But can a “political hack” really give us one?
Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy by Timothy Shenk. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2022. 464 pp., $21.00 (paperback)
A “partisan hack” may not be the first person we think of when we need to save American democracy. Campaign managers, direct mail gurus, party strategists, and the cigar-chomping political dealmakers of the proverbial smoke-filled rooms at party conventions are the sort of people we’re probably more likely to associate with negative campaigns and political attack ads than with anything resembling virtuous citizenship.
But Timothy Shenk, an American political historian at George Washington University, is determined to prove these negative stereotypes wrong. His book Realigners argues that political strategists play a vitally important function in our American democracy: They create political stability by forging lasting political majorities.
As we head into a divisive presidential election season, we need someone who can transcend our political divisions by identifying the concerns of a majority of Americans and crafting a message that can attract the votes of that majority. If that person is successful, we’ll end gridlock in Washington as both the legislative and executive branches of the government work toward shared policy goals. In other words, we’ll experience a political realignment, with one political party given the mandate to govern for a season.
We need these periodic realignments for our government to function, Shenk argues. And realignments are the work of party strategists—the “hacks” that we love to hate but that Shenk admires.
Whether principled or self-interested, a good campaign manager or partisan strategist is an expert at forging a consensus among the voters. This happened in the 1930s, when President Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats won landslide victories and acted on their election mandate by creating the New Deal. It happened at earlier moments in American history as well, such as when the Republicans captured the presidency in 1896 and retained control of both Congress and the White House for most of the next thirty-five years.
But it hasn’t happened recently.
In his quest to discover what might enable another political “realigner” to emerge today and break our contemporary political gridlock with a new majority consensus, Shenk takes his readers on a two-hundred-year journey across the entire history of American presidential elections to meet the people whose political strategies worked, as well as those whose efforts failed.
In addition to a few party strategists like Martin Van Buren (who had a long career as manager of a New York Democratic party machine before becoming president) and Mark Hanna (the strategist behind William McKinley’s presidential campaign of 1896), Shenk devotes space to principled ideologues like the Republican abolitionist Charles Sumner and the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly. Even a few intellectuals who considered themselves above the partisan fray, such as W. E. B. DuBois and Walter Lippmann, are given their own sections, because Shenk is interested in discovering why they failed in their quest to realign politics along more rational lines. In a narrative that runs from Alexander Hamilton to Barack Obama, Shenk profiles a wide variety of strategists who had almost nothing in common except a strong interest in politics and a desire to create a new realignment.
Most ultimately failed—sometimes by stunning margins. A few, like Hanna, managed to succeed for a few years or even an entire generation. But even then, they eventually reached a point where they lost touch with the wishes of the people and their coalition collapsed.
Shenk wants to find someone who will create “a multiracial majority that’s large enough to break the partisan deadlock, jolt the legislative process back to life, and mobilize ordinary Americans behind systemic reform.” This seems to be exactly what Barack Obama attempted in 2008. For a short time, it worked. Shenk devotes his entire final chapter to a detailed study of Obama because Obama promised to do what Shenk advocates: build a multi-racial coalition that would transcend partisan division and bring Americans together. In Shenk’s view, he failed, despite his two electoral victories. When Obama left office, Americans were arguably even more politically divided than they were at the beginning of his presidency.
The economy performed poorly, Shenk notes—and it’s hard for any president to succeed with a floundering economy. But Shenk argues that Obama also bears part of the blame for this failure because he cozied up to Wall Street interests even while publicly denouncing the plutocrats. He didn’t exactly govern as he promised—and he therefore lost the support of a significant number of blue-collar whites who voted for him in 2008 but then turned to Donald Trump eight years later.
By the time I reached the book’s conclusion, though, I was convinced that conventional political scientists are probably right: Realignments are not the work of brilliant political strategists but are instead a predictable reaction to much larger economic, demographic, and political trends too large for any one person (or one party) to control. Shenk’s brief analysis of Obama’s policy failures—and his concluding analysis about the failure of most political strategists to fulfill their promises of lasting policy results—suggests that realignments are not actually the work of the “realigners” that are the focus of this book.
