The epigraph to B. Dan Wood and Soren Jordan’s provocative and original book quotes Gouverneur Morris at the Constitutional Convention decrying the idea of treating the propertyless as “faithful Guardians of liberty” through enfranchisement. Four decades later, the authors report, an elderly John Adams echoed Morris in a speech opposing the repeal of property requirements for suffrage in Massachusetts: “[I]f it were left to mere numbers, those who have no property would vote us out of our houses” (p. 16). Such patrician hostility to mass democracy by the Founders, though hardly news, is bracing to behold—but what does it have to do with party polarization, this book’s ostensible subject? Everything, it turns out.
The Federalist outlook on democracy’s danger to property undergirded an enduring political agenda dedicated to shoring up elites’ wealth and power. It also provoked continual opposition on behalf of a “plebian” counteragenda of redistributive economic policies. Such class conflict over the fruits of government policy, according to Wood and Jordan, has not only provided the master story to much of American political history from the Founding to the present. It has also determined the dynamics of party polarization throughout that time.
The unusual structure of Party Polarization in America comes close to constituting two distinct books in one. Four historical chapters provide a sweeping synthetic history of economic policy in the United States since the Founding, while two further chapters employ innovative formal and quantitative research to assess the nature and dynamics of our contemporary era of polarization. The book’s key arguments are, nonetheless, straightforward and cohesive. Contemporary alarmism to the contrary, party polarization is no novel phenomenon but more like the default condition of American politics; the real historical aberration is the depolarized midcentury period from the 1930s to the 1970s. Contemporary polarization at the mass level is real, while both mass and elite-level polarization is asymmetrically pronounced among Republicans compared to Democrats. And finally, class-based economic conflict—more than cultural issues or identity—has driven party polarization dating back to the eighteenth century. Forget the hoary truisms about America’s individualist political culture and uniquely nonideological party politics. Class warfare and party polarization, the authors argue, are actually as American as apple pie.
The book concludes with a welcome call for future research that would “consider party polarization as a system-wide process” while widening the historical scope of inquiry (p. 312). If such attention to history is one of the book’s core strengths, however, its particular outlook on how institutions and processes do (or do not) change over time is also what introduces difficulties.
For all of the book’s rich historical detail, the authors make clear that their story is one of cyclical dynamics following a continuous, normal state. Party polarization, to them, is “an empirical regularity” (p. 304) across American history that has waxed and waned at different times due to consistent factors—namely, “the magnitude of class dissatisfaction” and the behavior of “party entrepreneurs” (p. 313)—and by more or less consistent mechanisms. Parties as organizations, and the nature of political conflict between and within them, are treated similarly in the Early Republic, the Gilded Age, the postwar era, and the twenty-first century.
Such flattening raises as many questions as it answers. Parties as organizations have, in fact, looked and operated differently across eras, from the elite cadres of the Founding Era, to the patchworks of patronage-fueled, locally rooted, mass-mobilizing organizations of the nineteenth-century party period, to the permeable and nationalized networks of issue-driven groups and professional operatives in the twenty-first. Has such variation affected the processes by which class conflict has or has not generated party polarization? The extent to which ideology—the constraint rendering positions consistent across issues—shapes the divide between the parties has also, arguably, changed over time. Wood and Jordan describe the historical ebbs and flows of party polarization as, empirically, “a times series random walk” (p. 4). By contrast, Hans Noel’s research on the construction of political ideologies suggests that a “unidimensional” left–right ideological divide developed over two centuries, as disparate issue positions came slowly to cohere into two distinct ideological clusters. This process happened gradually and fitfully, but consistently in one direction, rather than in a random walk. Such historical changes in both the parties as organizations and the role of ideology as a basis of political conflict help shed light on what may be meaningfully new about our current era.
