Another great article Frank! This is one of the most thoughtful places for discourse and reflection on the turbulent times for our Republic.
I completely agree that the status quo will never return. The left has gone too far left, the right has gone too far right and the center cannot hold. Frank has written extensively on realignments throughout our history and this time I think the realignment is different for a few major reasons.
More Americans of voting age (~90 million) sat out this last three Presidential elections. Roughly 80% of Americans have told pollsters for decades that "America is on the wrong track." Most Americans are not happy with any of the dysfunctional branches of the federal government (except when their party is in power).
Some argue that our current American division resembles the late 1960s but I would disagree; back in the 60s there were much higher levels of institutional strength/stability across American culture (more Americans went to church/much higher levels of family stability/much higher levels of trust/etc.).
I think we are already in a cold Civil War and the country has become too large and corrupt to effectively manage anymore. It took about 200 years for the Anti-Federalists to be proved correct that the federal government would eventually become an unchecked, bloated imperial blob. The best peaceful solution I believe is to diffuse power from the federal government back to the states (10th Amendment). There are many ways to get there (Article V Convention of States is one way). But we have to lower the temperature in this country recalibrating the balance of power between the federal government and state governments. If anyone is interested, I write more about this in my book (American Restraint) and I highly recommend Frank's book on Realignment!
I really like the substance of Abundance a lot actually. I think it correctly diagnoses a major problem leading to poor Blue state and city governance. They’re right that Democrats need to make this shift to win back trust. (I also like a lot of the people involved in the movement personally).
My only problem is it’s more of a policy solution than a political one. It asks the question of what Democrats should do better. The bigger question however is how do you build a national majority coalition around new ideas that addresses the problems leading to this rebellion and restores thrust in America. Abundance alone while good policy will not do that. I don’t see how without more it unites and inspires 50 percent of Americans as presently constituted alone, unless bound into part of a larger agenda directed to this larger question.
Good analogy. The last thing the democrats need is NIMBY or even worse, degrowth. Both products of fake progressives who want to protect their share of the pie 😎
In addition to the Jackson, Lincoln, and McKinley dispensations you refer to, there were also the "Revolution of 1800" that brought in the Jefferson dispensation, the "New Deal" Roosevelt dispensation and the "Reagan Revolution" Reagan dispensation. These enacted revolutionary change on the scale of the three you mentioned.
They can clearly be seen in plots of data, for example here is a plot of rising voting over time.
You can see jumps in the data for the Jackson rebellion/dispensation, the McKinley dispensation, and just recently, indicating something is going on, another rebellion as you note.
As for Byran's rebellion. It failed. The issue he and the populists championed was promotion of inflation. The discovery of gold in Alaska introduced inflation, eliminating this issue. So they got what they wanted, but because of an extraneous event, not because of their rebellion.
Populists also supported a number of progressive policies such as graduated income tax and direct election of senators. Progressives (a different group than the populists) also supported these things and a lot of other things the populist were not concerned with. This is because the populists were a Red, rural reformers, who had been Democrats and returned to the Democratic party (one of their leaders became a stalwart support of the KKK). The progressives were Blue, urban reformers, who mostly were Republicans (though there were some Democratic progressives like Wilson, who were economically progressive, but socially conservative).
T Roosevelt was a Progressive. Byran* was on the opposing ticket in 1900. The progressive era was not really a triumph of the populist rebellion. An external factor (gold discovery) came to their rescue.
*Byran was not progressive, he represented the pro-creationist side in the Scopes Monkey Trial.
I don't agree with your characterization of Jackson. Jefferson and Madison had formed the republican party (not to be confused with modern Republicans) in opposition to Hamilton's Federalists. The republican opposed tariffs, the central bank Hamilton had established, a standing army. They were the original small government political faction. They were largely agricultural and their vision for the future was an agrarian nation. They were what we would call the Red faction today.
Jefferson won in 1800 and 1804 and Madison in 1808 and 1812. When the 20 year authorization for the First Bank of the US ended in 1811, Madison let it expire. Then came the War of 1812. Madison found financing the war effort very difficult and rued his decision to get rid of the central bank. In 1816 a second central bank was authorized. Not only that but tariffs were passed and America had an army.
In other words Jefferson's republicans were now governing just like Federalists called for. Not only was there a hated central bank, but the government was levying tariffs paid for by farmers, in order to benefit non-farm businesses. Much of this commercial, industrial and financial activity was in the North (Blue America). The Red party that Jefferson had founded had become Blue.
