Realignments (w/ Timothy Shenk)
Added 2023-01-31 17:37:49 +0000 UTCEarly in Timothy Shenk's absorbing, provocative recent book, Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy, he describes it as "a biography of American democracy told through its majorities, and the people who made them." Looking at American figures from Martin Van Buren to Charles Sumner to Mark Hanna to Phyllis Schlafly and Barack Obama, the book attempts to define the character and conditions necessary for fashioning a durable electoral majority — in those moments when existing partisan and coalitional structures were reshuffled and articulated anew. In other words: a realignment.
In this thrilling conversation, Matt, Sam, and Tim talk through the implications of past realignments and argue about whether something similar is possible today.
Sources:
Timothy Shenk, Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022)
Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton (Harvard University Press, 1993)
Sam Adler-Bell, "The Radical Young Intellectuals Who Want to Take Over the American Right," The New Republic, Dec 2021
Firing Line debate on the Panama Canal (YouTube)
Comments
Great episode. I think there is some evidence of an ongoing political alignment that has happened in wealthier suburbs. e.g. Schumer's infamous dictum about Clinton winning two votes in Philly suburbs, for every vote lost in western PA was a failed strategy in 2016, but there is a clear trend that accelerated in 2018, which appears to have held in 2020 and 2022. It had a significant impact in the 2020 primary as well. e.g. my recollection is that the black vote in absolute terms in the 2020 Democratic primary in South Carolina was nearly identical to 2016 -- however, Biden was able to win decisively thanks to a surge in wealthier white voters (particularly in Mark Sanford's old congressional district, which flipped briefly in 2018 to the Democratic column). In Georgia, even as far back as 2016, there was a shift to the Dems in Georgia's 6th District (not sufficient to flip the seat in 2016, or to win the seat in a 2017 special election, but enough to win in 2018 and hold the seat in 2020). These districts may not be the basis for a transformative majority, but they may be sufficient for the Dems to build majorities in the future. As a side note, I think that Obama was an exceptional candidate, but an absolutely abysmal party leader. My view is that Howard Dean's 50-state strategy was likely a major contributing factor to Democratic wins in 2006 and 2008, and the dismantling of that infrastructure by Obama with the appointment of Tim Kaine as DNC Chair in 2009, a couple years before a redistricting cycle was pure political malpractice. In no particular order, I would also add abandoning ACORN and Obama's decision to wind up OFA (by rolling it into the DNC) as factors; in the policy realm his failure to pass the EFCA (Card Check) legislation didn't help, the too small stimulus 2009 ARRA didn't help, and the absolutely abysmal performance related to foreclosures clearly hurt the party. e.g. when a family loses a home, voting may not be the #1 priority in the next election cycle. It is my belief that the Dems had a chance to effect a generational alignment in 2008, and completely blew the opportunity. I don't put this entirely on Obama either. I think Obama did what party insiders wanted him to do. The plans that were in place for an Al Gore presidency in 2000, were dusted off with some minor updates.
J P 3
2023-03-10 03:40:58 +0000 UTCWhenever Timothy Shenk's voice came on i hit the 2x speed setting. What a delightful chipmunk.
Cleveland Leffler
2023-02-28 20:17:37 +0000 UTCThanks for such a thoughtful comment, Daniel. Your paragraph on "racial constraints" is especially well-taken. (Matt)
Know Your Enemy
2023-02-22 11:03:16 +0000 UTCA little late to the conversation here, but I'd like to echo the praises of Shenk and offer a few thoughts on the Obama discussion. My master's degree focused on the rhetoric of Obama and I have long wrestled with being enamored by his vision and disappointed at his presidency. TL:DR - great episode! I think one of Obama's problems is that he became convinced of his mythology. By this I mean that I think he really did believe in 2009 that he could usher in a new era of politics in Washington. Obama has always had a strong sense of himself operating in history and I think he believed that re-alignment was a major part of the change he'd bring. He had good reason to believe this as the Obama Phenomenon and Obamamania during his campaign is well-recorded. It felt to many like the nation was on the precipice of something new. I think this speaks to Matt's point that for Obama the coalition he brought together was a moral good in itself. Obama believed that he really was ushering in a new era of politics, but this vision met the harsh realities of Washington D.C. He then defaulted to a de-polarized technocratic politics, which naturally evolved out of his