Two related topics currently dominate public discourse among educated elites in the United States:  democratic backsliding and political polarization.  Although there are exceptions, this discourse tends to take the post-Watergate consensus about the rules of the political game as the benchmark for American democratic practice, bemoaning the accelerating decline in popular political civility and elite forbearance.

As important as the topic of democratic decline over the past generation is, it’s natural to ask about how the current situation fits into the larger arc of American political history.  When we answer this question, we see patterns repeating, or at least history rhyming.  This doesn’t necessarily counsel despair, but it does suggest that our current troubles aren’t entirely the doing of contemporary actors and circumstances.  And, it suggests that the path out of the current polarization and constitutional hardball will come from the inherent instability of the political coalitions that constitute the parties.

America has experienced similar eras of intense polarization to the present one.  The obvious reference point is the Civil War, both before and after the war.  The Second Party System—generally dated from 1828 to 1854—was designed in part to take slavery off the table and organize national politics along other lines, such as patronage.  The key was the maintenance of cross-sectional national political parties that contained conflict over slavery.  Social and population forces, along with the success of the regional Republican Party, eventually blew the lid off the Jacksonian system, leading to war.

The Civil War may have settled the constitutional issue of federal supremacy over the states, but it didn’t extinguish partisan polarization.  Indeed, the Republican Party, which supplanted the Whigs as the chief rival to the Democrats, was much more cohesive on national issues than the Whigs ever were.  Thus, during the Third Party System that followed, political interests became increasingly aligned with party identities in both the electorate and the government. 

When we use DW-NOMINATE scores to chart political polarization (recognizing DW-NOMINATE’s limitations in charting such things), it is only in recent years that the level of party polarization has matched that of the Reconstruction and Gilded Age years.

High polarization then, as now, coincided with what we would recognize as constitutional hardball and violations of neutral electoral norms.  Consider three examples drawn from national politics from the Civil War to the Gilded Age.

First, following the election of 1862, House Clerk Emerson Etheridge, a southern Unionist with southern sympathies, attempted to shift control of the House to a coalition of border-state Unionists and Democrats by denying the election credentials of a handful of Republicans.  A combination of miscalculation on Etheridge’s part and quick mobilization by Republican leaders nipped this effort in the bud.

Second, from the 1860s to the 1910s, Republicans pursued a strategy of stacking the Senate through the admission of new states to the Union, aiming to resist a rising tide of support for Democrats in House and presidential elections.  Had pre‑war neutral admission principles held, different states would have been admitted to the Union, resulting in different downstream policy outcomes and judicial decisions. 

Third, amid evenly divided national electorates from the mid-1870s through the mid-1890s, contested election cases became a partisan tool in the House of Representatives, typically being resolved in favor of the chamber's majority.  The pattern of contested elections in the Senate was more complicated, but the hardball impulse was clear.

The states themselves also got involved through egregious gerrymanders, mid-decade redistricting, and shenanigans associated with close Senate elections.  In one notable example, the 1896 Kentucky Senate election saw the two legislative chambers, each controlled by different parties, expel minority party members in an attempt to break a deadlock over the election.

Most notable, of course, was Jim Crow, which denied an effective political voice to southern African Americans for most of the period from the 1890s until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. 

The lesson is clear:  contemporary American politics is not the only time when political temperatures were high and parties sought victory by manipulating elections and legislative rules.  In fact, it has been more common than the current discourse on American polarization would suggest.

This brief reflection on American political history prompts two questions:  First, what is it about American politics that invites polarization and a related manipulation of electoral institutions?  Second, what can cause an escape from this downward spiral?

Fully addressing these questions would occupy at least another essay, so I can only suggest some tentative answers.

Considering the roots of polarization up through the Gilded Age, one can’t avoid noticing the problems of managing politics in a large multi-racial and multi-ethnic nation.  Identitarian politics are all over America’s political history, with each generation’s ascendant demographics doing their best to keep down the political aspirations of new Americans.  America’s open door to the world seems to invite successive streams of existential dread among parts of the body politic.

As to the question of escaping the spiral of polarization and the manipulation of democratic institutions, the loosening of partisan polarization in the century following the Civil War occurred when political parties fractured, thereby opening up opportunities for ad hoc bipartisan cooperation.  At the turn of the twentieth century, the Republican Party fractured along progressive/conservative lines; in the mid-twentieth century, deep divisions opened within the Democratic Party, which allowed both a conservative coalition to dampen the policy impulses of the New Deal regime and a coalition of northern Democrats and Republicans to confront southern segregation. 

Each of these rifts was a mixed blessing from a policy perspective, but they reduced the political heat enough to shift attention away from manipulating the rules of electoral institutions and, in turn, produced openings for expanding the electoral system.

A strong argument can be made that the main political cleavage these days is, as in ages past, along the dimension of how comfortable people are with the trajectory of American population dynamics.  From this perspective, it is unclear how rifts within the parties will open up, but history (and theory) suggest they will.