OG republicans were like WTF? Jackson in 1824 was an OG republican who wanted his party back. It was so bad that Monroe had run unopposed in the last election (at least there had been a *choice* in the election before that even if the Federalists got crushed).
Jackson lost in 1824 but won in 1828 and he did bring back as much of the old republicans has possible, founding the Democratic party, a culturally Red, Southern-based, small government party. The remaining republicans, who had become neo-Federalists now called themselves National Republicans and ended up as the Whigs, a culturally Blue, Northern-based, big government party.
I’m not sure what you don’t agree with! This is all more or less correct of course. (In fact I cut some of this about the Federalists from the piece to keep it manageable, and wrote about all this in great detail in The Next Realignment). But the corruption and stagnation of the Era if Goof Feelings was the major driver and well documented in Jackson’s thinking personally. I also however believe the real reason the Jackson movement took off the way it did was about democratization as the country grew and moved west. The early republic was set up as an elite affair intentionally and both Federalists and D-Rs were very elites in their conception of the republic (naturally they had only known monarchy and aristocracy). The principles of the republic clashed with the reality, and was the country grew and spread out from a few colonies to a continent people demanded more real democracy and opportunity. Thus the the energy behind Jackson.
I agree about democratization. My point mostly was Jackson wasn’t a radical, he was really just tried to restore the party of Jefferson and basically founded his own party for that purpose. Yes, he blamed the Second Bank for the Panic of 1819, seeing them as corrupt, so that’s right. We really are pretty much on the same page, I just wanted to emphasize that Jackson wanted to make Jefferson’s party, Jefferson’s party once again.
Frank - another nice piece but, you left out (not, I fear, by accident) FDR & the New Deal. It seems we are experiencing a hybrid of the first (w Trump fulfilling the Andrew Jackson role) and third (w Global Free Trade driven Wealth Concentration and The Friedman Doctrine taking the place of slavery) scenarios. In the space of a little more than a decade, we’ve experienced two global economic shocks stemming from the later - the 2008 mortgage & derivatives driven GFC & the COVID pandemic. The later increasingly being attributable to reckless circumvention of domestic research prohibitions by a Big Pharma dominated scientific regime. Your description of the 1850’s era elite response (‘ignore it’) is disturbingly similar to the aftermath of 2008 & 2020, with the addition of authoritarian measures utilized to stifle dissent. The American working & class has not recovered from the GFC and, the reshaping of the housing market towards private equity landlords has added to their financial decline. Into this space a demagogue has arisen to the incalculable detriment of America and benefit of China. I agree that the Obama coalition has shattered but, I fear the skill set behind the elite is too dependent upon pillage & cannot divert towards building & renewal. The economic chaos resulting from Trump’s policies combined w the Democratic elite’s commitment to preventing a 2nd New Deal will almost certainly lead to bloodshed.
Thank you for the response. I liked the recent piece on the Mugwumps very much too. On the economic track, Gary Stevenson (“The Trading Game”) is gaining attention & YouTube subscribers.
Will you write more about what these 3 paths look like from 2025-2035? What would a civil war look like? Are you talking a genuine hot war, or a divorce for blue and red states? What would a successful rebellion look like? What’s happening RIGHT NOW is not sustainable. There is too much chaos, too much destruction. Too many people are getting hurt. It’s like Godzilla stomping all over DC. I find it hard to believe that the Dems would co-opt some of the MAGA agenda. What matters MOST to MAGA folks are the social issues that Dems won’t budge on. So I guess, at this point, I would bet on civil war.
We are not going down the path of civil war. That only happened once, when half the states chose to leave the union to protect an economy they thought depended on enslaving people. In all the other major turning points (or dispensations, as Michael Alexander calls them above) the majority of Americans eventually worked out common sense solutions. I believe we will do the same now, though it won’t be immediate and will take a lot of effort, including trying to understand and work with people‘s different perspectives and goals. Few people actually would want a civil war as opposed to opening up their minds to listen to other points of view and trying to work things out. That hasn’t been happening so far. But I hope the people will start to realize that the current approach is not working, and is subjecting everybody to alternating periods of having the other half win elections and then use government power to force their views on everyone else. I would like to see a different approach where, instead of battling to seize federal government power to force other people to do what one side or the other wants, we limit the use of government power and work on creating opportunities and space for people to build their own segments of society and the way they want to live, which inevitably is not going to be the same for everyone.
