| The first five party systems were all characterized by a predominance of trifectas from one party. Two had a large number of splits (The 2nd and 3rd party systems), while the other three had either 12 or 13 trifecta Congresses. The 3rd, 4th and 5th party systems all began with a string of 7 straight trifectas for the dominant party. The Federalists--in the First Party System--were the only party to start off in control of government, but to end up being the subdominant party through the whole of the party system.
Increasingly, I've come to believe that the closest parallel to where we find ourselves today is the Fourth Party System, starting in 1896, which was characterized by prolonged GOP dominance in its early years, which encompassed intense differences in ideology within the party. The result was a ruling party sharply at odds with itself, which was eventually dethroned by the rigidity of its conservative wing: In 1912, the GOP finished 3rd nationwide, behind former GOP President Teddy Roosevelt and his Bullmoose Party.
I do not believe that there is anything necessarily predictive about this resemblance, only that there's something indicative about it: A sound majority does not ensure anything in itself, and life can be full of surprises. Despite what happened later on, Roosevelt's presidency did leave a lasting progressive legacy in its wake.
In general, two terms of trifecta rule seem to be necessary to leave a truly substantial, lasting legacy. There have only been six periods of US history that have seen four or more trifecta congresses back-to-back:
1800-1824, which established the dominance of the decentralist Democratic-Republican vision; 1860-1872, which won the Civil War and established the dominance of the centralized Northern industrial vision; 1896-1908, which stabilized the erratic political economy of the preceding era, producing progressive reforms that did as much or more to blunt more radical demands as to place any limits on accumulated power; 1920-1928, which raised the business class to unparalleled political dominance; 1932-1944, which dug us out of the Great Depression, established the American welfare state and won WWII; and 1960-1968, which gave us civil rights law, the Great Society, and all but landed a man on the Moon.
Periods without such long strings of trifectas were generally characterized either by lurching, or by drift. Thus, the Second Party System was generally dominated by the Jacksonian Democratic Party, but it proved incapable of preventing the logic of industrial development in the North from shifting the balance of political power, eventually leading to the abolishment of slavery, following the Civil War. Halfway through the Third Party System, the Democrats broke the total dominance of the Republicans, but the following period of mostly divided government merely saw business run amuck, growing quite powerful, but also increasingly unstable. The Democratic insurgency in the middle of the Fourth Party System proved unstable and deeply self-contradictory, as Wilson's international idealism drove him to criminalize domestic political dissent, effectively destroying his own progressive base. The period from 1946 until the Democratic trifect in 1960 was characterized by a mixture of continued progress along lines laid out from 1932 onward and spasmodic convulsions of rightwing paranoia.
The Great Anomaly
The one truly anomalous period in this story is that of the Sixth Party System, during which there were only three relatively brief trifecta periods--Carter's two congresses, Clinton's first Congress, and Bush's first half-congress (until Jeffords defection) and his middle two (2002-2006). Yet, despite the fact that this period was characterized by divided government, it was a period of a remarkably sustained movement to the right, despite not only the lack of strong trifectas (Bush's congressional majorities were weak historically, as well as relatively brief), but also the lack of any strong underlying shifts in public attitude--as can be seen from GSS data.
Instead, what happened was that conservative power was concentrated and consolidated both within the GOP, and within an organized network of political institutions the likes of which had never been in American politics before. While the number of self-identified conservatives did not increase greatly, their wholesale shift into the Republican Party gave them substantially more power than they had previously enjoyed, and the willingness of top conservative activists and politicians to break the old rules--up to and including federal criminal laws--created substantial shifts in a conservative direction that were never actually ratified by voters.
This began with Nixon's wide-ranging lawlessness, which only became successfully institutionalized by his Republican successors, Reagan (the October Surprise and Iran/Contra), the two Bushes (four illegal wars between the two of them, one and possibly two stolen elections, pervasive fraud and corruption of government, etc), and other leading GOP operatives and political leaders (the Abramoff corruption network, Gingrich's multiple ethics violations, DeLay's corrption of Texas legislative elections, etc.)
Furthermore, while the numbers of conservatives did not substantially increase, their extremism did, feed in substantial part by the failures of their own ideology, which only served to make them more alienated and more angry.
This largely trifecta-less, anomalous aggregation of conservative power--also refelcted in a sharp rightwing shift in the political media--is, I believe the principle under-recognized reason for Obama's astonishingly inept governance in such sharp contrast to his highly polished campaigning. In a comment here this week, historian Robert Cruikshank (Robert in Monterey) pointed to a number of other profound Presidential political disconnects that fall mostly into this same period of history. I will take a closer look at them in the next diary. |
