What Makes A Realignment? Part 1: An Introduction To The Party Systems.

Throughout the course of American history, there have been six party systems, each with their own hegemonic party, and coalitions. Realignments are rare, only occurring once every forty years or so, (1/)
but when they happen, they cause massive shifts in the electorate that change the electoral landscape for the next two generations, and allow the ruling party’s agenda to dominate for at least a decade, if not more. (2/)
The most famous realigners in American history are Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan, all three managing to remake the United States in their own image, and have their shadow cast over the nation for the next forty years or so. (3/)
Lincoln had the Republican Party, at the time the more left wing party in America, by his side. The Republican coalition at the end of the 19th century consisted of primarily African-Americans and skilled white workers (i.e. businessmen, clerks) and was based off the north, (4/)
while the Democrats were dominated by conservatives, unskilled labourers and former slaveowners, predicated around the South/the former Confederate States of America. (5/)
William Jennings Bryan, the famed populist, smashed this Democratic coalition by throwing the classical liberals out of power, and reorienting the party towards a much more populist era, marking the beginning of the Fourth Party System. (6/)
FDR held together a tenuous alliance that would later reach its peak in the 1964 election, with LBJ’s taking a dominating 60% of the popular vote. The New Deal Coalition consisted of liberals, who anchored in specific liberal groups, especially ethno-religious constituencies (7/)
(Catholics, Jews) in as well as liberal white Southerners, labor unions, urban machines like the ones in NYC and Chicago, progressive intellectuals, populist farm groups and some Northeastern Republicans. (8/)
The coalition began to wane and split in the late ‘60s, beginning with the Vietnam War and the divisive fault line of Civil Rights amongst the Dixiecrats. With the assassination of RFK, the Democrats lost their last hope to save the Fifth Party System, (9/)
the ensuing intra-party civil war causing the Democrats to lose the White House from 1968-1976, even being dealt a 49 state landslide by Nixon, which along with the nomination of Goldwater in 1964, portended the rise of a conservative coalition. (10/)
Carter won not because of his own prowess, but because of the general disgust towards the GOP after Watergate broke. He would later be swept out of of power in the next election by Reagan in a dominating landslide that crushed the remnants of the New Deal coalition. (11/)
Speaking of Reagan, with the 1980 landslide election, the conservative Republicans had finally gained the levers of power after a 16 year long struggle, in an event called the Reagan Revolution. The Republicans, adopting Nixon’s Southern Strategy, (12/)
became the party centered around the states constituting the former CSA, as well as picking up rural voters and suburbia. The Democrats, meanwhile, became the party of African-Americans, Latinos, and urban voters. (13/)
This would not prove to be enough, however, as every Democratic president since Reagan has been forced to work with his deregulatory framework, with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama being moderate centrists, (14/)
a far cry from the bold liberalism of FDR in an era where the word liberal itself was considered dirty We still live in the the Sixth Party System, but Reagan's shadow has been waning ever since Obama took office, hastened by Trump’s repugnance towards suburbia and seniors. (15/)
What Makes A Realignment? Part Two: The Realigning Cycle

In the book “FDR and Reagan: Transformative Presidents with Clashing Visions” there are six roles for presidents to play within the Party Systems. (16/)
Note that multiple presidents can serve a single role within a System.