I think we have a greater chance of coming back together as a country if we reduce the scope of how government, especially the federal government, is used to build or alter society and control what people do and say. Closely related to that is reducing the amount of federal government agencies and spending, which are just another way of using other people‘s money, debt, and money “printing“ to pay for things you cannot convince people to voluntarily pay for. There are certainly things that the federal government can and should be doing within its enumerated powers, but the size and scope of the federal government and agencies has grown over the decades far beyond the letter and intent of the Constitution. There are many areas where the use of government power is causing extreme polarization that would not be nearly so corrosive to our republic if left to people to work out outside of the government or through different approaches at the local or state level.
A new civil war probably won't happen. But if it did happen, it wouldn't look like the old one. Another substack writer described it as a 'dirty war' - small scale violence that keeps escalating between shadowy, unnamed groups that steadily spirals out of control.
It would not surprise me if there is a small scale violence and terrorism. That has happened a lot before in our history and always been brought under control. The US went through a wave of that from anarchists in the early 1900s (https://guides.loc.gov/chronicling-america-anarchist-incidents), from the KKK and their fellow travelers from the end of the Civil War through the 1960s, left-wing bombings and assassination in the 1970s (https://www.amazon.com/Days-Rage-Underground-Forgotten-Revolutionary/dp/1594204292), the Whiskey Rebellion, race riots, and other riots (including the wave of riots in the summer of 2020 and the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021). I am an optimist and do not think things will spin out of control now, even if there is some violence (which I hope there is not).
This is the denial I’m talking about! There are no sides. There is just America.
An awful lot of the American people both on the so-called left and right have been clearly saying for years now they’re not happy with the current state and course of America. This discontent has been tearing apart the country for over a decade now, and the intensity and pace is only speeding up, not slowing down. If you can’t see this I don’t know what to tell you.
The insistence this is about “sides” or “teams,” and that’s what matters most, winning some symbolic war over enemies that exists more in people’s minds than reality, is probably the source of the blindness. The good news is there are many American getting to work to eventually get us back in track. I hope someday you’ll join us.
Choose wisely America, choose wisely.
Sadly they are sticking with the fools so far
Another great article Frank! This is one of the most thoughtful places for discourse and reflection on the turbulent times for our Republic.
I completely agree that the status quo will never return. The left has gone too far left, the right has gone too far right and the center cannot hold. Frank has written extensively on realignments throughout our history and this time I think the realignment is different for a few major reasons.
More Americans of voting age (~90 million) sat out this last three Presidential elections. Roughly 80% of Americans have told pollsters for decades that "America is on the wrong track." Most Americans are not happy with any of the dysfunctional branches of the federal government (except when their party is in power).
Some argue that our current American division resembles the late 1960s but I would disagree; back in the 60s there were much higher levels of institutional strength/stability across American culture (more Americans went to church/much higher levels of family stability/much higher levels of trust/etc.).
I think we are already in a cold Civil War and the country has become too large and corrupt to effectively manage anymore. It took about 200 years for the Anti-Federalists to be proved correct that the federal government would eventually become an unchecked, bloated imperial blob. The best peaceful solution I believe is to diffuse power from the federal government back to the states (10th Amendment). There are many ways to get there (Article V Convention of States is one way). But we have to lower the temperature in this country recalibrating the balance of power between the federal government and state governments. If anyone is interested, I write more about this in my book (American Restraint) and I highly recommend Frank's book on Realignment!
I feel like the abundance crowd is the democrat's attempt to be a Teddy Roosevelt. I wonder what are your opinions on the movement.
I really like the substance of Abundance a lot actually. I think it correctly diagnoses a major problem leading to poor Blue state and city governance. They’re right that Democrats need to make this shift to win back trust. (I also like a lot of the people involved in the movement personally).
My only problem is it’s more of a policy solution than a political one. It asks the question of what Democrats should do better. The bigger question however is how do you build a national majority coalition around new ideas that addresses the problems leading to this rebellion and restores thrust in America. Abundance alone while good policy will not do that. I don’t see how without more it unites and inspires 50 percent of Americans as presently constituted alone, unless bound into part of a larger agenda directed to this larger question.
Good analogy. The last thing the democrats need is NIMBY or even worse, degrowth. Both products of fake progressives who want to protect their share of the pie 😎
Another great middle-brow piece. Thanks for writing!
These three rebellions are part of a larger phenomenon, the critical elections leading to new political orders I call dispensations.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/the-importance-of-a-political-dispensation
In addition to the Jackson, Lincoln, and McKinley dispensations you refer to, there were also the "Revolution of 1800" that brought in the Jefferson dispensation, the "New Deal" Roosevelt dispensation and the "Reagan Revolution" Reagan dispensation. These enacted revolutionary change on the scale of the three you mentioned.
