The Bad Political Realignment and Blockbuster Video

This election is setting up pins the next one will start knocking down.

This election will almost certainly be the final kick that knocks our old political party framework down. This isn’t the election that shapes our future—that one is still to come. It’s the election that sets the field on which America’s future is fought.

It looks increasingly likely we’re going to have the bad kind of political realignment, and this election looks to be the final blow that brings the old world down.

GOOD REALIGNMENTS AND BAD ONES

A political realignment is an earthquake that shatters America’s parties, scrambles their coalitions and ideas, and makes way for two new versions of our parties that look nothing like what came before. There are two kinds of these realignments: the good kind, and the bad one.

The good kind of political realignment happens when some person or movement emerges before America’s parties fall apart and drags them into the future. That’s essentially what William Jennings Bryan did in 1896 to launch the Populist and Progressive Era, or what Franklin Roosevelt did in 1932 to launch the New Deal era.

This kind of realignment is good because it brings about a national renewal without the chaos, uncertainty, radical ideas, lost years, and potential political violence that comes with true political collapse.

The bad kind of realignment happens when this kind of leadership doesn’t arrive in time. If America’s parties refuse to adjust course, challenge outdated alliances, embrace fresh ideas, and instead keep kicking the can down the road, eventually the parties crack and the entire old two-party framework collapses. That forces America to rebuild from the rubble instead of from the mountaintop. This is both unpleasant and difficult. It’s more or less what happened when the Federalists imploded or the Whigs collapsed.

What makes this kind of realignment bad is it means years of national chaos. It means grifters, radicals, and utopians crashing into the public square brining truly frightening ideas. It means lost years where lives are disrupted and America is dysfunctional. It means years of turmoil until something emerges capable of rebuilding from the ash heap amid the chaos. It’s a lot easier to do this before the collapse than after.

As I wrote in my book back in 2019, I hoped we could make this coming realignment the good kind. Increasingly I fear that ship has sailed. If it’s going to be the disruptive kind of realignment, as appears increasingly likely, this election certainly marks the beginning of that end. I don’t think we’re in for a triumphant election ushering in a new alignment like 1932. I think this election is setting up the pins the next one will start knocking down.

I think it’s more like 1852

TURMOIL AND KNOW NOTHINGS—THE DEATH OF THE WHIGS

We like to anchor political realignments to a dramatic election year—Jackson’s election in 1828, Lincoln’s election in 1860, Bryan’s campaign of 1896, or Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932. In reality, all of those realignments played out over many years, with the key election just a dramatic moment setting the new system into place. Sometimes this process plays out relatively quickly, like the New Deal realignment that arguably started with the Great Depression in 1929 and settled into place by Roosevelt’s re-election in 1936. Sometimes, however, they take a lot longer to play out like the realignment that destroyed the Whigs, created the Republicans, and launched a Civil War.

If you include the years of gradual breakdown leading up to the Whig collapse, it took nearly two decades for that realignment to fully play itself out. The Whig Party began to break in 1846. It imploded in 1852. Lincoln was elected in 1860. The next party system of Republicans and Democrats, America’s Third Party System, only fully settled into place at the end of the Civil War in 1865. What happened in the middle of those years was not very fun.

The story of the Second Party System’s collapse began with the launch of the Mexican-American War in 1846, bringing slavery to the national forefront. Both the Whigs and Democrats were national parties with Northern and Southern wings divided over slavery, organized around the now irrelevant Jacksonian issues of the 1820s. The Whigs in particular were a strange coalition including both Southern plantation barons and Northern businesspeople. Annexing the large slave state of Texas and taking so much new territory that would have to admitted to the Union either free or slave made the bubbling slavery issue impossible to avoid. Both coalitions were by now held together by little, but divided over a passionate moral issue America demanded they address.

The Whig’s hamfisted efforts to compromise to hold their party together finally blew the party up. In 1852 the Whigs nominated an anti-slavery candidate for president in Winfield Scott, right after the party endorsed the Compromise of 1850, hated in the North as a boon to slavers. Both Northern anti-slavery Whigs and Southern pro-slavery Whigs were now furious for different reasons and they abandoned the party in the election, leading to a massive electoral blowout for the Democrats. Ambitious Whigs, seeing the writing on the wall, began to flee their now toxic party label. Over the next few years that put the party into the ground. The Democrats, swept into office in a landslide as their longtime political foe imploded, thought they won a mandate and misread the situation.

