Political History and Theory

The post-World War II era would have looked very different had Henry Wallace become president.

The distinction between totalitarianism and totalism offers valuable insights for China studies and the making of U.S. China policy.

Chinese filmmakers, journalists, and artists are challenging the Chinese Communist Party’s version of history.

The latest generation of African coupists offers definitive proof that the armed forces are the greatest victims of military rule.

The most popular historical analogy for current American troubles is the Civil War era. The second most popular is the Gilded Age. But where the 1850s do not meaningfully resemble today, the 1890s certainly do. Technological change, economic concentration, and rising inequality; political partisanship, financial corruption, and social turmoil; populism, racism, and xenophobia—the similarities are striking. Moreover, the paths the country took out of that earlier crisis offer valuable lessons for what we should do now, and what we should fear.  In the last third of the nineteenth century, the United States was a country in ferment due to three broad trends: economic growth and industrialization, demographic growth and social change, and the rise of mass political participation. These national transformations fed on one another, as did the backlashes they provoked. And the eventual result was the taming of the laissez-faire economy and the suppression of popular democracy.  From 1870 to 1900, the U.S. population doubled from 38 million to 76 million, and by the turn of the century, one in seven Americans was a new immigrant. The population spread across the continent as railroads, steamships, telegraphs, and telephones tied the country together and linked it to the world at large. In the South, meanwhile, the democratizing thrust of Reconstruction increasingly brought formerly enslaved people into the mainstream of regional life.  The combination of modern corporations, industrial research labs, and globalized markets kicked off an unprecedented surge of continuous technological innovation and economic growth. And as usual with capitalist development, all that was solid melted into air. As economic historian Brad DeLong puts it, “Before 1870, you almost certainly had a job very much like that of your father or mother. After 1870, that was no longer the case. A wild ride of Schumpeterian creative destruction gave rise to enormous wealth while destroying entire occupations, livelihoods, industries, sectors, and communities.” The historian Henry Adams claimed that “the American boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900.”   For many of the white, male, Anglo-Saxon Protestants who had long dominated the country, these changes were deeply troubling. Independent farmers and craftsmen had once formed the base of Jeffersonian-Jacksonian democracy; now they were increasingly out of place in the new urban, industrial economy, competing with Catholics and Jews, foreigners, Black people, and women.  The rhythms of the business cycle battered the old middle classes both ways. Booms eroded traditional social structures and hierarchies, while busts left individuals stranded and bereft. Agricultural employment plummeted and the industrial workforce became proletarianized, even as economic consolidation produced huge organizations and giant fortunes at the top of the ladder. “Small shops employing artisans or skilled workers increasingly gave way to larger mechanized factories using more unskilled labor,” writes the historian Charles W. Calhoun in The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America. “American workers found their economic lives reduced from independence to dependence as the wage system of labor came to dominate the workplace.”   Throughout the turmoil, two equally strong patronage-based national parties fought each other to a draw as electoral politics became mass entertainment and a major seasonal jobs program. Historian Jon Grinspan captures the scene in The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865–1915:  Presidential elections drew the highest turnouts ever reached, were decided by the closest margins, and witnessed the most political violence.…The nation experienced one impeachment, two presidential elections “won” by the loser of the popular vote, and three presidential assassinations. Control of Congress rocketed back and forth, but neither party seemed capable of tackling the systemic issues disrupting Americans’ lives. Driving it all, a tribal partisanship captivated the public, folding racial, ethnic, and religious identities into two warring hosts….Republicans tended to support an active federal government, while Democrats denounced “centralism,” but mostly, each side just opposed what the other stood for.  As the mainstream parties let problems fester, the disaffected started taking matters into their own hands and organizing for resistance. Angry farmers and miners joined the Grange, the Greenback and Union Labor parties, and the Populists. Angry industrial workers joined the Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor, and the American Railway Union. And angry moralistic reformers joined the mugwumps, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and the progressives. By the last decade of the century, the nation was starting to boil.  From the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era  In 1892, state militias were called in to put down the Homestead strike. In 1894, federal troops had to be sent in to quell the Pullman strike. The Panic of 1893 triggered a devastating depression, with economic activity dropping 25 percent, unemployment nearing 20 percent, and millions suddenly thrust into privation. Populist Jacob Coxey led the first-ever march on Washington, mobilizing unemployed workers to demand a public jobs program by sending “a petition with boots on.” Authorities quickly dispersed his “army” when it arrived, but the protests seemed an ominous warning about troubles to come (and ultimately gave us The Wizard of Oz as a political allegory).   In the presidential election of 1892, the third-party Populist ticket won over a million votes out of twelve million cast. In the 1894 midterms, the party’s support increased by 41 percent. In 1896, the Democrats coopted the threat to their left by running William Jennings Bryan on a loose money platform. Reformers of many types backed Bryan, but corporate interests gave huge sums to William McKinley, allowing him to outspend his opponent five to one. Republicans won what is still the most expensive campaign in American history and ended up breaking the political deadlock, eventually creating a new economic and political framework.  The Gilded Age’s dynamism and instability triggered economic, communal, and political backlashes, which over time coalesced to produce a semblance of order. Economic populists started to rein in laissez-faire, slowly establishing checks on some aspects of business activity. White nativists moved to restore their waning dominance by disenfranchising Black people and restricting immigration. And progressive reformers gentrified the political system, reducing mass participation and introducing technocracy. Together, these moves led to what would become known as the Progressive Era.   “An incredible transformation of American politics took place around 1900,” Grinspan writes,   reconfiguring a public, partisan, passionate system into a more private, independent, restrained one….The well-to-do victors of the Gilded Age’s class wars…restrained the old system, decreasing violence and partisanship, but diminishing public engagement along with it….From one angle, the new model meant votes for men and women, free of domineering political machines, campaigns driven by somewhat reasoned debate, which empowered skilled executives and administrators to govern aggressively. From another, the new form of American democracy meant a passive electorate of mostly white, native-born, well-off voters, presided over by an inflated president, a distant congress, concealed parties, and busy lobbyists.    How the Second Gilded Age Compares to the First  There are clearly many parallels between then and now. Both the late nineteenth and the early twenty-first centuries saw technological change, increased globalization, economic growth, concentration of wealth, and rising inequality. Karl Marx described the way steam, railroads, and the telegraph had shrunk the world as the annihilation of space by time; in recent decades, the information revolution and digital technology have shrunk the world still further, producing similar vertigo.  Both eras, moreover, saw increased immigration, changing demography, and a decline in standing for less-educated rural whites. And both saw rising populism, racism, xenophobia, and anti-Chinese sentiment. In both periods, a conservative Supreme Court opposed government intervention and reinforced the power of the privileged while a sclerotic constitutional structure impeded reform. Both witnessed the growth of an increasingly raucous and demotic public sphere, first in the nation’s streets and now on its information superhighways. And both featured national alarms over substance abuse and terrorism (alcohol and anarchism in the nineteenth century, opioids and Islamic fundamentalist terrorism in the twenty-first).  But there are differences as well. In the first Gilded Age, there was a concentration of power at the bottom of the scale as well as at the top, with a rise in labor organization and the emergence of powerful unions acting as a counterweight to giant corporations. Today, unions are in decline and contemporary economic elites remain largely unchallenged by serious opposition from below.  And in the first Gilded Age, when the challenge was industrialization and the emergence of the wage economy, a rising country developed new tools to understand and respond appropriately. The spoils system was replaced by a professional civil service, while experts were empowered through the emergence of modern universities, investigative journalism, and the administrative state. In the second Gilded Age, a declining country, facing deindustrialization and the emergence of the gig economy, is retreating into ignorance, culture wars, and performative outrage. Both parties seek to restrict free expression and narrow the boundaries of acceptable discourse, while Republicans also seek to dismantle social protections, shrink the administrative state, and replace a professional civil service with old-fashioned partisan patronage. None of that bodes well for quick resolution of the country’s major problems.  Lessons Learned  By the turn of the twentieth century, the United States was the world’s leading power. It had the largest and most productive economy on the globe and the highest standard of living. The country had developed, in the historian Sean Adams' words, “a form of industrial capitalism …that used large corporate structures, relatively weak unions, and limited government interventions to build a dynamic, but unbalanced economic order.” Largely unfettered markets provided many upsides, including an unprecedented cornucopia of cheap consumer goods and modern conveniences. But capitalism brought downsides too, such as inequality, economic volatility, and social instability. And so, in the early twentieth century, a series of reforms gradually reduced both the precarity of the poor and the privileges of the rich.   The government took on ever-greater responsibility for creating an economic environment in which all citizens could survive and thrive, accepting the need for financial interventions and using increased taxes to pay for increased social services. This process never went as far in the United States as it did in Europe, but by the mid-twentieth century, the mixed American economy looked more like the contemporary social democracies across the Atlantic than its Gilded Age self. Some of these economic restrictions and protections were rolled back by neoliberal reforms in the late twentieth century, but even so a vast complex of state intervention and social insurance mechanisms remained. The second Gilded Age thus took off from a much higher base than the first and its victims experienced much less privation than their predecessors a century earlier.  One lesson the case teaches, therefore, is that certain kinds of reforms can make life better. The sustained economic growth that began in the late nineteenth century has continued ever since, generating astonishing material progress, but the problems of the late nineteenth century have remained as well. Free markets produce vast wealth but distribute their benefits irregularly and unevenly while causing constant social destabilization. The only way capitalism and democracy can peacefully coexist, therefore, is for policymakers in each new era to find ways to sustain economic growth while ensuring society as a whole shares in the benefits.  A second lesson, however, is that other kinds of reforms can make life worse. At the end of the Gilded Age, the United States achieved stability by suppressing social challenges rather than finding ways to accommodate them. The political scientists Robert Lieberman and Suzanne Mettler argue in Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy that as the nineteenth century came to a close, political leaders across the country set out to stifle political competition “by creating new laws and public policies that sharply limited who could participate. In the North and West, ‘progressives’—who sought to make government more orderly—introduced registration requirements that effectively made voting more difficult for less educated people, the poor, and immigrants. Southern Democrats, meanwhile, deliberately pursued disenfranchisement, both by using legal means and by circumventing the rule of law.”   Some of the Progressive electoral reforms, such as the secret ballot, still appear worthwhile, but others now seem elitist, paternalistic, and overly restrictive. And the imposition of Jim Crow stands as one of the great tragedies of American history. “To this day,” Lieberman and Mettler observe, “the United States remains the only functioning democracy in Western history ever to have taken away voting rights from such a large number of citizens who had been exercising them previously…. From 1890 to 1910, the entire South transformed itself from a functioning democracy to a region of authoritarian enclaves.… Once in place, disenfranchisement and the system of American apartheid it promulgated would endure for seventy years.”  The most basic lesson from the Gilded Age and its aftermath is thus one about democratic agency. External or structural force can present problems for the country, but citizens choose how to respond. As the Wisconsin Progressive Robert La Follette insisted, “America is not made. It is in the making.” In the end, therefore, the question is not what kind of country we are. It is what kind of country we want to be.  This publication is part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Project on the Future of Democracy.