The first role is Reconstruction, otherwise known as the Realigner. FDR and Reagan served this purpose, having to put the country back together after crises that land Americans in dire straits. (17/)
Reconstructionist presidents generally win some of the largest landslide of their party systems, and set the agenda for decades to come. They wield massive power, and are often ranked the highest in academic circles. (18/)
The second role is Great Son Articulation. These Presidents are usually the Vice Presidents of the Reconstructive presidency, and are primarily tasked with continuing the hegemony of their party while making tweaks and changes. Harry Truman and George H. W. Bush are such. (19/)
The third role is Preemption I, in which the opposing party moderates and seizes the presidency after consecutive landslide defeats, having subsumed themselves into the current paradigm and governing under the shadow of the Realigner. Clinton and Eisenhower come to mind. (20/)
The fourth role is Grandson Articulation. The hegemonic party of the era returns to power after a close election, and continues the path of the Realigner. (21/)
At the same time, cracks begin to show within the Party System. JFK/LBJ fit the mold for the New Deal Coalition, while Bush Jr. serves this role for the Sixth Party System, both having dragged their own parties down by the end of their terms. (22/)
The fifth role is Preemption II. The opposition party sweeps back into power in a landslide that foretells the future coalitions of both parties and seems to inaugurate a new era for the country, but is hampered and only manages to partially break with the status quo. (23/)
Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford come to mind for the Fifth System, while Obama serves this role in the Sixth, both having more radical beliefs than Eisenhower/Clinton, but failing to fully break out of FDR and Reagan's legacy. (24/)
The sixth and last role is of Disjunction. The party that began the realignment is elected one final time, but faces a daunting task of putting together a nation breaking apart at the seams, as well as facing multiple crises at once, (25/)
ultimately proving to be ineffective at best and disastrous at worst, and is defeated by a Reconstructive president in a landslide that heralds a new era for America. Buchanan, Hoover, Carter, and lastly, I believe, Donald Trump are classified as such. (26/)
The Seventh Party System, Part One: Trump And Carter As Political Twins

The 39th and 45th President of the United States could not be more different. The former was regarded as meek, moral, and kind, while the latter is regarded as bombastic, amoral, and cruel. (27/)
However, there is much, much more that binds them together as peas in a pod than what makes them different if you look beneath the surface. (28/)
First off, Carter and Trump were both relative outsiders to the political scene. Carter was a reformer who broke with Democratic orthodoxy, deregulating the economy and lowered taxes. Meanwhile, Trump, during the primaries, was too a reformer who broke with GOP orthodoxy, (29/)
breaking from the consensus of Bush and Romney with radical populist rhetoric that would've seemed unthinkable within the GOP of only four years ago. (30/)
Carter portended the end of the hegemonic Democratic coalition, and Trump may do the same to the current hegemonic one. On paper, Carter won narrowly against Ford, who was the poster boy of the D.C. establishment and closely tied to the corruption of Nixon, (31/)
but looking beneath the surface, it was even worse than that. The Solid South had been in near-open revolt against the Democrats ever since the 1964 election, with LBJ only being able to win them due to the sheer terror Goldwater inspired in the Democrats. (32/)
1968 had seen George Wallace sweep Deep South, and 1972 saw Nixon sweep the nation. Carter was a favourite son of the South, having been Georgia's Governor, and on paper had recaptured the South, but had won Texas and Mississippi, two former safe states for the Democrats, (33/)
by razor-thin margins, in the backdrop of Watergate!
Similarly, in 2016, Trump triumphed against Clinton, an experienced opponent that likewise embodied the establishment by a narrow margin, but the Republican victory was built on quicksand. (34/)
The Rust Belt had only been won by tiny margins, while former solid Republican bastions, like Texas and Georgia while not flipping away yet, were the closest they'd ever been in generations, trending sharply left in 2016 and even more so in 2018. (35/)
Trump’s presidency has been utterly repulsive to key components of the Reagan coalition, causing key components like suburbia and now seniors to abandon the Republicans in droves, mirroring Carter and the Democrats' narrowing margins amongst Southerners. (36/)
This caused the embarrassing failure of the 2017 Obamacare repeal, to say nothing of the COVID stimulus. In hindsight, we should've known that the stimulus wouldn't have passed just from previous experience. Trump had repeal-and-replace, Carter had the water bill fiasco. (38/)
Last, but definitely not least, Carter and Trump both faced a confluence of crises that proved to be overwhelming, and ruined, or in the case of Trump, is ruining, his presidency. Carter faced stagflation and the Iran Hostage Crisis. (39/)
Trump is facing an economic recession, a raging pandemic, and unprecedented racial strife, injustice, and social unrest that is obliterating his presidency to smithereens. (40/)
The Seventh Party System, Part Two: Biden As Reagan