What actually came next were years of national chaos.

For the next two years, in the misguided belief that the Whig collapse gave them a permanent majority, the Democrats sought to use their powerful majority to push through whatever they wanted—which, as the Democrats increasingly became the pro-slavery party, mostly meant expanding slavery in the territories. After a series of blunders like Bleeding Kansas, Americans by 1854 were no happier with the Democrats than the Whigs. In the midterm elections, voters thew the Democrats out of power and put Congress in the hands of coalition of smaller parties, many new, called “The Opposition.” The opposition was headed by the American Party, also known as the Know Nothings.

It turned out the Whig collapse hadn’t empowered the Democrats. It had created space for the conspiratorial, bombastic, anti-immigration Know Nothings movement to come from nowhere and seize political control.

The Know Nothings had started as anti-immigration secret societies—the name came from a story that when asked about the movement, members should say they “knew nothing.” They were fiercely patriotic, loyal to the Constitution, but convinced there was a papal conspiracy afoot to flood America with Catholic immigrants to overthrow democracy. Remember the movie Gangs of New York? Bill the Butcher was a Know Nothing. Now running under the banner of the American Party—shortened from Native American Party, meaning Anglo Americans—this movement with its ugly agenda would now spend the next few years as America’s second major party.

With Congress in the hands of this ad hoc Opposition Coalition headed by the Know Nothings, American politics turned unstable and chaotic. New small parties were popping up, including a new one formed in 1854 called the Republicans. National political warfare became vicious. Members of Congress were carrying weapons in chambers and a Congressman beat a Senator nearly to death with his cane on the Senate floor. The political culture among citizens was hardly better. These were the days of violence in Kansas and John Brown.

It was presumed the election of 1856 would be a contest between the Democrats and the American Party candidate, former president Millard Fillmore (not much of a Know Nothing, but an ambitious politician who seized an opportunity), until the third party Republicans made it into a three-way race. The anti-slavery Republicans outperformed the American Party, emerging as the Democrats new chief competitor. In 1860, the Republicans actually managed to win the presidency with Abraham Lincoln. That set off a civil war.

The Republicans, however, still didn’t solidify their position for several years more. Wartime pressure saw the Republicans form an alliance with pro-war Democrats under the temporary banner of a National Union Party. It was this Union Party that re-elected Lincoln in 1864. Then, it wasn’t until the war ended and peacetime politics resumed in which the new political battlelines of Republicans and Democrats took shape and the Third Party System truly began.

In other words, almost twenty difficult years passed between 1846 and 1864. In between them a major party died, another one emerged and fell, an ugly conspiratorial anti-Catholic anti-immigrant movement took control of the House of Representatives, political violence overwhelmed the country, a war broke out, and finally the Republicans formed, solidified control, and reorganized politics into a new alignment. Keying this transformation to the election of 1860 is just tagging the highlight moment of a longer process.

Where are we now in our realignment? I don’t think we’re in 1860 much less 1865. I increasingly think we’re closer to 1852.

OUR MISSED OPPORTUNITY

The last eight years have been a terrible missed opportunity.

The opportunity is just sitting there to reinvent American politics for a new age. Our political parties are coming apart, which only happens about once or twice a century. America’s political marketplace includes two slow, outdated, dysfunctional behemoths unwilling and incapable of pivot to new conditions or fresh ideas. Someone is going to get to reshape America’s future. Americans are waiting for a visionary leader, the next creative thinker to create a movement, or the political entrepreneur who builds the next political start-up—but no one seems to want to do it.

There are reasons everyone has feared to break the status quo.

One the right, Donald Trump has frozen his party into place. Trump was successful in tearing the old Republican party down, but his Republican party is built around his personality, not an ideology or ideas that can outlast him. While he remains on center stage, however, nobody else can build a new Republican Party either. At the start of his administration, a few people like Steve Bannon wanted to transform MAGA into a recognized philosophy, but those efforts went nowhere because they ran into the mercurial impulses of Trump. There now are some on the new right interested in reshaping the Republican Party into a new working class party, but they’re also unable to offer ideas outside the shifting Trump consensus or work with anyone who has not been loyal. This constricts what they can do. Ultimately, it’s been impossible for anyone to experiment or build a new Republican Party other than Trump, and that’s just not who he is.

