Elizabeth Tandy Shermer on Timothy Shenk’s *The Realigners: Politicians, Pundits, and the Quest to Govern America*

The self-proclaimed “ ‘freemen of Albemarle County,’ “ where Thomas Jefferson lived, provocatively declared there to be a “ ‘GREAT GOLDEN LINE [sic] ’ “ during Fall 1776 efforts to draft a state constitution.[1] Even though they envisioned a dominion where “ ‘all power is radically in the people,’ “ they recognized there would be a division “ ‘between the Rulers and the Ruled [sic].’ “[2]

Who, when, and how someone was able to traverse that divide is the question running throughout Timothy Shenk’s ambitious new book, The Realigners: Politicians, Pundits, and the Quest to Govern America. “The issue,” he stresses when explaining how twenty-first-century gridlock inspired him, “is structural.” “But these structures didn’t descend from above,” he stresses. “[A] governing class whose power derived from its ability to speak for ‘we, the people’ “ created this system.”[3]

Realigners nevertheless emphasizes what it took for a coalition to win. Shenk focuses on those Americans who built and maintained national electoral majorities or seemed to foreshadow new coalitions from the Early Republic through the present day. This historian spares readers charts and statistics. Chapters instead focus on a so-called Realigner, sometimes a pair. They were, Shenk admits, largely elite white men, which reflects the persistence of racial, gender, and economic inequality that some Realigners railed against and others aided.

Noticeably, only the Realigners in the first half of the book were actually able to govern. These men and women were all politicians. Their ranks include Alexander Hamilton and James Madison who together wrote the Federalist Papers, which emphasized the need for a strong central government, a virtuous political elite, and the importance of a national mandate. Even though they came to disagree, the politically triumphant Democratic-Republicans’ rule included the tariffs and national bank that Hamilton championed. Yet Martin Van Buren emphasized the need to limit the power of the central government in the antebellum era. He reimagined the Democratic Party as the Democracy, which did not include the wealthy elite, radical abolitionists, uncompromising members of the Slaveocracy, early suffragists, and the Indigenous. Those were the men and women threatening not just democracy but the Union itself. There was, of course, a Civil War when Republican Charles Sumner considered himself the representative of African Americans on either side of the Mason-Dixon line. But he and other Republicans governed in years when Southern states had seceded and then faced strict criteria for redemption. Shenk attributes the real expansion of the relatively young Republican Party’s power to a formidable father-daughter duo, Mark Hanna and Ruth Hanna McCormick. They managed to bring together an impressive Gilded Age, Progressive Era, and Roaring 20s coalition of workers, bosses, and newly-enfranchised women into a party unapologetically of business.

Those chapters highlighting what it took to transform national politics and rule are followed by a short “interlude” on the years between Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s re-election and Lyndon Baines Johnson’s decision not to run again. Yet Realigners does not cover how the Democratic Party was remade to be able to win and govern in those pivotal years. “The Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt,” Shenk boldly claims, “was more a mirror image of Mark Hanna’s GOP than a repudiation: a party committed to good jobs and decent wages that worked through political machines and maneuvered carefully around the culture wars of its time.”[4] No one, Shenk insists, had predicted this “crazy-quilt coalition,” which included Americans from the rural South, the arid and coastal West, the urban Steelbelt, and even the Plain states.[5]

But Realigners’ second half does not progress directly into the late twentieth-century’s well-known politicians. Instead, a latent theme in these chapters on W.E.B DuBois, Walter Lippmann, and Phyllis Schlafly seems to be the power of those on the periphery of politics, particularly in a shifting media landscape, to predict or foment realignments even if they could not actually rule. For example, DuBois, over the course of his life, was a socialist, liberal, professor, writer, journalist, NAACP activist, and separatist, who died in Ghana, far from the New England town in which he was raised. This African American intellectual, if not for his race, could have been as towering a figure and political insider as Walter Lippmann, who once flirted with Progressivism, was scarred by McCarthyism, and slow to understand the importance of both the Vietnam War and Civil Rights insurgencies. Those movements repulsed Phyllis Schlafly, who lost her races for elected office but had a tremendous national following, especially after she started publishing a widely disseminated newsletter, The Phyllis Schlafly Report. She became the kind of political kingmaker whom she attacked in her most famous book, Choice Not an Echo (1964), including for former President Donald Trump.

Those three chapters together implicitly reveal that winning did not guarantee a coalition’s or a politician’s ability to govern nationally. Yet Shenk’s captivating portraits of DuBois, Lippman, and Schlafly do not highlight the US political structures that can help explain why twentieth-century thinkers and pundits would be able to reach and persuade Americans better than party leaders or their elected representatives, who actually had the task of governing.

Systemic issues, as Shenk emphasizes in the introduction, are crucial but not emphasized. These chapters seem to suggest that American federalism was of the utmost importance, including its checks on the people’s power (like the Electoral College) and the authority ceded to local and state leaders since the debates Shenk covers in the first chapter on Hamilton and Madison. Especially important to who could rule seem the control legislatures had over voting rights even during Realigners’ interlude on the New Deal and its order. State leaders even retained that power after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and Supreme Court decisions that undermined the malapportionment that could historically be found across the country. That authority enabled elected Democrats and Republicans to gerrymander state election maps because, after every census, the House’s 435 seats needed to be reapportioned (a number set in the 1929 Permanent Apportionment Act, not the Constitution). Those increasingly strangely drawn maps became more common as party membership and voter turnout declined in the late twentieth century, when partisan gridlock in Washington made it almost impossible to pass anything but budget reconciliation agreements, which do not require a supermajority to get past a Senate filibuster.

Attention to those tectonic changes would have added even more depth to Shenk’s fascinating portrayal of Barack Obama. This rich final chapter offers an inciteful read on Obama’s early life as well as the three phases of a presidency that both transformed and divided the Democratic Party. But this rich portrait can also be read as a man flummoxed by the challenges of keeping a coalition together after midterm and presidential elections; the gerrymandering practices that undermines the ability of a Congressional majority to rule; and the Constitutional limits on the president’s power. Obama, for example, actually came into office with a supermajority that was, nonetheless, slimmer than Roosevelt and Johnson had in the years covered in Shenk’s interlude. He had enough votes to get the 2010 Affordable Care Act (better known as Obamacare) through tense budget negotiations in 2010. Months later, Democrats lost a lot of seats in Congress as well as legislatures that would soon need to redraw voting districts.

Even though Shenk does not delve into the structural issues that have historically made traversing the Golden Line challenging, Realigners still emphasizes important continuities in US politics since the Founding. His Realigners, for example, accept and even celebrate conflict, not consensus. This theme implicitly and importantly critiques a term in twentieth-century political history that has remained powerful despite all the work done on the divisions within and between the Far Right, conservatives, liberals, and leftists, no matter which party they voted for or were a member of. These Realigners also styled themselves as prophets of doom or party hacks, which underscores how fears about the state and health of the American experiment have been a part of the past and how the major parties have been vital to how US democracy has functioned. In doing so, Shenk offers a vital long-term perspective on the political chaos that inspired him to write this very readable book.

[1] Timothy Shenk, The Realigners: Politicians, Pundits, and the Quest to Govern America (New York, Farra, Straus and Giroux, 2022), quoted 4.

[2] Shenk, The Realigners, quoted 4.

[3] Shenk, The Realigners, 12.

[4] Shenk, The Realigners, 159.

[5] Shenk, The Realigners, 164.