They can clearly be seen in plots of data, for example here is a plot of rising voting over time.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd0d29977-c1cb-424f-b305-f9bd539c72c5_471x220.png
You can see jumps in the data for the Jackson rebellion/dispensation, the McKinley dispensation, and just recently, indicating something is going on, another rebellion as you note.
As for Byran's rebellion. It failed. The issue he and the populists championed was promotion of inflation. The discovery of gold in Alaska introduced inflation, eliminating this issue. So they got what they wanted, but because of an extraneous event, not because of their rebellion.
Populists also supported a number of progressive policies such as graduated income tax and direct election of senators. Progressives (a different group than the populists) also supported these things and a lot of other things the populist were not concerned with. This is because the populists were a Red, rural reformers, who had been Democrats and returned to the Democratic party (one of their leaders became a stalwart support of the KKK). The progressives were Blue, urban reformers, who mostly were Republicans (though there were some Democratic progressives like Wilson, who were economically progressive, but socially conservative).
T Roosevelt was a Progressive. Byran* was on the opposing ticket in 1900. The progressive era was not really a triumph of the populist rebellion. An external factor (gold discovery) came to their rescue.
*Byran was not progressive, he represented the pro-creationist side in the Scopes Monkey Trial.
I don't agree with your characterization of Jackson. Jefferson and Madison had formed the republican party (not to be confused with modern Republicans) in opposition to Hamilton's Federalists. The republican opposed tariffs, the central bank Hamilton had established, a standing army. They were the original small government political faction. They were largely agricultural and their vision for the future was an agrarian nation. They were what we would call the Red faction today.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/an-alternate-american-political-spectrum
Jefferson won in 1800 and 1804 and Madison in 1808 and 1812. When the 20 year authorization for the First Bank of the US ended in 1811, Madison let it expire. Then came the War of 1812. Madison found financing the war effort very difficult and rued his decision to get rid of the central bank. In 1816 a second central bank was authorized. Not only that but tariffs were passed and America had an army.
In other words Jefferson's republicans were now governing just like Federalists called for. Not only was there a hated central bank, but the government was levying tariffs paid for by farmers, in order to benefit non-farm businesses. Much of this commercial, industrial and financial activity was in the North (Blue America). The Red party that Jefferson had founded had become Blue.
OG republicans were like WTF? Jackson in 1824 was an OG republican who wanted his party back. It was so bad that Monroe had run unopposed in the last election (at least there had been a *choice* in the election before that even if the Federalists got crushed).
Jackson lost in 1824 but won in 1828 and he did bring back as much of the old republicans has possible, founding the Democratic party, a culturally Red, Southern-based, small government party. The remaining republicans, who had become neo-Federalists now called themselves National Republicans and ended up as the Whigs, a culturally Blue, Northern-based, big government party.
I’m not sure what you don’t agree with! This is all more or less correct of course. (In fact I cut some of this about the Federalists from the piece to keep it manageable, and wrote about all this in great detail in The Next Realignment). But the corruption and stagnation of the Era if Goof Feelings was the major driver and well documented in Jackson’s thinking personally. I also however believe the real reason the Jackson movement took off the way it did was about democratization as the country grew and moved west. The early republic was set up as an elite affair intentionally and both Federalists and D-Rs were very elites in their conception of the republic (naturally they had only known monarchy and aristocracy). The principles of the republic clashed with the reality, and was the country grew and spread out from a few colonies to a continent people demanded more real democracy and opportunity. Thus the the energy behind Jackson.
I agree about democratization. My point mostly was Jackson wasn’t a radical, he was really just tried to restore the party of Jefferson and basically founded his own party for that purpose. Yes, he blamed the Second Bank for the Panic of 1819, seeing them as corrupt, so that’s right. We really are pretty much on the same page, I just wanted to emphasize that Jackson wanted to make Jefferson’s party, Jefferson’s party once again.
