America is in Rebellion

This rebellion can end one of three ways. In none of them do we restore the status quo.

America is in rebellion. While this rebellion is waged through politics and campaigns, it’s different from normal two-party politics. Two-party politics is about two groups debating how best to reach their common goals. Fights can be fierce, but they’re still internal disputes between people who all accept the system they’re operating within—the institutions, how power works, and who gets to become leaders or elites. Their disagreements are about details, how to manage a system everyone fundamentally supports.

A political rebellion is different. It isn’t about disagreements over how to manage the system, but an organized effort to destroy the system and replace it—its institutions, rules, and rulers. It attempts to accomplish through politics what people used to accomplish through demagogues, street violence, and rough men storming palaces through force of arms. Rebellions are a natural part of human politics. They’re even beneficial. Without regular refreshing, any society eventually turns stale, resists change, or becomes corrupt. What makes a democratic republic special is it can carry out these periodic revolutions through elections instead of violence. That allows us to periodically refresh our society to reform broken institutions, replace bad ruling classes, and channel popular discontent, without the usual slide into decay, followed by violence and upheaval.

It’s important, however, to recognize the difference between politics and political rebellions. It’s understandable that people watching these events play out tend to interpret them as merely frustrating and intemperate bouts of ordinary politics. We’ve never had a popular rebellion in our lifetimes. It’s natural for people to see fights between people calling themselves Democrats and Republicans and presume politics is still operating the same as it always has. While this rebellion has centered around the Republican Party, it isn’t even solely about Republicans. Its energy crosses the political spectrum, flowing with power within parts of the Democratic coalition too. The Republican Party is just its current vehicle, while the source is all those Americans whose interests Republicans are currently, but quite imperfectly, seeking to represent.

Many people would like nothing more than to put this rebellion down to restore the status quo, but that isn’t going to happen. Once a political rebellion gains this kind of critical mass, it’s impossible to ever go back to the way things were—at least not until the discontent and demands for change are met. In fact, there are only three potential outcomes to popular rebellions, and each has useful parallels in our history.

In none of them does the old establishment return to power, restoring the status quo.

OPTION ONE: ANDREW JACKSON’S REBELLION (THE REBELS WIN)

The first way a political rebellion can end is if the rebels win. That’s what happened during America’s first great populist revolt under Andrew Jackson. The rebels took the White House and used their political power to renegotiate the American system. The establishment retreated to become an opposition, which eventually united around its own new ideas for solving the problems Jackson’s rebellion raised.

When Jackson came to Washington during the corrupt Era of Good Feelings, he was disgusted at a system he believed stagnant and corrupt. Many angry Americans agreed with his assessment. The early republic’s dynamic politics of Hamilton and Jefferson was now long gone, with the Federalists defunct and a self-satisfied one-party government in place with officials more interested in petty rivalries over status, wealth, and position. America was growing too, with workers jostling in growing cities and settlers spreading out across the frontier. Ordinary Americans wanted more power, opportunity, and public-spirited government as America had promised.

In 1824, Jackson ran for president to disrupt this system. The establishment found him erratic and unsuitable as president. Jackson was no aristocrat or philosopher like the leaders of the Founding generation, but a self-made man from Tennessee who rose to fame as a military hero. He had a temper. He loathed cities and banks, and was obsessed with abolishing the Second Bank of the United States (something like the Federal Reserve). He adopted disruptive political positions like extending the vote to all men without regard to property, or helping poor workers move west so they could own their own land and control their destinies. The establishment saw him as dangerous and authoritarian, and his ideas as lunacy. Jackson won the most electoral votes in 1824, but short of a majority, so the establishment stopped him from becoming president through a deal negotiated in Congress between the losing candidates that Jackson denounced as a “corrupt bargain.” After four years railing against the system, Jackson finally secured the White House in 1828. His opponents called him King Andrew and feared he would wreck the economy and destroy the republic.

Jackson unleashed an onslaught of policies and major change that permanently shifted control from the elite-dominated early republic to more of a mass democracy. (He also made some decisions, like clearing Native Americans from land to make room for settlers, that are quite controversial today). Over time, however, two interesting things happened. On one hand, Jackson’s movement tempered as those around him, like his Vice President Martin Van Buren, worked to turn his ideas into a working and sensible party—creating the establishment Democratic Party. The opposition also realized it couldn’t rely solely on denouncing the popular Jackson, and needed to present its own ideas responding to the discontent in a different way. Under Henry Clay, anti-Jackson forces united into another new political party with its own ideas about how to spread democracy and prosperity called the Whigs. The old establishment became a party in the system Jackson designed, and a new era of stable politics began.

OPTION TWO: WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN (THE REVOLUTION IS CO-OPTED)

The second way to end a political rebellion is to co-opt it. Through this path, the revolution technically loses, but its ideas are integrated into a different movement for reform. The demands of the revolutionaries get addressed, but in a different way than the original revolutionaries intended. This is what happened during America’s second great populist revolt under William Jennings Bryan.

America in the 1890s was in its Gilded Age, an era of shocking corruption and stagnation. The industrial revolution was transforming America’s agricultural economy, with new industries born from new technologies, growing factories, cities bursting with new immigrants, and railroads spreading across the nation. This economic revolution created new businesses and millionaires in oil and steel, but also shattered the small-town family-farm economy that still supported much of America’s middle class. Politics was still organized around resentments from the Civil War, with campaigns not about solving problems but throwing insults over Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion. Naturally, there was an angry populist backlash, creating a new political party called the People’s Party that started winning governor’s mansions and seats in Congress.

