Cedric de Leon - Crisis!: When Political Parties Lose the Consent to Rule

Crisis!

When Political Parties Lose the Consent to Rule

Cedric de Leon

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Leon, Cedric de, author.

Title: Crisis! : when political parties lose the consent to rule / Cedric de Leon.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019004977 (print) | LCCN 2019006598 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503610651 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503603554 (cloth; alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Political partiesUnited StatesHistory. | CrisesPolitical aspectsUnited StatesHistory. | Legitimacy of governmentsUnited StatesHistory. | United StatesPolitics and government.

Classification: LCC JK2261 (ebook) | LCC JK2261 .L455 2019 (print) | DDC 324.273dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004977

Cover design: Rob Ehle

Cover images: Nineteenth-century political cartoons via Wikimedia Commons

Text design: Kevin Barrett Kane

Typeset at Stanford University Press in 11/15 Brill

CONTENTS

THE CRISIS SEQUENCE

To hear Martin Van Buren tell it, losing the 1840 presidential election was the best thing that ever happened to him. The former president returned to his farm in upstate New York and watched his potatoes grow after directing a troubled economy for four years. Three of his sons lived nearby and his first grandson was born later that summer.

But Van Buren was either fooling himself or putting on a show, for his actions suggested that he was carefully planning a political comeback. He went on a national tour in early 1842, not even a year after his removal from office, to lay the groundwork for the next presidential campaign. This was no mean feat: Americans did not then have the modern conveniences of air or even train travel. On the first leg of his trip, the former president traveled overland down the Eastern Seaboard and then turned west across the Deep South. On the last leg, he traveled north through the Midwest and became the first former president to visit the boomtown of Chicago.

Martin Van Buren therefore had good reason to believe that he would prevail at the 1844 Democratic National Convention. A majority of the partys delegates had pledged themselves to him by 1843. The opposition only helped to strengthen his self-assurance. President William Henry Harrison, leader of the Whig Party, had died in the first weeks of his administration, leaving the White House to his vice president, John Tyler, whose accidental tenure was marked above all by gross ineptitude. Democrats in Congress shared their leaders confidence, so much so in fact that they counted their chickens before they were hatched, electing a staunch Van Burenite, John W. Jones of Virginia, Speaker of the House to push through their presumptive leaders legislative agenda.

Since the 1840s, American voters have become well acquainted with the phenomenon of the frontrunner. The perennial frontrunner in our own time has been Hillary Clinton. Like Van Buren before her, Senator Clinton headed into the 2008 Democratic primary elections with the swagger of an odds-on favorite, while Barack Obama bore the mantle of the quixotic challenger. In January 2007, Mrs. Clinton announced her candidacy for the highest office in the land from the living room of her home in Washington. Seated comfortably on her couch in her trademark pantsuit, the senator from New York said, Im in, and Im in it to win. One reporter for the influential online magazine Politico expressed what was on everyones minds when he called her Hillary the inevitable.

This was not just a theme imposed upon the race by a cynical mass media, for the Clinton campaign itself deliberately cultivated the air of inevitability. Indeed, this seemed to be the core of the campaigns strategy: to shock and awe the American public into a Clinton coronation. The Obama campaign

The Clinton campaign had plenty of reason to crow. Their candidate was a U.S. senator, heir-apparent to the throne of the Democrats leading faction, the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, and First Lady to the hugely popular president Bill Clinton, the partys newest patriarch. George W. Bush had by that point led the country into the quagmire that was the Iraq War and bungled the rescue and resettlement of Americans in Hurricane Katrina. In 2006, the voters issued a signal rebuke to the Bush administration by turning both houses of Congress over to the Democrats for the first time since the early 1990s. It was clear to most observers that whoever became the Democratic nominee would almost certainly become the next president, and no one stood a better chance of winning the nomination than Hillary Clinton.

Of course, we now know that neither frontrunner did what they set out to do. James K. Polk, who was by all accounts a washed-up politician in 1844, was drafted in the last minute to break a deadlocked Democratic convention. The original dark horse candidate, he defeated Van Buren and went on to beat Henry Clay by the thinnest of margins to become president. Barack Obama, though certainly the star of his partys convention in 2004, was a first-term senator and a long shot for the nomination, yet he defeated the most powerful Democrat in America to become the nations first black president.

This book is about the events that followed the unanticipated victories of presidents Polk and Obama and that led in each case to a crisis of hegemony, a moment in which the party system disintegrates into factions and the people withdraw their consent to be governed by the establishment. The major parties of the nineteenth century were coalitions of northern and southern states that united on either side of economic issues, in large part to avoid the politicization of slavery. Keeping the electorates eyes on the tyranny of banks and tariffs meant that voters and legislators paid less attention to the scourge of bonded servitude. Mr. Polks election was a mandate for Manifest Destiny, a program of aggressive territorial expansion that promised cheap land to less affluent white men and a life of economic independence out West. Far from delivering on that promise, however, the further colonization of indigenous lands and what was then still northern Mexico led instead to a toxic debate over whether slavery would be permitted in the new territories. That dispute led to the factionalization of the two-party system, the secession of eleven southern states from the Union, and eventually to the Civil War in 1861.

I use the case of the Civil War to help us make sense of our own time. The nineteenth and twenty-first centuries are by no means historical twins, but there is a shared logic or pattern at work in which the politics of race and economics backfires on the political establishment. Until recently, the contemporary party system studiously avoided the politicization of racial inequality and neoliberal economic policies like free trade and deregulation. That globalization was good, that government was bad, and that the struggle for civil rights was settled became received wisdom. To run afoul of those conventions was to commit political suicide. The Great Recession of 2008, the worst economic downturn since the 1930s, created the conditions for a break with the status quo, and Barack Obama came to symbolize that break. Though he steered clear of civil rights policy, Mr. Obama promised an ambitious regulatory overhaul of Wall Street and an unprecedented expansion of government spending to update the countrys ailing infrastructure and thereby put the unemployed back to work. Far from welcoming this challenge to politics-as-usual, the establishment moved in to suppress the New New Deal. The failed promise of the Obama agenda, in turn, factionalized the major parties, rendering them incapable of stopping Donald Trumps epic rise in 2016. The Trump phenomenon, in other words, is not the beginning of the story but the end result of party polarization and fracture since the Great Recession.