Plus a racist and a overseer of Native American genocide
Frank - another nice piece but, you left out (not, I fear, by accident) FDR & the New Deal. It seems we are experiencing a hybrid of the first (w Trump fulfilling the Andrew Jackson role) and third (w Global Free Trade driven Wealth Concentration and The Friedman Doctrine taking the place of slavery) scenarios. In the space of a little more than a decade, we’ve experienced two global economic shocks stemming from the later - the 2008 mortgage & derivatives driven GFC & the COVID pandemic. The later increasingly being attributable to reckless circumvention of domestic research prohibitions by a Big Pharma dominated scientific regime. Your description of the 1850’s era elite response (‘ignore it’) is disturbingly similar to the aftermath of 2008 & 2020, with the addition of authoritarian measures utilized to stifle dissent. The American working & class has not recovered from the GFC and, the reshaping of the housing market towards private equity landlords has added to their financial decline. Into this space a demagogue has arisen to the incalculable detriment of America and benefit of China. I agree that the Obama coalition has shattered but, I fear the skill set behind the elite is too dependent upon pillage & cannot divert towards building & renewal. The economic chaos resulting from Trump’s policies combined w the Democratic elite’s commitment to preventing a 2nd New Deal will almost certainly lead to bloodshed.
I actually thought a lot about whether and how to consider FDR in this framework! I decided he didn't fit, but I agree it's very arguable.
Thank you for the response. I liked the recent piece on the Mugwumps very much too. On the economic track, Gary Stevenson (“The Trading Game”) is gaining attention & YouTube subscribers.
Seems like talk of a Civil War is becoming popular in social media
Will you write more about what these 3 paths look like from 2025-2035? What would a civil war look like? Are you talking a genuine hot war, or a divorce for blue and red states? What would a successful rebellion look like? What’s happening RIGHT NOW is not sustainable. There is too much chaos, too much destruction. Too many people are getting hurt. It’s like Godzilla stomping all over DC. I find it hard to believe that the Dems would co-opt some of the MAGA agenda. What matters MOST to MAGA folks are the social issues that Dems won’t budge on. So I guess, at this point, I would bet on civil war.
We are not going down the path of civil war. That only happened once, when half the states chose to leave the union to protect an economy they thought depended on enslaving people. In all the other major turning points (or dispensations, as Michael Alexander calls them above) the majority of Americans eventually worked out common sense solutions. I believe we will do the same now, though it won’t be immediate and will take a lot of effort, including trying to understand and work with people‘s different perspectives and goals. Few people actually would want a civil war as opposed to opening up their minds to listen to other points of view and trying to work things out. That hasn’t been happening so far. But I hope the people will start to realize that the current approach is not working, and is subjecting everybody to alternating periods of having the other half win elections and then use government power to force their views on everyone else. I would like to see a different approach where, instead of battling to seize federal government power to force other people to do what one side or the other wants, we limit the use of government power and work on creating opportunities and space for people to build their own segments of society and the way they want to live, which inevitably is not going to be the same for everyone.
I think we have a greater chance of coming back together as a country if we reduce the scope of how government, especially the federal government, is used to build or alter society and control what people do and say. Closely related to that is reducing the amount of federal government agencies and spending, which are just another way of using other people‘s money, debt, and money “printing“ to pay for things you cannot convince people to voluntarily pay for. There are certainly things that the federal government can and should be doing within its enumerated powers, but the size and scope of the federal government and agencies has grown over the decades far beyond the letter and intent of the Constitution. There are many areas where the use of government power is causing extreme polarization that would not be nearly so corrosive to our republic if left to people to work out outside of the government or through different approaches at the local or state level.
A new civil war probably won't happen. But if it did happen, it wouldn't look like the old one. Another substack writer described it as a 'dirty war' - small scale violence that keeps escalating between shadowy, unnamed groups that steadily spirals out of control.
It would not surprise me if there is a small scale violence and terrorism. That has happened a lot before in our history and always been brought under control. The US went through a wave of that from anarchists in the early 1900s (https://guides.loc.gov/chronicling-america-anarchist-incidents), from the KKK and their fellow travelers from the end of the Civil War through the 1960s, left-wing bombings and assassination in the 1970s (https://www.amazon.com/Days-Rage-Underground-Forgotten-Revolutionary/dp/1594204292), the Whiskey Rebellion, race riots, and other riots (including the wave of riots in the summer of 2020 and the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021). I am an optimist and do not think things will spin out of control now, even if there is some violence (which I hope there is not).
No, America is not in rebellion. It’s your narrow little silo that’s in rebellion.
This is the denial I’m talking about! There are no sides. There is just America.
An awful lot of the American people both on the so-called left and right have been clearly saying for years now they’re not happy with the current state and course of America. This discontent has been tearing apart the country for over a decade now, and the intensity and pace is only speeding up, not slowing down. If you can’t see this I don’t know what to tell you.
The insistence this is about “sides” or “teams,” and that’s what matters most, winning some symbolic war over enemies that exists more in people’s minds than reality, is probably the source of the blindness. The good news is there are many American getting to work to eventually get us back in track. I hope someday you’ll join us.