History Repeats: US Political Parties and the Repetition of Crisis and Collapse with Guest Donna Waller

Part I of a 4-part series on Meeting Political Crisis as an Opportunity for Transformation

As I mentioned in my introductory launch post last week, one of my primary purposes with Hope and Healing is to understand how many of the crises we are currently facing have their roots in cultural and collective traumas that we have not yet been able to heal. This week, my friend and colleague, Donna Waller, and I dive into what many of us feel is a deep political crisis in the United States.

I say “what many of us feel” is a deep political crisis because over half of the country does not perceive that we are in the thick of a political crisis. Last week, the New York times published findings from a focus group with people who voted our current administration into office; the participants in the focus group see us as in a period of correction – for them, the crisis was the status quo, and what we are experiencing now is the necessary fix to what was “wrong.”

So when I say that we are in the thick of a political crisis, I mean precisely that our country is so divided, so polarized, with violence escalating by the day, that our social fabric, badly frayed, feels perilously close to tearing apart at the seams. A case in point: we have entered a period in which there are more mass shootings in a year than there are days in a year . . .

Lori:

Donna, back in grad school in the 90s, you were one of my most important role models for how to live a life of conscience and for how to be a responsible and engaged citizen in a democracy, so I am especially grateful that you have agreed to a series of conversations on how to meet political crisis as an opportunity to transform and evolve our political parties As a political scientist and theorist, with a long career in academia and political engagement, I am especially interested in your perspective on how our current political crisis in many ways repeats the history of US political formation and evolution.

Before we jump in, though, can you speak just a moment about what led to your passion for US government and political theory?

Donna:

Well, as a political scientist, I have to say that what drives me is that I have been Interested by the political world and the political system since I was a small child. And what that means is, like everyone else, I was socialized into politics. I grew up around and was close to my grandparents' generation, and that was a generation that had fought in World War I, that had lived through the Great Depression, and whose children had fought in World War II. And they saw what went on in Washington as very salient to the lives of people.

So I overheard a lot of adult conversations about things like that. For example, one of my earliest political memories is of my grandfather and my great uncle arguing about whether Franklin Roosevelt had saved capitalism in the 1930s or had taken capitalism on the road to socialism.

I’d say to your readers: think about what your earliest political memories are and that will give you a clue about how you think about politics. In my case, it was my grandfather, who was my favorite human being on the planet. And he was in the saved capitalism school. My Uncle Henry was a World War I veteran who probably had PTSD and was kind of scary. So in their argument about political events in the 1930s, I knew my grandfather was right.

And then my mother always took me in the voting booth with her. In Florida in the 1950s, we had machine voting. We went into the voting booth and pulled the machine’s lever to vote. I pulled my mother's voting lever from the time I was a child until I could vote myself.

Lori:

These images of pulling the lever on the voting machine and your grandfather and Uncle Henry arguing about whether Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s saved capitalism or sent us on the path to socialism pretty much mirror what is going on today, don’t they? Like, we’re having the same arguments, only without remembering the historical roots?

Donna:

Oh yeah, what we're seeing actually today, I think, is the final last backlash against all the reforms in the New Deal in the wake of the Depression. Though there has been another great wave of reform that people forget about, which was the Great Society under Lyndon Johnson's administration. But I see much of what's happening today as some curiously retro move back to capitalism before the 1930s.

Lori:

So let’s stick with this experience of national crisis and political party formation for a moment. Am I remembering right you discussing that the Great Depression and New Deal were America’s second great experience of deep national crisis? And that the Democratic Party gained political dominance because FDR responded to and helped to resolve the crisis? But before that, the country experienced national crises over slavery, and that led to the civil war and the rise of the Republican Party?

Donna:

Yes. Right.

Lori:

When I heard your talk about this at the Historical Society last week, you mentioned that Alexis de Tocqueville, one of your favorite historians, predicted that there was one thing that could derail democracy in the United States, and that was...

Donna:

A race war.

Lori:

Could you talk about that a little bit more?

Donna:

Well, de Tocqueville came to America before the American Civil War, in the age of Jackson, and came here to study political democracy. So asking me to talk about his prescient understanding that a race war could derail American democracy is really hard as this response needs a larger political context. To get to this question, we have to broaden our historical perspective to include the writing of the Constitution and the creation of America, the creation of the United States of America. Our constitution itself was born of a political crisis, when our founding fathers – of whom you know I’m quite reverent in lots of ways – believed the country was on the brink of collapse. They convened a grand convention of state delegates with the purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation. By the end of the Constitutional Convention, they had a completely new constitution that radically reformed government and created the United States of America.

And the great contradiction to the project of the founders is that a crass deal over slavery was at the heart of the new constitution. Unable to resolve disputes about slavery, the delegates agreed that the slave trade could continue until 1808. By the time de Tocqueville came to America, then, the issue of where slavery would be allowed to expand as the country grew and new states came into the Union had already caused a political crisis. And the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was the result of that (unresolved) political crisis. And that had happened seven or eight years before de Tocqueville arrived here.