unifying narrative and Ivy League education. For all his intelligence, Obama never was much of a policy politician. He played catchup on policy on the 2008 campaign trail, and though he could master the ins-and-outs of the healthcare bill and school Republicans in debates, his vision and narrative of America never had a strong policy package underneath it. "Change" captured a feeling, but did not articulate specifics. This I think led to Obama relying on the expertise of technocrats to produce the change he wanted, the change of carbon tax credits, health-care marketplaces, and bank bailouts. A politics that made sense to his intellect and desire to represent unity. I do believe it is difficult to understate the racial constraints Obama faced as the first Black presidency. Shenk is right that race does not explain everything about the Obama presidency, but it does explain a great deal. Presidential death threats went up 400% in 2009, Tea Party constituents held signs that said "Universal Healthcare = White Slavery" at rallies, and Obama's own reluctance to speak about race all offer a glimpse into the the constraints of race in the "post-racial" era. Not all of these constraints are about backlash. I think the institutional Whiteness of the U.S. Presidency is a significant constraint in itself. This does not to excuse Obama's failures, but race runs through almost everything he does and does not do. Most of all, I think Obama angst and disappointments come from a moment that felt so full of possibility clashing against the depleted political imagination of the aughts and early 2010s. Two decades of the Democratic Party tacking right-ward, a decade mired in foreign wars, and the austerity mindset of the financial crisis all narrowed political thinking. Shenk put it nicely when he said that the Trump victory convinced him American politics had more possibility than he realized. I sometimes wonder what Obama's politics would have been if he had not risen to power in this time of such little political imagination. I'm not sure he ever would have been the champion of the left we wanted him to be, but its easy to fantasize about what his rhetorical skills could have accomplished in an age where universal basic income and medicare for all are much more realistic debates than they were in 2008. A fantasy to be sure. This is a very long way of saying great episode! Thank you as always for your thoughtful discussion.
Daniel D.
2023-02-20 19:48:41 +0000 UTCGreat episode! So small but it’s Dew-Boyz not Dew-Boy
Cosmo Pappas
2023-02-05 18:34:48 +0000 UTCI loved the episode as well, but--for whatever it's worth for a comment four days late--I'm not sure it really WAS reckoned with as much as it needed to be. I'm not sure how else to think about this very obvious parallel between Shor's analysis and Shenk's research except to conclude that, post-2012, lots of leftists became convinced (however much at least some of them properly regret it now) that the Obama coalition--which wasn't really his coalition, but rather the one which the hot-takes made normative--had solved the class problem: the ascendant were on the right side of history, so focusing on the identitarian qualities of the ascendant was the new revolution! Meeting with Silicon Valley VCs to discuss how transhumanism will eliminate racism, etc., was the new organizing. That's a flippant way of putting it, of course, and obviously there was and is a movement in that part of the electorate that mattered (Clinton still did win the popular vote, after all). And yet, no recognition of the costs, of the backlash, of the left populist perspective, and its possible, more enduring and larger coalition, that was lost. If anything, I think our hosts fond memories of being Obama believers weakened the harsh judgment which that moment deserves.
Russell Arben Fox
2023-02-05 00:26:22 +0000 UTC(I should read the book. I like how he thinks.)
Rick Perlstein
2023-02-03 22:56:42 +0000 UTCAlso, the New Deal was highly technocrats. Technocrats is entirely compatible with populism/class politics.
Rick Perlstein
2023-02-03 22:55:09 +0000 UTCRoosevelt's Kevin Phillips, btw: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Howe
Rick Perlstein
2023-02-03 22:54:06 +0000 UTCBook on the Panama Canal debate.
Rick Perlstein
2023-02-03 20:38:41 +0000 UTChttps://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Line-Big-Ditch-Treaties/dp/0700615822
Rick Perlstein
2023-02-03 20:37:59 +0000 UTCHa, thanks Joshua! I'll add that to the show notes above (Matt)
Know Your Enemy
2023-02-02 22:00:31 +0000 UTCI think it's interesting that Shenk's takeaway from the 2012 election (everyone learned the wrong lesson) was basically the same as David Shor and Co. Enjoyed hearing that reckoned with from a more explicitly leftist perspective.
joe
2023-02-02 19:39:37 +0000 UTCCome for Buckley's bloviating intro remarks (so long that Ervin cuts him off!), stay for George Will dressed like he's about to deal cards at a baccarat table..