As Wood and Jordan show, contemporary rates of polarization in Congress mark a return to those seen at the turn of the last century. But Gilded Age and early Progressive Era polarization featured no comparable government shutdowns, constitutional crises, or widespread worries about partisan animosities tearing apart the social fabric. The book’s historical account vividly details how industrialization produced violent class conflict and the emergence of new demands for the regulation of business and the redistribution of resources. But that class conflict and emergent agenda were not neatly reflected in the party system. Bourbon Democrats like Grover Cleveland joined Republicans on monetary and labor policy, important early legislative ventures like the Interstate Commerce Act and Sherman Antitrust Act passed with bipartisan support, and Progressivism ultimately animated major factions within both parties. As work by historians and political scientists alike has suggested, the disciplined voting behavior of politicians in that era reflected the competition between two mighty patronage networks over control of public office and access to the distributive policies of economic development more than it did either a class-based war over redistribution or a battle of clashing ideologies.
Once such ideologies did begin to emerge over the course of the twentieth century, they cross-cut rather than reinforced existing party divisions. That, more than a deep or widespread political consensus about the New Deal social contract, is arguably what accounts for the aberrant party depolarization of the midcentury era. In my own work, I have tried to track the institutional changes and strategic pursuits of key actors that ultimately served to render the parties more permeable to ideological activism and, thus, more reflective of the key ideological divisions in American politics. Contemporary polarization, in which ideological zeal drives rather than mitigates party discipline and procedural brinksmanship, might represent something new under the sun, after all.
Arguably as provocative as the book’s case for the deep continuity of party polarization in American history is its insistence that political economy and class conflict, not a “culture war,” have always defined and driven that polarization. Starting with a forceful reaffirmation of Charles Beard’s class-based analysis of the constitutional Founding, the authors proceed to retell American political history as a perpetual battle between plebians and patricians over governmental largesse. Given a public conversation saturated with angst over culture clashes and political “tribalism,” Wood and Jordan’s account provides an invaluable reminder of the enduring centrality of who-gets-what questions to American policymaking and political conflict.
It is sometimes difficult, however, to be sure for whom the authors think economic conflict has mattered and for what reasons those issues should be considered primary in accounting for party polarization. A generation of political historians cataloged the pronounced importance of ethnocultural ties, identities, and commitments in shaping mass electoral behavior during the nineteenth-century party period. And the politics of race and civil rights, along with the rise to salience of new cultural issues in the 1960s and 1970s, played obviously important roles in the story of partisan realignment and repolarization in the later twentieth century. Wood and Jordan acknowledge this, but they portray such issues in the post-1960s context largely as electoral bait used by “Old Guard Republicans” to win votes in the service of a restoration of the pre–New Deal elitist economic agenda. That implies an approach that defines the important axes of conflict in American politics largely in terms of the behavior of political elites and officials making public policy. Such an outlook is eminently defensible, but would have benefited from explicit discussion.
Even limiting the focus to elite cleavages, moreover, still leaves unexplained the one case in American history of political polarization prompting constitutional breakdown and violent conflict: the Civil War. Wood and Jordan exclude from their account an analysis of that conflict and its origins, on the grounds that “polarization over slavery was not about party polarization” (p. 5). But their own grand theory of party polarization is not rooted in an argument about the particular dynamics of parties as such; it is a story of conflict in society manifesting itself in conflict within the political system. The theoretical justification for excluding the Civil War from that story is not obvious. The force of their historical account suffers as a result of sidelining the messy but essential politics of race throughout the centuries, which has been so central to defining who is included in the class of people on behalf of whom the authors’ plebian advocates have waged their war with the patricians.
The political ascension of Donald Trump encapsulates many of these themes. Along with his racially charged and nationalist appeals, Trump on the campaign trail espoused a number of plebian economic positions—protecting entitlements, taxing hedge fund managers, plowing money into infrastructure. Such positions were not accidents. While Wood and Jordan convincingly demonstrate significant movement to the right on economic issues among many cue-taking Republican voters, the GOP base remains divided on economics, leaving a receptive audience for Trump’s heterodoxy. The actual policy record of GOP governance under Trump, by contrast, has proved anything but heterodox, moving uniformly in a radically regressive direction. So far, Trump in office has served loyally as a patricians’ populist.
The bait and switch ironically recalls the Founders’ old arguments against popular suffrage. Common people become “the dupes of pretended patriots,” Wood and Jordan quote Elbridge Gerry in 1787, “daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions, by the false reports circulated by designing men” (p. 213). Is the reader mistaken in detecting from the authors a hint of rueful agreement with this sentiment?