So we see that, many times, the issue of slavery and, later on, the issue of race, has come to the fore in the country, and every time people spend a lot of time trying to solve it. But it’s never resolved; all of the solutions are temporary, but everybody always thinks they're forever. Just so the Missouri Compromise, which made a solution that only lasted until the 1850s. But when de Tocqueville came, most Americans thought that issue had been solved. The Missouri Compromise put the issue of slavery on the back burner again. But de Tocqueville, as an outsider, was smart enough to see that the compromise was only a temporary fix. And because he traveled everywhere, north and south, he understood slavery as the contradiction at the heart of America. Seeing this contradiction, de Tocqueville understood that the issue of slavery was still simmering in the 1830s and posed a threat to American democracy. And of course, the Civil War broke out in the 1860s.

Lori:

And so today, we are seeing a repetition of these two historical national crises: the civil war and race, the New Deal and capitalism?

Donna:

Still here.

Lori:

So these two issues have been through lines running through the American political psyche? And, never really resolved, they are re-erupting and again polarizing the country?

Can we connect these crises re-erupting to something else I have heard you talk about: how the moments of major national crisis and political rupture have brought about radical destabilization within political party structures, and how this has resulted in political parties reforming themselves – or reformulating into a new party. And a corollary to that: that the political party best able to reform / reformulate and respond to the crisis gained political ascendency? Could you give us just a little bit of a rundown about how we saw that with the political crisis in the Civil War and then with the political crisis leading up to FDR coming into office?

Donna:

Sure. Okay, and as a former academic, I have to give a bow, a reference here. A lot of the way I think about this is shaped by the work of Everett C. Ladd, and in particular his book American Political Parties: Social Change and Political Response. I encountered his work when I was an undergraduate student, and he was the first person I read that put the party system into historical context. So I have to acknowledge that my framework borrows a lot from his work, so I’ll give him credit. But here's the way it goes:

Because of the way our electoral system is structured -- and that's another 40 minutes there -- we have a two-party system. We always have and we always will. One of the reasons for that is that the original issue that caused the party system to form was the ratification of the Constitution, and there were only two sides to that issue: yes or no. And those two sides formed the basis of America's first two political parties: the Anti-Federalists, who opposed the new constitution, and the Federalists, who supported it.

So that's one reason. The other is structural. As long as we elect from single member districts by majority vote, that pushes us into two choices. One person gets everything when they get 51%. So we have always had two parties since the birth of the Republic, and we're always going to have two parties, but they're not always the same two parties. And they don't always compete evenly.

Now I have to admit... I'm a supporter of political parties. Most people hate political parties. What I wish is that the political parties were bigger and mobilized more people than they do, actually. But that's another issue. . .

So: we’ve always had two parties, but they don't compete evenly. And here's why, and this is what I wish more people understood about political parties: the reason they don’t compete evenly is that political parties don't run things. They respond to what bubbles up from the people. Usually, what happens is that one of the political parties catches the general mood and agenda of the country at a particular time. Jacksonian democracy is probably historically one of the prime examples of that.

So one political party catches the mood of the people. And what that means is that the party that catches the mood of the people has a tendency to dominate, especially the presidency, and the tendency has been to rule pretty much continuously for long periods of time. Ladd, if I am remembering this right, refers to these long stretches of party dominance as one party being the sun and one the other party the moon.

But what causes a change in the system is always a big political crisis. And that's the issue that you just spoke about. In terms of the American Civil War, the war was probably inevitable a full decade before it actually broke out. In 1850, there were many people that looked around and went, whoa, we can't solve this. But, because both of the political parties had wings in both the North and the South, and neither party wanted to alienate voters, all through the 1840s and 50s they tried to avoid speaking about slavery.

After the Mexican War, the parties couldn’t avoid the slavery issue because of the Free Soil Controversy. Still, they tried as hard as they could to keep the issue of slavery out of the political agenda and out of anything Washington would deal with. And you can see this same pattern of avoidance today, and this is one of the causes for people saying, wow, there's no difference between the two parties. When no party has clearly tapped into the political psyche, party power rotates without a clear direction in the country. So, in this election, the vote goes to Franklin Pierce. In the next election, the vote goes to James Buchanan. And the parties begin to alternate in power.

When there’s no clear dominant party in the presidency, that’s usually a sign that there’s some large elephant sitting on the couch right in the living room that everybody is trying to cover with newspaper or something. Because each party knows that that elephant in the room is a killer if they can't deal with it. And for some reason, each party thinks they can't, so they try to. . . .

Lori:

Wait just a minute. Let me make sure that I've got this right. If we're thinking about how government is working, there's kind of a zeitgeist, something moving in the country. When a political party is able to respond appropriately to what is moving, is able to really tap into that elephant in the room and address the underlying currents that have been pushed aside and covered up, that political party takes power and keeps it as long things seem to be going well?