Joshua Smith
2023-02-02 19:09:04 +0000 UTCLoved this episode. For the Panama Canal sickos out there, the firing line episode Matt references is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZO1bFaRNtk
Joshua Smith
2023-02-02 19:07:58 +0000 UTCWhen Professor Shenk very aptly described Obama's second term as a "black box", I recalled that it was around....2014, I think ..... when Obama himself started uttering the phrase "income inequality". I remember news outlets publishing totally earnest reports whose gist was "This New Thing Called 'Income Inequality' A Growing Problem". And while that exact phrase may have fallen out of vogue, we now hear Democrats (and Republicans, if to a lesser degree) invoke "working people/families" almost as often as they do "the middle class". I don't know where I'm going with this, lol - I'll let someone smarter finish my thought for me!
Matthew Dargay
2023-02-02 05:30:56 +0000 UTCI hear this little voice begging in some of these podcasts, articles and among friends begging for some sort of more realist approach to come through. That we will win if we weren't so online, if we didn't focus only on the national level with Bernie, if we didn't focus on organizing small stuff so much and getting divided and conquered by the major parties or maybe if we focused less on elites and more on grass roots--- wait no, the other way around, wait no! both. Something something how Obama did it, something something why did he fail? If only he stuck to what is really going on, if only we were more tied into what is 'really' going on! There is something off about convincing people to think like you all the time, as if people are all atomistic individuals who are either aware or unaware of their dignity and rights. It's a nice idea, but I have never seen it work in the 'real' world. We all have to live with the fact that a guy like Obama can come in with good intentions and leave them behind buried in the shadow of his coolness, and never repent for leaving them there. It's a lesson in how fragile the realness of universal rights and dignity really is.
Dan
2023-02-01 20:42:33 +0000 UTCThis was a great one. Thank you so much. I especially appreciate the articulation of something that's been on my mind (of course not nearly as succinctly and clearly as Prof. Shenk put it here): yes, things don't look "great"; yes, we're beset by the notion that American society/democracy is going to fall apart imminently; yes, things aren't exactly rigged for pursuit of a just society--but as long as there is a possibility that a better word can happen, it's malpractice not to push for it using the means, the democratic means, available to us. Giving up is not really an option, however imperfect this particular experiment in democracy is, and the way forward may not be obvious to us yet just as it wasn't to pre-1890s Republicans.
Ryan Erickson
2023-02-01 19:38:28 +0000 UTCI've found it much easier to just get the patron rss feed and put that into my podcast app. May be worth trying depending on your platform.
David Savage
2023-02-01 19:30:28 +0000 UTCWow, Prof. Shenk is so incredibly eloquent and lucid. You guys keep amazing me with the quality of the interviews you give and the excellence of your guests. This episode was really remarkable, in a long list of outstanding episodes (each of which forces me to reconsider something about how I perceive the world). I look forward to reading his book!
Alex
2023-02-01 14:18:41 +0000 UTCLoved this episode! One thing this really got me thinking about (among many) is: given the Phyllis Schlafly discussion, I feel like we need a KYE episode on her son Andrew and his notorious project, Conservapedia.
David Savage
2023-02-01 01:07:03 +0000 UTCMatt here. You're right, I'd love to talk about DZ's work at some point. (I've only read the book on conservative parties and democracy in Europe.) Glad you're liking the episode
Know Your Enemy
2023-02-01 00:45:38 +0000 UTCI just spent 20 minutes figuring out (finally successfully) how to download this to my phone. My fault, I suppose, for having an old, used, iPhone7, but still, it was much easier before Patreon moved things around.
Russell Arben Fox
2023-01-31 23:59:02 +0000 UTCThe question of politics is the question that is always on my mind. When I was a political director for acorn/wfp/SEIU at the height of the Obama era I was really focused on the idea of wedges that can be used to educate/organize that group that's less easy to define. In 2023 it almost makes me a pariah to bring up the question because anyone who isn't 100% on board with the left/liberal project is fundamentally a fascist. Thankfully I no longer do politics professionally but I love thinking about it and glad to hear about honest discussion about it.
Julia
2023-01-31 22:15:25 +0000 UTCAspects of this discussion are making me think of Daniel Ziblatt’s “Conservative Dilemma” thesis. I’d love to hear the KYE boys wax lyrical on that topic! Awesome episode so far - incredible work lads!
Dónal Gill
2023-01-31 18:23:28 +0000 UTCThank you - this is a bizarre quality of life downgrade, isn't it?
M
2023-01-31 18:09:24 +0000 UTCIf this affected anyone else, I think the download option got moved to the ellipse at the bottom of the post, instead of near the Patreon audio player.
Chance Phillips
2023-01-31 17:55:47 +0000 UTC