The American Revolution wasn’t inevitable.

The thirteenth annual Independence Day trivia quiz from The Water’s Edge.

American politics turned hyper toxic several years ago, and ever since commentators have raised the specter of a second civil war. No other historical parallel, it seems, captures so viscerally today’s national division into two hostile camps, each convinced the other poses a mortal threat to the republic.   “Today’s events bear an uncanny resemblance to an earlier decade—the 1850s,” wrote one author in Politico. “It is like 1859,” wrote another in Foreign Policy. “Everyone is mad about something and everyone has a gun.” In 2018, Rasmussen reported that 31 percent of likely voters thought the United States would experience a second civil war within five years. In 2020, the number had increased to 34 percent. In 2022, 50 percent of respondents to another survey thought that there would be civil war “in the next few years.”   The analogy is common. But is it accurate or useful?  What caused the American Civil War  In the 1790s, the newly formed United States was nearly ripped apart by partisan divisions between Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists and Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans. After winning the presidency in 1800, however, Jefferson offered an olive branch, declaring, “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” He adopted some of his opponents’ policies while gutting them as political opposition, successfully governing the country as the patrician leader of a populist uniparty. Jefferson’s successors, James Madison and James Monroe, followed his lead. During six consecutive Virginian administrations, American politics focused on continental expansion and internal development, with the question of slavery kept off the national agenda.   In 1828, Andrew Jackson picked up where the Virginians left off, adding a sophisticated Democratic political machine to the mix. During the 1830s, northern abolitionists began to agitate for reform, but southern slaveholders responded by shutting down the discussion: They blocked the dissemination of abolitionist literature through the mail, prohibited debate on the subject in Congress with a “gag rule,” and physically attacked any antislavery politician who had the temerity to protest.   Eventually, however, continued westward expansion forced the issue to the fore. In 1846, northern Democrats tried to ban slavery from any territory acquired in the Mexican-American War. They failed, but two years later they joined with the Whigs to exclude slavery from the Oregon Territory. In 1850, a grand compromise brought California into the union as a free state while allowing Utah and New Mexico to enter later as possible slave states. Then, in 1854, Congress paved the way for the Kansas and Nebraska Territories to enter but left the slavery question for local residents to decide. Since the results of those decisions would tip the balance of pro- and antislavery forces in the Senate, partisans of both camps flooded into the territories and openly battled for local control. In the next few years tensions rose ever higher, and when antislavery Republican Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in a four-way race in the election of 1860, the southern states seceded. Lincoln refused to accept their decision and the nation plunged into civil war.  How close a parallel?  The situations then and now certainly have some similarities. The abortion issue, for example, shares some characteristics with slavery, from the existential question of personhood and its associated rights to the institutional question of which branch of government should address it and at what level. The Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision protected slavery and its 2022 Dobbs decision unprotected abortion, in both cases raising crucial questions about how the issue should be settled and by whom.  Then as now, immigration was changing the country’s demographic balance and remolding society, creating a populist backlash among the native born. In 2021, foreign-born citizens made up 13.6 percent of the population; in 1860, they totaled 13.2 percent.   In both eras, the country’s rival factions believed they represented utterly incompatible visions of national life and faced the prospect of dominance or doom. In the middle of the nineteenth century, southern states knew that if slavery could not spread to the west, they would collectively become an ever smaller, weaker, and more vulnerable province in a larger, hostile country. Red America today, notes the political scientist Pippa Norris, operating from many of the same geographical redoubts, feels similarly threatened culturally:  At a certain point, the arc of history, which bends toward liberalism, means that traditional values among social conservatives lose their hegemonic status, which is eventually reflected in progressive changes in the public policy agenda evident in many postindustrial societies during the late 20th century, from the spread of reproductive rights, equal pay for women and men, anti-sex-discrimination laws, support for the international rules-based world order based on liberal democracy, free trade and human rights and concern about protection against environmental and climate change…. Since the early 1980s, on issue after issue…the pool of social conservatives adopting traditional views…has been shrinking in size within the U.S. national electorate, from majority to minority status. They are running down an up elevator.   