Rethinking American Partisan Adjustments to Social Upheaval

Maybe not peace this time.

A word of caution and perhaps explanation. I have allowed myself to go a bit deeper than usual into intellectual history in this essay. As I read it back it seems to me that I am channeling the style, as well as many of the ideas, of my principal mentor and friend Walter Dean Burnham. A humble man, he wrote and spoke with a spirit of prophecy. It has always been hard to get his voice out of my head… perhaps because I am never certain that I want to.

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Throughout American history political insurgencies have thundered across the political landscape and settled interests have barricaded their privileges. It is the curse or relief of a working democracy. 

Economic and social systems in the United States are highly dynamic.  And often ruthless.  New elites establish themselves and assert privilege.  They find place among the “old money,” who enlarge their club memberships. Their lobbyists find offices on K Street in DC.

The economically marginalized are left standing on the platform, the train already receding in the distance.  Large numbers of people lose, or feel likely to lose their means of living, their hope for the future, the status and sense of self-worth they have gained by “following the rules.”  Not to mention the unseen poor living outside the boundaries of society. 

They are the recruits for insurgent political movements that emerge on the edge of the party system and sometimes capture one of the existing political parties. 

Normally in the past, the system has adjusted and created a new stability that acknowledges if not fully solves some of the underlying tensions in the economic system. 

Obviously today we are in the midst of another such systemic crisis.  One lesson we might take from the past is to keep from blanket judgments about an insurgency.  It is easy to dismiss mass movements as mindless ravers easily manipulated by cynical elites seeking personal power.  Better to see them as Eric Hoffer did in his seminal mid 20^th century work, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, as the casualties of a world of blind and rapid change.  And to recognize that their leaders may be men and women of exception talent and intelligence.

(I am making no claims about the mind, heart or sincerity of our former President.  He is the face of the movement, a man with remarkable communication skills.  Behind him, associated with him, however, is a formidable structure of ideas in think-tanks and universities.)

Those that prefer periods of “normal” political activity have been able in the past to accommodate such leaders and their new ideas. Afterall, they were not rejecting the core values and beliefs of American political history. A Franklin Roosevelt was confident that he was restoring the “American Way.” Later, Eisenhower and Nixon accepted the basic framework of the New Deal.

Today, this “front” in the political wars may not be so readily accommodated. Unlike insurgencies in the past, their intellectual programs appear less a rearrangement of chairs at the table, than a challenge to the underlying value system which has sustained the Republic since the Revolution.

I have written about this before. I referred to it as our becoming part of a larger Western intellectual culture whose inherent conflicts were not settled by the Enlightenment and 19th century celebrations of progress.

In fact, I am no longer certain that they were really ever settled in the American context. Clearly, Lockean liberalism held such sway that intellectual historians like Louis Hartz (The Liberal Tradition in America) became by the second half of the 20th Century virtually our sole guides to American thought. However, other strains of thought, if muted in the academic writings of the past, remained underground as powerful currents of serious dissent to such orthodoxies.

John Murrin writes of the passionate debate and disunion of the Constitutional Period. (Chapter Seven in Rethinking America, originally published in To Form a More Perfect Union: The Critical Ideas of the Constitution, ed. Herman Beltz, et. al.)

Although all the Founders probably believed that [fundamental] values exist, they did not agree on what they are or how to find them. Instead, contemporaries had to choose among several competing value systems, each with brilliant articulation in the high thought of the day.

I suggest they have remained with us and still play out in our modern era. We are somewhat defenseless in our support of traditional liberal democracy if we assume, as many do, that such issues are settled.

For while the present period of partisan realignment shares many features with the past, this time we may be facing fundamental challenges to an orthodoxy that has always managed to unite the peoples of what has always been an extremely divided country.