet every quiver has been read through the lens of realignment: This time, observers believe, the logjam will break, and a new era of one-party rule will emerge. And why wouldn’t they think so? For most of American history, that’s how party politics worked. That is, until recently, when the system creaked to a stop, leaving us with the ping-ponging party control that has defined twenty-first-century U.S. politics.
In his lively and ambitious new book Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy, historian Timothy Shenk argues that the task facing Americans now is to get that system up and running again, to refire the engines of realignment and build a coalition that can dominate national politics for a generation. To make his case, Shenk, an assistant professor of history at George Washington University and co-editor of Dissent magazine, maps political alignments and realignments from the very first days of the United States through the presidency of Barack Obama.
Shenk is particularly concerned with those responsible for building coalitions: the realigners. These realigners—a term Shenk coined to describe this group—emerge from the “democratic elite,” the operatives, activists, and intellectuals who populate the space between the rulers and the ruled in a democratic society. Not mere middlemen, the realigners do the hard work of sharpening the ideas and massaging the coalitions that help one party to dominate long enough to turn their ideas into policy and institutions, and to allow the country to change in meaningful, if not always laudatory, ways.
These realigners, ranging from Charles Sumner and Mark Hanna to W.E.B. Du Bois and Phyllis Schlafly, may be flawed characters. But in Shenk’s telling, they serve as the linchpins of the American system. Shenk’s realigners are the doctors of democracy: When a sharp break happens in U.S. politics, it is the realigners who reset the bone and allow the country to move past the crisis. And what America needs now, he argues, is a democratic elite who can engineer a new era of big, stable electoral majorities. Such coalition politics would act as a “corrective” to tribalism, a bulwark against stagnation and excess populism. “There are plenty of visionary proposals out there for remaking society,” he writes in the introduction. “What’s missing is a plan for building a coalition that could turn those dreams into reality.” What’s missing are the realigners.