“There’s a good reason so many of the stories in this book have a gloomy ending,” Shenk acknowledges in his final chapter. None of those who created a winning coalition were able to deliver lasting results to the people who voted for their party, and as a result the voters who had once believed their promises turned against them. “Jacksonians couldn’t stop economic inequality from rising,” Shenk notes, while abolitionists couldn’t stop the passage of Jim Crow laws even after outlawing slavery. “The New Deal order fell apart, and the Reagan revolution careened into a ditch.”
In other words, policy matters. A clever campaign message will take a candidate only so far; it is not enough in itself to create a realignment. And unfortunately for politicians, the outcomes they promise depend on factors they don’t even fully understand, let alone control. Andrew Jackson did not realize that his policies would precipitate an economic crisis that would cause his party to lose the White House to the Whigs. Herbert Hoover’s campaign managers had no idea that a looming Great Depression would end their party’s control of the White House for an entire generation.
It seems that the people Shenk’s book profiles—the “small number of people who tried to remake the country”—were observers more than shapers of the trends that moved the electorate. At best, they could capitalize on those trends by being in the right place at the right time and matching their messages to the concerns of the voters. At worst, they misjudged the political moment and went home frustrated. But in no sense can we say that people like Mark Hanna “remade” the country.
At first glance, we might be mesmerized by the power political strategists seem to exercise in creating winning coalitions—but when we look more closely, as Shenk has done, we find that this power is much more ephemeral and elusive than we might have thought. The people behind the curtain are not the wizards we might have imagined them to be.
For that reason, I’m not expecting any political strategist in this election season to deliver the type of multiracial, broadly based new majority coalition that Shenk dreams of, because the current political trends do not favor it.
In the last decade, we have experienced a political realignment, but not the type of realignment that Shenk wants or even seems to recognize. In this new realignment, which features an establishment party versus an anti-establishment one, a person can predict how particular states will vote based almost solely on the educational demographics of the state’s electorate. Of the fifteen states with the highest percentage of college-educated voters, only one (heavily Mormon Utah) voted Republican in the 2020 presidential election. Of the fifteen states with the lowest percentage of college-educated voters, only one (heavily Hispanic and indigenous New Mexico) voted Democratic.
In this division, there’s little room for middle ground, and the candidates have every incentive to move toward the extremes to maximize turnout from their base, just as they did during the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, when the two parties were regionally polarized in a reflection of Civil War divisions. Persuading voters to cross party lines was nearly impossible in the late nineteenth century. Partisans relied instead on political violence, scathing denunciations of the other side as treasonous, and public charges of election fraud to rally their base or depress turnout from the opposition. Newspapers, which were usually openly partisan, did everything they could to find scurrilous charges with which to tar the candidates of the opposing party.
Unfortunately, Shenk doesn’t say very much about Gilded Age politics—perhaps because it doesn’t fit his narrative of brilliant strategists who created new majority coalitions. The Gilded Age was an era of divided government and razor-thin victories, not new lasting majorities. During that period, political strategists knew they couldn’t persuade the other side, so they hardly even tried.
The election of 1896 decisively ended all this. In Shenk’s telling of the story, that was because of Mark Hanna, who created a winning campaign message for McKinley. If this explanation is correct, maybe Shenk is right in saying that what we need today is another brilliant campaign strategist who can create a broadly based multiracial coalition with a positive message.
But if McKinley’s victory was actually a result of the economic depression of the 1890s and the fragmentation of the Democratic Party—not Hanna’s political brilliance—maybe we shouldn’t expect a new realignment until a similar political and economic crisis occurs. Until that happens we will be left with campaign strategies that focus only on maximizing turnout among the base through the worst sort of divisive partisan rhetoric, not building new coalitions with an inspiring, broadly based appeal.
In other words, maybe we’ll be stuck in a new Gilded Age for a while longer.
Shenk avoids that conclusion because he wants to believe that the problems of our current era can be fixed and the democratic system can work. But the problems of our divided electorate are probably greater than a brilliant political visionary or a great campaign strategy can solve. I’m certainly not ready to give up hope for American democracy. But I have little reason to believe that a new “realigner” will be able to create a lasting political majority and national unity anytime soon. Â
Daniel K. Williams is a historian working at Ashland University and the author of The Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship.
This is excellent. Thank you.