Donna:

Right. You want to think about the Republican Party after the Civil War as industrialization becomes the zeitgeist of the whole nation. The Republican Party went from a third party opposing the extension of slavery into the West in 1852 to a party that dominated from 1860 to 1932. And they did it by being the party of industrial expansion. And that doesn't just include the handful of industrial entrepreneurs. It includes lots and lots of immigrants who are pouring into the country for those industrial jobs. The party caught the cultural and social waves coming out of the people. And the Republican party dominated until the industrial cultural wave smashed into a brick wall in 1932.

Lori:

And the brick wall was?

Donna:

The Great Depression.

Lori:

And so then what happened within the political party structures in response to that wave crashing into the brick wall?

Donna:

Party dominance changed from the Republicans to the Democrats in the election of 1932.

Lori:

And would you say that that's in relation to the fact that there was a vacuum in vision and that the reforming -- reformulating -- Democratic Party at that time was able to fill that vacuum?

Donna:

Yes. Yes. What you have to understand is the magnitude of that political crisis. And you also have to understand that the Depression had already begun in 1928 in many sections of the economy when Herbert Hoover was elected president. And what happened in 1932 was a response to the fact that the Republican Party chose not to use the national government to grapple with that crisis.

One of the reasons that the New Deal reforms were able to go through -- and they were radical in terms of what had come before -- was the enormity of the crisis. Every single state government was bankrupt. A third of the banks in America had gone under with people's money in them, and 25% of the workforce was unemployed. And that is what created the wave that knocked Republican party dominance down and put the Democrats in power for the next almost 40 years.

Lori:

So the other thing that I'm hearing in this, which seems to me extremely important for our political moment, is that that wave crashing signifies a deep cleavage in the American psyche itself.

Donna:

Oh, yes. Oh, yes, definitely. One of the reasons the party system can't grapple with deep cleavages is that, if you think of political parties as representing coalitions of interests, then you have kind of a clear delineation. I talked to you before about the fact that the Democratic Party, up until quite recently, has simply been what the textbooks used to call the Roosevelt Coalition from the 1930s. And that coalition consisted of labor unions, women, ethnic minorities. Those are the groups that you think of as forming the foundation of the Democratic Party. But the labor unions, many of them, now generally go with the Republican party. President Biden was able to bring some of them back, but generally speaking, they're in the Republican arena. The rest of the coalition is still in the Democratic Party, but it is pretty hard to win without the labor unions. So deep cleavages in the people undercut the possibility of coalitions.

Lori:

OK, these two things are really popping for me now: the wave crashing hits the wall, and cleavages in American psyche. So how do we know that we have hit another one of these moments? I have heard you speak previously about when the country has flip-flopped between one party and the next, alternating presidencies. If I understand this correctly, this is a sign that neither party has been able to really concretely address the elephant in the room, which means that the cleavages exasperate. Is this the case, and can you talk a little bit more about this and what this means for us at this moment?

Donna:

Sure. Actually, I have for a long time been predicting that we'll have party realignment pretty soon. And that's because I perceive that there are two huge related crises that are looming: climate change and energy crises, and neither party has been able to address these crises. And that, by the way – the fact that neither party is able to address a crisis - is always because of the enormity of what they see happening.

Definitely, climate change is real. I live in Florida, and it’s ground zero for climate change. Climate change is real, but we have a governor here that's stricken it from every single official communication, we are not allowed to face it or try and deal with it, but it's real. And a corollary issue to climate change is energy. I anticipate that there could be energy crises of various kinds, and we’re not dealing with these issues. Instead, the Republicans and the Democrats are pretty much going along their way, and one party doesn't even want you to say the word climate change.

Eventually, we’re going to have to deal with this. So far, the Department of Defense is the only part of government really facing this. The Department of Defense knows climate change is real and has huge implications in a variety of ways. They treat it as a defense issue.

So my assessment is that there will be crises associated with climate change. And the party that grapples with them more effectively than the other party will dominate again for the next 40 years or so. At least, up until now, when the country has weathered a major national crisis, the party that brings the country through crisis has been in power for roughly 40-year cycles.

Lori:

I think that's exactly the place for us to wrap it for today because the next talk is going to be specifically about the emerging future. And where I want to put the exclamation mark and come back to when we start our next interview is the Department of Defense treating climate change as a defense issue.

Donna:

They understand Sea levels are rising. Think about places like Norfolk, Virginia.

Lori:

All right. We're going to pause it here, and that's what we'll come back to for Part II of our series on Meeting Political Crisis as an Opportunity for Transformation.

And then our third and fourth talks will look at the future of democracy, framed around a quote from you that I love: If you believe in democracy, then you believe that people are capable of learning from their mistakes.

Donna:

That's correct.

Lori:

Your ability to see the future with hope, and people as capable of learning and growth, is one of the reasons why, throughout my life, you have been a great inspirations and a source always of hope. And I thank you incredibly for that and for the joy that you bring, even as we look into moments of crisis. Thank you, Donna, and I'm looking forward to our next talk.