Transforming Our Political Order

 

The recent overwhelming Democratic conquest of the midterm political map has been repeatedly compared to the 1974 post-Watergate Democratic midterm landslide. That is an accurate analogy in terms of the size and scope of the Democrats' electoral sweep. It should not, however, serve as a particularly attractive analogy for Democrats, at least not  in terms of any hopes they might have for a transformative political realignment. Remember what happened after 1974! Yes, the Democrats followed up their 1974 midterm win with a presidential win in 1976. But Jimmy Carter's monumentally failed presidency proved to be the end of Democratic hegemony, the definitive end of the old New Deal political order. In political science terminology, Jimmy Carter was a "disjunctive"* president. He represented the end of the previously prevailing liberal, New Deal political order, which dated back to Franklin D. Roosevelt, but which had been experiencing a catastrophic crack-up in the 1960s and 1970s. In retrospect, the 1974 Democratic landslide, followed by Jimmy Carter's relatively narrow 1976 win, was a short-term fluke, a popular reaction against the Nixon Watergate scandals, rather than a foreshadowing of a longer-term political trend. That longer-term political trend was represented by Ronald Reagan, a "reconstructive"* president whose election in 1980 signaled the transformation of the American political order from FDR's New Deal liberalism to anti-New-Deal neo-liberalism. 

The three pre-Reagan presidents who, I think, were most politically transformative and "reconstructive" were obviously Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR. Those three turned a new political page after the failed disjunctive presidencies of their predecessors, John Quincy Adams, James Buchanan, and Herbert Hoover, whose failures personified the crack-up of, first, the Revolutionary-era patrician political order, then the populist Democratic coalition of the Jacksonian era, and then the post-Civil War Republican coalition. Jackson, Lincoln, and FDR were also transformative in a "small-d" democratic direction, politically affirming and at least initially increasing equality. While also transformative and "reconstructive," Reagan famously differed from those coalition-creating predecessors. Instead of  pushing politics and American society in a somewhat more democratic and egalitarian direction, Reagan's transformative realignment pushed politics and American society in a less democratic, more oligarchic direction. A direct political through line runs from the catastrophic 1980 election to today's polarized, angry, oligarchic politics and society. Transformative presidents and political realignments can go in either direction.

There can be little doubt that the 2026 midterm results reflect an anti-oligarchic political move in a potentially more egalitarian democratic direction. Is this the end of the post-Reagan neo-liberal realignment? Two years ago, it was perhaps plausible to suggest that Donald Trump might be another transformative president, promising some sort of populist, post-liberal, reconstructive realignment in the aftermath of the failed, disjunctive Biden presidency. Undoubtedly, Trump has broken the presidential mold, and the old order will not likely be restored in any recognizable way. Trump himself, however, has apparently acquired his own disjunctive end-of-era appearance.

Of course, contemporary politics has scrambled previous political models in ways which may make those older categories untransferable. Even the conventional shorthand characterization of two-term presidents as successful (with the occasional exception like U.S. Grant) and one-term president as failures, falls apart when we have a president like Trump who (like Grover Cleveland) can count as both. 

* The terms "disjunctive" and "reconstructive," as descriptions of presidents whose failure marks the end of previously prevalent but now cracking up political order and presidents who replace the outdated order with a new one, are derived from Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to George Bush (Harvard U. Pr., 1993, 1997).