Bryan, only thirty-six, was a former congressman with populist sensibilities from agricultural Nebraska. He walked into the 1896 Democratic National Convention and after a barnburning speech on Populist issues overthrew his party’s establishment and walked out its presidential nominee. Bryan then stormed across America’s small towns to adoring crowds, campaigning on a Populist agenda. His major issue was adopting a bimetallic money policy of dollars backed by silver as well as gold, which was meant to trigger a massive burst of inflation to eat away the debts of struggling farmers while sticking it to banks. The establishment panicked. They didn’t see a young tribune of the people, but an uneducated demagogue whose crazy ideas would destroy the economy. McKinley and his Republicans went to America’s business leaders asking for funds to stop Bryan (more or less inventing modern campaign finance), assembling an unprecedented warchest used to chip away at Bryan’s popularity. Bryan’s rebellion lost, but in a sense it also won.

Bryan’s Populist ideas would now become the Democratic Party’s ideas, and Bryan its dominant figure nominated for president two more times. Not long after Bryan’s campaign, a new Republican president, Teddy Roosevelt, saw the discontent that fueled it and adopted the ideas of an alternative movement also seeking to address that discontent in a different way. This Progressive Movement advanced its own reforms to address the corruption and disruption of industrialization—an 8-hour work day, antitrust controls on national corporations, abolishing child labor, creating public schools and parks, embracing efficiency, breaking up political machines, and the direct election of senators, among many more. This movement would come to dominate the entirety of American politics and government. Bryan lost, but his rebellion won.

This is the second way a political rebellion can go—the establishment heads off the rebels by fulfilling their demands a different and better way.

OPTION THREE: THE CIVIL WAR (AMERICA IMPLODES)

The final way to end a political rebellion is to ignore it, creating the kind of turmoil and chaos that led to America’s Civil War.

By the 1850s, America was in the midst of a moral revolution over slavery. The Mexican-American War claimed vast new territories requiring countless votes on whether to admit new states as slave or free, all while a religious revival called the Second Great Awakening inspired a new generation with the idea that slavery was a moral abomination that must end to create God’s Kingdom on Earth. America’s establishment saw this new energy around slavery as a threat to national stability, and sought to push it off. Leaders tried to pass clumsy deals like the Compromise of 1850 to make the issue go away, which only angered Americans more. These leaders failed to understand that slavery had become a matter of moral urgency and “normal” politics no longer mattered. In 1852, this energy tore the divided Whigs apart and unleashed nearly a decade of national chaos.

Over the coming years, a flood of new parties entered politics. Congress fell into the hands of a coalition led by the angry anti-immigration anti-Catholic American Party—commonly known as the Know-Nothings. Political violence broke out in Bleeding Kansas. America spiraled into instability for almost a decade, until another new party, the Republicans, consolidated support around an anti-slavery agenda, won the White House, and the nation descended into civil war.

By seeking to ignore the discontent and restore a status quo that was already gone, America’s leaders made the inevitable process harder. If a powerful rebellion can’t enact change through elections, like floodwater it will find another route.

IT'S TIME TO CHOOSE A PATH

For a long time, the American establishment was frozen in denial. It insisted this rebellion was just a temporary moment of insanity that could be defeated or outlasted. Once a rebellion is so nationally popular it has seized a major party and the White House, however, the time for marginalizing or pushing it aside has passed. After the shock of the last election, denial moved to bargaining. Perhaps we can buy off the rebels? Maybe abandon a few unpopular policies? Maybe do a better job of governing the system? Maybe buy off people with more stuff? None of that will work. A rebellion doesn’t want small policy adjustments or stuff. It wants to shatter the system to rebuild it, and to replace you from power.

The reality is the establishment and Democratic Party, now in opposition, will never be restored to leadership without addressing the true source of the discontent fueling this rebellion. Americans are no longer happy with their lives in modern America. They face difficult problems the system can’t or won’t address. They don’t trust the system or people running it. They don’t want to overthrow America or the Constitution, but do want to fundamentally reorder the basic foundations of American government and society, as well more representation and power. These people—now a majority—won’t go away until someone listens to them and restores their faith and trust. This must be the focus of reform.

There are only three options, and none of them are going back. Of the three, it seems there’s only one real choice. Whether you like the specific policies and ideas the rebellion is advancing, you need to listen to the reasons people are rebelling and find solutions to their problems. You don’t need to adopt every issue or argument, become a Republican, support the current administration, or embrace conservative or populist politics. The Republicans already represent those ideas in the public square. You must take the complaints seriously and undertake your own agenda of reforms that directly address them—not promise to govern better, or try to buy them off, but actually uproot the parts of the system they reject and fix them in some way. You must act like Teddy Roosevelt who addressed Bryan’s Populist revolt by channeling its complaints into the Progressive Movement’s reforms. This restored America’s two-party system with two parties now competing over how to solve a common set of problems with different policies. That ended the rebellion and restored normal politics.

Rebellions are more than disruptions or threats. They’re signals something is seriously wrong, and it’s time to course correct before the system breaks. Republican democracy gives us this opportunity to address discontent before it eats away at the foundations of our democratic and constitutional order. Perhaps the best course isn’t to run away in fear, but eagerly embrace this change. Given the alternatives, it’s a chance we should embrace.

What do you think about the rebellion? Join the conversation in the comments.