Some say that history moves in cycles, but looking at the last 90 years of American electoral history, you’ll find a truly bizarre pattern of similarity between who was nominated, who won the presidency, and what that has meant for ideological shifts concerning how the federal government operates. And what’s more, if this pattern continues it means that we are heading into a multi-term transformative Democratic administration like that of Franklin Roosevelt’s.
To see the pattern it is useful to consider the idea of a “realigning election.” In political science, a realigning election is one that marks a sharp change in how parties operate and what policies are enacted. There is a lot of argument as to which elections qualify, but we’re going to examine two that are seen by many as the most recent: 1932 and 1980. While the party dynamics and policy thrusts of each realignment would seem to be direct opposites of each other, each unfolded in a strikingly parallel way.
For this discussion, I am going to refer to the parties as either Innovative or Reactive. The Innovative Party is the one that advances a new way of understanding what government does, which then becomes dominant. The Reactive Party is the party that eventually largely conforms to this new understanding in order to remain relevant.
In the 1932 realignment, the Democrats were the Innovative party, ushering in the New Deal and an era of large-scale government intervention in the interests of social equality, while in 1980, the Republicans were the Innovators, setting off an era of deregulation and privatization in the interest of economic growth many now refer to as Neoliberalism. What is strange is that each era involved the exact same number of administrations featuring similar types of candidates with similar fates. Check this out:
1932/1980: A president (Herbert Hoover/Jimmy Carter), seen as ineffectual in a time of national crisis and demoralization, is defeated after one term by a former large-state governor who promises a return to happier, more prosperous days (Franklin D. Roosevelt/Ronald Reagan). This new President proves very popular, is reelected in a landslide, and cements a new way of thinking about government.
1948/1988: That president’s vice-president (Harry Truman, George H.W. Bush), although less charismatic and popular than his predecessor, wins election. He is seen as something of a disappointment by die-hard believers in the new understanding.
1952/1992: Following an internal battle over how to respond to the new understanding, the Reactive party nominates an outsider to Washington (Dwight Eisenhower/Bill Clinton) who promises a more centrist approach to governing, accepting the broad themes and policies of the new understanding (Eisenhower keeping the New Deal infrastructure in place and being friendly with labor unions, Clinton doing welfare reform and promising the end of Big Government). He is elected to two terms, cementing this thinking as the dominant understanding.
1960/2000: The Reactive Party nominates the vice-president (Richard Nixon/Al Gore), who is defeated is a very close election by the scion of an important political family (John F. Kennedy/George W. Bush), whose vice-president is an older Washington insider seen by many as a Machiavellian figure (Lyndon B. Johnson/Dick Cheney). This Innovative Party administration lasts for two terms and tries to push the dominant understanding even further (LBJ’s Great Society programs, Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security), but is undermined by their promotion of an increasingly unpopular war in Asia.
1968/2008: Seen as fatally compromised by their association with the unpopular war, the vice-president elected eight years before (LBJ/Cheney) does not run for the presidency. Instead, the Innovator Party nominates a candidate who has always promoted themselves as a clean politician and a fighter for what’s right (Hubert Humphrey/John McCain).
He loses the election to a Reactive Party candidate who has positioned himself as appealing to all factions within his party (Nixon/Barak Obama). This candidate is elected to two terms. Despite the fact that he largely continues to govern by the Innovator Party’s dominant understanding, he is seen by the members of the Innovator party as a corrupt, even un-American, adversary.
1976/2016: The dominant understanding begins to falter. The Reactive Party is riven by a close primary battle between an establishment candidate identified with the dominant understanding administrations of the past (Gerald Ford/Hillary Clinton), and an older candidate who has been seen as an extremist, but now is supported by a groundswell from the grassroots (Reagan/Bernie Sanders).
The establishment candidate wins the nomination, but is then defeated by the candidate of the Innovator Party – a political outsider who is less loyal to the dominant understanding and promotes himself as a truth-teller (Carter/Donald Trump). This new president is ineffective in working with Congress in pushing his agenda, and the country again finds itself in a state of demoralization.
Crazy, huh?
Near the beginning of the 2020 primary season, it looked as if this pattern would continue as it had in 1980, with the opposition party nominating the elderly loser of the previous primary whose image has changed from that of an extremist to that of a charming, idealistic grandfather (Reagan/Sanders).
But Bernie Sanders turned out not to be on par with Reagan as a partisan politician. Reagan was an outsider to the Republican establishment that had been forced to accept the institutions of the New Deal. He was the heir to conservative iconoclast Barry Goldwater, who was the vengeful heir of Robert Taft, whose conservatives had been out-organized by Eisenhower’s moderate, New Deal-accepting insurgency in 1952.
While Bernie’s ideas have precedents in the Democratic Party, he was never a member, so he had very few allies within the party. In fact, he insisted on defining his campaign as against the established party leaders. He did this even when it looked like he could be on his way to a delegate majority. In contrast, Reagan worked to reassure the moderates in his party, including offering the vice-presidency to, first, Gerald Ford and then George H.W. Bush.
Instead, 2020 is shaping up to be a lot like 1932. Then, in the midst of the global crisis that was the Great Depression, the Democrats nominated a mainstream moderate, Franklin Roosevelt, who promised a return to normalcy. FDR’s administration, of course, turned out to be far more radical than anyone anticipated, and created the infrastructure for a level of social democracy that had only been previously proposed by minor, leftist parties like the Progressives and the Socialists.
There is plenty of evidence that this could be the road a Biden administration could take. Biden’s platform, while seeming moderate in comparison with those of Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, is still well to the left of how Obama governed. In addition, the joint task force he set up with Sanders has pushed some policies further left. On top of that, like FDR innovated in response to the unprecedented crisis of the Great Depression, Biden will be forced to innovate in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the increasingly severe side effects of climate change.
But perhaps the bigger questions are raised by the existence of this historical pattern in the first place. What does it mean that our political life unfolded in such a similar way twice in a row, down to some pretty minute details? Will it happen again? Do we have free will at all? I will not attempt to answer these questions here, but they are something to ponder for anyone who seek to understand how social change is made.
Originally posted at changeshapersblog.wordpress.com