With Republicans and Democrats today increasingly sorted into rural and urban strongholds, the country’s reddest districts and states gain structural advantages within the electoral system that allow a minority of the population to dominate the majority—just as southern slaveholding states were able to do because of the Constitution’s three-fifths clause. From targeted attacks on prominent political figures to street clashes by politically affiliated mobs, political violence today is rising to disturbing levels (even if it has not yet gotten to Bleeding Kansas levels). And both eras feature a refusal by powerful political forces to accept the outcome of a presidential election—via southern secession then and the Stop the Steal movement now.  Still, the differences seem even more compelling. Most critically, the institution of slavery affected every aspect of southern economic, political, and social life. It was the “cornerstone” of everything else in the south, as Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens put it, with racial dominance the organizing principle around which the rest of existence was arranged. This all-encompassing system was geographically limited to a single contiguous region of the country and could be sustained only by constant forceful repression inside and out—hence the whips and chains, the suppression of speech and assembly, and the extraterritorial reach of fugitive slave laws.   For the north, in short, there could be no lasting compromise with slavery, only victory over it or submission to it. Nothing in American life today is truly comparable, and without such a driver, you don’t get another civil war. (In Israel, by contrast, the situation today shares enough similarities with the United States in the 1850s to make the analogy disturbingly relevant there.)  Lessons to be learned  During the Civil War, the Union had a population of 18.5 million, while the Confederacy had 5.5 million free and 3.5 million enslaved. The border states had a population of 2.5 million free and 500,000 enslaved, along with 340,000 Native Americans. The struggle convulsed the continent, with 2.1 million northerners and 880,000 southerners taking up arms. And it was a bloodbath, with 620,000 combined military dead by the end.   The north’s victory ended the south’s “peculiar institution” once and for all, but the reunited country was left to deal with its tragic legacies. A brief Reconstruction collapsed into the resumption of white dominance, and much of the ground gained by the war was lost. The Jim Crow era lasted for generations, and it wasn’t until the civil rights movement in the mid-twentieth century that Black Americans managed to achieve full legal equality. It took still more activism from further generations to press for full social equality, and the struggle continues today.  Crucial issues from the 1850s, in other words, remain unresolved and continue to shape current American life. And longstanding social identities and communal histories fuel contemporary hatreds, as the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA, demonstrated so vividly.   Yet the ways they are operationalized today differ significantly from the past. In actual Civil War battles, tens of thousands of soldiers died. The Charlottesville clashes, fought over the removal of Confederate monuments, and even the January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, resulted in only a handful of casualties. They were tragic and sobering. But they were not harbingers of organized mass political violence.  In the end, the 1850s comparison is both comforting and troubling. The country is not at risk of political collapse or civil war, and has, however slowly, improved dramatically over the long run. Yet somehow it is still replicating the toxic political psychology and extreme emotions of the lowest period in its national history. It is not the 1850s. But it feels as bad.   This publication is part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Project on the Future of Democracy.

The explicit incorporation of the African diaspora into U.S.-Africa policy risks segmenting the community into old and new, with important domestic and international consequences.