One of the interesting things about the great realignment elections—1860, 1932, 1980—is that the presidents who win them (Lincoln, FDR, Reagan) never run simply against the losing candidate. Nor do they run simply against the party of that candidate. They run against a decades-long regime, which is never simply a party or political regime, but always, also, a social regime. Lincoln ran against the slaveocracy, who had nested in the Democratic Party. FDR ran against the economic royalists, who had found their protectors and agents in the Republican Party. Reagan ran against a complex of “special interests” (civil rights organizations, unions, feminist groups, poverty programs) that had captured the Democratic Party. In repudiating Carter, Hoover, Breckinridge/Douglas—and the Democrats of 1980, the Republicans of 1932, and the Democrats (Southern and Northern) of 1860—Reagan was really repudiating the special interests, FDR was really repudiating the economic royalists, and Lincoln was really repudiating the slaveocracy. You could hear this in their words, and see it in their deeds.
The reason these realignment presidents do this is not simply because they want to gut what they view as a malignant social formation. It’s that they are presented with, and don’t hesitate to seize upon, a golden opportunity when the candidate/party that represents those social formations is at a historically low ebb. The Democrats were fractiously divided between two candidates and two regions in 1860. Hoover and Carter were haplessly presiding over economic crises. Lincoln and the Republicans, FDR and the Democrats, Reagan and the Republicans: all were shrewd enough to see and seize upon their moment. In part because all those candidates and parties had undergone a radical internal transformation (in the case of Lincoln and the Republicans, that involved a break with preexisting parties and the formation of a new party). In order to topple these regimes, these realignment presidents first had to come to power through a major faction fight within or without their party, where they forced one faction to give way to another.
Realignments, in other words, are what are called, in fancy terms, conjunctures. You have an immediate political or economic crisis that, in the hands of the right kind of party, gets turned into a repudiation of decades of rule and misrule and a broader social malignancy. It’s not enough to have a crisis: the 2007 Financial Crisis didn’t generate a realignment; the Democratic Party, despite Obama’s rhetoric, wasn’t interested or ready for that. Things certainly were pushed to the left—relative to both Bush and Clinton—but it wasn’t a realignment. No, it’s not enough to have a crisis; you need a party and persons ready to turn that crisis, rhetorically and politically, into a catastrophe that sets the stage for an entirely new mode of politics.
The great possibility—and potential peril—of the current moment is that we are once again presented with that kind of opportunity. It’s not simply that Trump and the Republicans are a walking disaster. Their disaster opens out onto—reveals—a much deeper social malignancy: the triumph of the business class. I’ve spent the entire morning reading article after article on the GOP’s plans on taxes, the budget, the debt, and the regulatory regime they’re trying to destroy. And what comes away more than anything else is the players. It’s not Bannon or Miller, both of whom seem to be completely sidelined. It’s not even Ryan or McConnell. Almost all of the players are straight from Wall Street, corporate America, the Chamber of Commerce, Heritage, and so on. And it is consistently their interests that are winning in the Trump administration.
What’s also revealed in these documents is just how incompetent and bad these guys are at their jobs. Steven Mnuchin—from Yale, Goldman Sachs, and more hedge funds than I can count—can’t do the simplest thing in Washington because he hails almost entirely from the very class that Republicans and neoliberal Democrats have been telling us for decades knows what it is doing. Remember, in the wake of the Financial Crisis, Obama’s smug and self-important defense of Lloyd Blankfein’s and Jamie Dimon’s multi-million-dollar, year-end bonuses? “I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen.” Well, as it turns out, those guys aren’t so savvy. And when they get political power, they’re even more clueless. That’s important for us to stress. Part of what gave FDR and New Dealers like Rexford Tugwell and Sidney Hillman such élan in the 1930s was their sense that the business class had thoroughly discredited itself. Their sense was: the economic royalists had their chance; it’s our turn now.
We have an amazing, once-in-a-half-century opportunity not simply to discredit and disgrace Trump or Ryan or McConnell or the Republican Party. We have an amazing, once-in-a-half-century opportunity to repudiate the entire business class. They are the authors of our current predicament. They are the doyens of our current moment. They are the social malignancy—like the slaveocracy, like the economic royalists—that needs to be repudiated.
But we can’t do that unless and until we either transform the Democratic Party, as Reagan and the right did with the Republicans in the 1960s and 1970s, or find and found a new party, as Lincoln and the Republicans did in the 1850s.