Originally, in March and April, when Biden’s poll numbers were mired in the mid single digits, I felt that Biden would be part of the disjunction that paved the way for a new majority. (41/)
However, with the jaw-dropping amounts of double digits lead for the former Veep, I feel confident in predicting that Biden will be remembered, at least in part, as the Seventh Party System’s inaugurator. (42/)
Biden and Reagan have some similarities. Both would be the oldest presidents ever when/if they were inaugurated. Both too, were called senile. (43/)
What is critical here is that Reagan married disparate groups into his coalition, and Biden is poised to do the same, with possibly the largest coalition the Democrats have had since LBJ. (44/)
The roots of Biden’s polling lead go back to a coalition described in the 2002 book “The Emerging Democratic Majority”, a book that has been mocked and ridiculed for a generation by the GOP but may now come to pass this November. (45/)
In it the book, it was prophesized that a coalition of the growing minority population in the Sun Belt, plus urban voters and blue collar workers in the Rust Belt, would allow the Democrats to break the Southern Strategy and become the natural party of government. (46/)
What they, or frankly, anyone did not see coming was that the Democrats would not only cobble these groups together, but add onto that majority with massive gains in the suburbs as well as, at least for now, seniors, far beyond anything that could be imagined in 2002. (47/)
This isn’t 2008. Schumer is much more combative than Reid ever was, and with the prospective admission of Puerto Rico and DC, the Democrats will likely be able to shape the direction of the US for most of the 21st century. (48/)
The polls show that Biden is likely to have a solid governing mandate, like the one Reagan was given, to end the malaise in government that has persisted for nearly a decade and utilize the trifecta to break the stranglehold on progress. (49/)
Hell, this election even resembles 1980 in the sense that the debates may have sealed the incumbent’s fate. Trump has been dropping like a uranium laced anchor since the first one, and McConnell doesn’t have enough time to extricate the Senate from the sinking ship. (50/)
And with an energized base that will turn out, as well as the lesson of 2010, and the upcoming GOP civil war post-Trump that promises to be as ugly as the 2016 primary, the Biden administration will likely mark the triumphant return of liberalism in the United States. (51/)
In the biblical story of Moses and the 40 year exile, it is said that the Israelites suffered in exile and only returned after passing through the desert. Likewise, the Democratic Party has been in exile since 1980, driven from the political majority by the Republicans. (52/)
There's a sense of history right now for Democrats; that they're nearing the last port in their long exile. There's a sense of 2008 in the air, and then something else. (53/)
Something that they're finally nearing a destination for, something which had eluded two political generations of Democratic leaders (arguably, three, if you counted Carter and his contemporaries; Clinton and his; and then Obama and his). (54/)
This election is poised to be pivotal, just like that of 1980, and that of 1932, and that of 1860. Do not waste your vote. We are witnessing history in the making, and the future too. (55/)
The Seventh Party System, Part Three: Past, Present, and Future

No Party System lasts forever. Trump is proving this right now. But Biden’s coalition is strong enough to save this country, begin depolarization, restore decency and finally, finally cancel the Trump show. (56/)
Would every Democrat have been able to pull this off? No, even with COVID, not everyone would’ve been able to usher in a realignment. I believe there were only a few candidates capable of such a wide lead over Trump, Sanders and Biden coming to mind. (57/)
Many others may have won, sure, but they may have been part of the disjunction, either paving the way for the ascendancy of someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Josh Hawley and change the direction of the Seventh Party System. (58/)
But that's enough speculation about the past. What about the future? Well, I for one think that Biden and Harris will be lumped in as Reconstructive presidents if they are elected, especially considering the speculation around Biden serving one term. (59/)
It's possible, but unlikely a primary from the left would be able to win against Harris though. Harris' VP would then thus play the role of Great Son Articulation, and as for who reprises Eisenhower and Clinton, we'll that's anyone's guess. (60/)
But going with a cycle that repeats around once every 40 years, 2020 will most likely be remembered as the opening chapter of the Second Progressive Era and the Seventh Party System, which will end around the 2060s, and thus the cycle continues anew. (61/)
(END//)

Holy fucking shit, if you got here, you deserve a pat on the back and water. Congratulations on reading through this monstrosity of an essay, and I hope I was able to help educate you! If you found this entertaining, drop a follow perhaps? Thanks!

(END//)
You can follow @Cadeyrnewydd.
Tip: mention @twtextapp on a Twitter thread with the keyword “unroll” to get a link to it.

Latest Threads Unrolled: