Joseph Lane: Is it 1856 or 1860? (The Past as Political Prologue)
Peter Lawler wrote a fascinating analysis here at the Britannica Blog of eight recent elections that might help us understand this one, and I would like to offer another perspective on the question of historical antecedents and what we might learn from them.
Is this 1856 or 1860?
I may seem to be going further afield than Lawler’s post-1932 suggestions, but I think there is a real sense in which the 1850s might be instructive.
In 1993 Stephen Skowronek of Yale published The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton. This book won a number of major prizes, including the Neustadt Award for the best book published on the American presidency, and it is widely credited with defining the emerging subfield of “American Political Development.”
Skowronek tried to place American presidencies in “political time,” arguing that the rise and fall of “political regimes,” defined by the ascendancy of ruling coalitions, often dictates what presidents can and cannot accomplish. “Reconstructive” presidents who forge new ruling coalitions at crucial junctures in American history have been able to construct new working coalitions and to dictate the basic terms of political debate for generations to come. “Affiliated” presidents work within the coalitions that predecessors have defined for them. “Late Regime Affiliates” generally preside over “Disjunctive Presidencies” in which the various elements of established ruling coalitions unravel, defect, or turn against themselves under the pressure of new issues that do not map well onto the principles or programs that gave birth to the coalition in the first place.
Writing in 1993, Skowronek argued that the “New Deal” regime ended with Reagan’s victory over Carter in 1980. He declined to speculate about the character or likely lifespan of the new regime that took its place, but many suspect that we are watching its death throes today. And, in fact, John McCain appears to have many points in common with the Late Regime Affiliates who Skowronek describes as coming to the fore in the last days of declining coalitions.
In writing about the disjunction of the New Deal Democratic coalition during the Carter presidency, Skowronek notes that Late Regime Affiliates rely heavily on the “reification of technique.” Electoral victory requires that they confront the obvious problems that the ruling coalition, now long-established, could not resolve, but in doing so, they face real difficulties because there are limits to how much they can reject the substantive commitments of the party that they hope to lead.
These late regime candidates promise that if only the government were administered more honestly and earnestly, the problems would disappear. In this regard, John McCain is almost a textbook example. He is forced, by the dictates of party orthodoxy, to hew to the position that he shares a “basic economic ideology” with even the most unpopular of incumbents. His insistence that if only the lobbyists are banned from the halls of power and all earmarks are vetoed, his tax relief and deregulation platform will produce very different results than the Bush tax relief and deregulation platform has generated in the last eight years. There is a decided echo between McCain’s campaign in 2008 and Carter’s run for the Democratic nomination promising “comprehensive reform” and a “thorough housecleaning.”
But, like many Late Regime Affiliates, John McCain’s relationship with his party is tension-filled and problematic. As ruling coalitions age, the willingness of their individual factions to relinquish control over any presidential nomination decreases. They are used to having their way, and nomination battles often devolve into bitter contests between discordant factions that can only be resolved by choosing a candidate that belongs to none of them. In many respects, Carter rose, quite unexpectedly, to the Democratic nomination by being belatedly tolerated by all factions and loved by none, but once in office, his less than perfectly orthodox policy preferences angered no one more than those very factions who were forced to support him as a candidate. One could easily imagine, that if McCain somehow wins, the party faithful may find that they did not really want “an original maverick” and that a hero of the right (his own VP?) may challenge him for renomination in the name of greater party orthodoxy, an old drama enacted when Stephen Douglas challenged first Pierce in 1856 and then Buchanan in 1860 as well as when Ted Kennedy challenged Carter in 1980.
So why the 1856 or 1860 question? In 1856, there were many signs that the Democratic party was disintegrating during the term of Franklin Pierce, but it managed to (barely) eke out one last victory with James Buchanan. Buchanan’s 1856 campaign largely avoided direct discussion of the issues that had demonstrated the incapacity of the previous Democratic administration; relied heavily on promises that increased “probity” and “rededication” of an experienced hand would set things aright; relied heavily on the repetition of old party bromides in contexts where they seemed dated and inexact; and ruthlessly attacked the character and credibility of an inexperienced Republican rival. Sound familiar?
Of course, Buchanan’s “victory” ultimately did the Democratic party more harm than good as its hopelessly moribund coalition splintered under the pressure of dealing with terrible crises that they had helped to create. It is, perhaps, possible that John McCain can manage to win this election, but it is less clear that his “reification of technique,” the promise of a more virtuous and more rigorous application of the same principles that characterized the disintegration of the Republican party under the Bush administration, will solve today’s problems or reunite the fraying strands of the old coalition. Like Buchanan in 1856 or Carter in 1976, McCain might win a victory (although that seems unlikely) that promises to give an old coalition a new lease on life but that in fact only stretches out the slow motion train crash now in progress.