On the left, Democrats don’t see any need to experiment. For now, their party has been held firmly together by opposition to Trump. This “Resistance” party has united Democrats in the immediate term, replacing the need for innovation, policy, or ideas. Just as Trump’s presence blocked Team Red from rethinking anything or building something new, so it has done the same for Team Blue. While Trump remains, Democrats are unwilling to challenge old ideas or alliances. The demands of opposition made it impossible to question old friends. It made it impossible to make new ones. It made it unnecessary and unpopular to try new ideas that might distract from the common mission of opposing Trump. Democrats are happy to take the votes and endorsements of former Republicans, but they’re hardly inclined to listen to their ideas, work with them as equals, or give them actual seats at the table. Democrats may worry about the political impact of noisy parts of their coalition they do not like, but they’re not inclined to challenge them in public much less give them the boot. As long as Trump remains, the Democrats have not needed to, or wanted to, evolve.

In fact, unity against Trump seemingly prevents many Democrats from even perceiving they have a problem. These Democrats presume they aren’t actually facing a crisis of ideas, but only one of messaging. They’re interested in reforming the Democratic Party to make it more popular, but unwilling to question or rethink old alliances, loyalties, or ideas. They believe the ideas they’ve always followed for decades are all the ideas they need. All they need is better implementation and messaging to sell them once Trump gets out of their way. These forces on the left are trapped by partisan blinders.

Both parties therefore face something like the innovator’s dilemma or the Blockbuster Problem. Blockbuster Video didn’t fail to outcompete Netflix because Blockbuster executives were stupid. They could see the writing on the wall for their business model just like everybody else. Their problem wasn’t of vision but of will. Blockbuster was invested in millions and millions of dollars of retail brick and mortar stores. Their business model relied on harnessing late fees from those stores. Adapting to the threat of Netflix meant taking risk, threating short term profits, and destroying previous investment. As important, Blockbuster leadership had risen to their lucrative positions because they were great at managing brick and mortar retail stores. They didn’t know anything about online businesses. They could have brought people in who had those skills, but that would have made them obsolete. Pivoting to on online model would push existing Blockbuster management out. It was in their personal interest to ride the current model into the grave, even if it meant the business ultimately would fail.

Our existing parties face a similar problem. Innovating means aliening parts of their existing coalition. It means letting go of old commitments and embracing new ones. It means making new friends with people they are accustomed to viewing as enemies. Moreover, unlike a hundred years ago, modern political parties are staffed by professional and technocrats. These people are not visionaries or philosophers. They are administrators with an expertise in the political dynamics that existed throughout their lives. The very connections and alliances that make them valuable are founded in the party structures as they presently exist. Embracing new ideas means alienating and potentially losing old friends, violating core beliefs, and working with people they have hated. It potentially puts them out of a job. As technocrats skilled in administrating a specific system, these things are alien and unthinkable. 

This could have, and should have, been an easy realignment. Everyone could see where things were headed years ago and innovators could have seized one or both parties and yanked it into the future. A fresh candidate could have come with fresh ideas and attracted a new coalition suited to the present. People forget that Roosevelt’s New Deal was a completely novel intellectual project led by a brain trust of professors, professionals, and policy entrepreneurs unwedded to the past. It built an entirely new coalition that pulled in former Republicans and expelled former Democrats. In fact, few remember that many leaders Roosevelt called upon to create his New Deal had previously been Republicans.

Pressure is building, neither party has found it’s new ideas to hold together a new coalition. The forces tearing at our parties are going nowhere. The new challenges we face aren’t going away. The division in our parties aren’t disappearing. These things cannot be papered over or messaged away. And the factors that have locked us into place for so long are now about to disappear. No matter who wins this election, we’re probably heading to the beginning of the endgame. Then someone will need to come along ready to pick up the crown we dropped in the mud, like Lincoln’s Republicans had to do. This ultimately gets us to the same place, but it’s the much harder road.

In fact, people are already starting to maneuverer. Some are operating openly in politics. Others are behind the scenes. Others still are no doubt working invisibly. Some have good ideas, some less so, and some are likely dangerous.

In the next few articles, I’ll be examining more closely what I think is likely to happen to our parties both if Trump loses and if Harris loses.

What do you think is going to happen after this election? Join the community in the comments.