The people who turn up at Sanders and Trump rallies are wed, across the aisle, in bonds of populist unrest. They’re revolting against party élites, and especially against the all-in-the-family candidates anointed by the Democratic and the Republican leadership: Clinton and Bush, the wife and brother of past party leaders. (More attention has been paid to the unravelling of the G.O.P.; the Democratic Party is no less frayed.) There is, undoubtedly, a great deal of discontent, particularly with the role of money in elections: both Sanders and Trump damn the campaign-finance system as rigged and the establishment as corrupt. But to call the current state of affairs, in either party, a political revolution isn’t altogether accurate. The party system, like just about every other old-line industry and institution, is struggling to survive a communications revolution. Accelerated political communication can have all manner of good effects for democracy, spreading news about rallies, for instance, or getting hundreds of thousands of signatures on a petition lickety-split. Less often noticed are the ill effects, which include the atomizing of the electorate. There’s a point at which political communication speeds past the last stop where democratic deliberation, the genuine consent of the governed, is possible. An instant poll, of the sort that pops up on your screen while you’re attempting to read debate coverage, encourages snap and solitary judgment, the very opposite of what’s necessary for the exercise of good citizenship. Democracy takes time. It requires civic bonds, public institutions, and a free press. And in the United States, so far, it has needed parties.

“Hi, welcome to the Uncanny Valley of Pancakes.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

The American two-party system is a creation of the press. “The idea of a party system,” as Richard Hofstadter once pointed out, is an American invention, one that not only tolerates but requires the practice of loyal opposition, political criticism, and organized dissent. It began in 1787, during the debate over the Constitution, a debate waged in ratifying conventions but also, more thrillingly, in the nation’s hundreds of weekly newspapers. Some favored ratification; these became Federalist newspapers. Others, the Anti-Federalist newspapers, opposed it. If it hadn’t been for the all-or-nothing dualism of this choice, the United States might well have a multiparty political culture. But the model held, and the Federalist–Anti-Federalist cleavage, with some adjustments, became the basis of the first party system, which took shape in 1796. It pitted Federalists, who supported the election of John Adams, against the Democratic-Republicans, who supported Thomas Jefferson. In the seventeen-nineties, the number of newspapers, each of them partisan, grew four times as fast as the population. At a time when there were very few national institutions, parties exerted a tremendous, and vital, nationalizing force. Once much maligned as destructive of public life, parties, driven by newspapers, became its machinery. “The engine,” Jefferson said, “is the press.”

The men who drafted the Constitution hadn’t anticipated parties, and made no provision for them. Parties are an add-on. They make their own rules. At first, they chose their Presidential nominees by legislative caucus: each party’s congressional caucus nominated its Presidential candidate. That practice lasted until Andrew Jackson campaigned against “King Caucus,” calling the method anti-democratic, and said that the people needed to have a more direct role in the choice of the party nominee. Jackson came to power through a new form of political communication, the campaign biography: after the publication of “The Life of Jackson,” in 1824 (when Jackson won the popular vote but lost the election), no campaign season was ever again without one. Jackson’s rise also marked the end of the first party system and the beginning of the second: Jacksonian Democrats versus Whigs. Historians like to date the shift from one party system to another to a single year—in this case, 1828, the year Jackson won—but, in truth, such shifts are, by their very nature, gradual. And, while they’re obviously driven by ideological movements, by the emergence of new economic issues and circumstances, and, especially, by changes in the composition of the electorate, they’re also influenced by novel forms of political communication.

So are the methods by which Americans elect their Presidents. The first Presidential nominating convention was held in 1832; state delegates met to make the choice after hearing stump speeches from the contenders. Critics said this was a bad idea, too. “This convention system, if adopted by both parties, will make our government a prize to be sought after by political gamblers,” the governor of Illinois warned.

The second party system lasted until 1854, by which time its inability to address the matter of slavery was proving to be the undoing of the Whigs, and the Know-Nothings, and the Free Soilers, and the Liberty Party. It wasn’t only slavery, though. The system had entered a state of disequilibrium because political communication was undergoing a revolution. Revolutions in communication tend to pull the people away from the élites. (The printing press is the classic example; think of its role in the Reformation. But this happens, to varying degrees, every time the speed and scale of communication makes a leap.) In 1833, refinements in printing technology lowered the cost of a daily newspaper to a penny or two; in the eighteen-forties, newspapers got their news by telegraph; the post office set a special, cheaper rate for newspapers; and, in the eighteen-fifties, newspapers began printing illustrations based on photographs. Meanwhile, literacy rates were skyrocketing. Candidates began campaigning, speaking and writing to the people directly. For a while, party élites lost control, until the system reached equilibrium in the form of a relatively stable contest between Democrats and a new party, the Republicans. Walt Whitman complained about “the neverending audacity of elected persons,” damning men in politics as members of the establishment, but voter turnout rose from 36.9 per cent in 1824 to 57.6 per cent in 1838 and 80.2 per cent in 1840. And so it churned, and so it churns.

The third party system lasted until 1896. (Dating party realignments is an uncertain affair; it depends on how and what you’re measuring. By some accounts, the second party system ended in 1860, and we’re still in the third.) Like the first party system, it came to an end with a populist revolt, which took place during another acceleration in the speed of communication, brought about by the telephone, the Linotype, and halftone printing, technologies that allowed daily newspapers and illustrated magazines, in particular, to carry political news faster, and to more readers, than ever before. The eighteen-nineties saw a war between the Pulitzer and the Hearst newspaper empires; the number of newspapers exceeded ten thousand, including more dailies than exist today, some with a circulation of more than a million. Meanwhile, campaign posters papered the walls of buildings on every city block. In 1896, Puck printed a two-page color spread called “The Poster Craze in Candidateville”: a lanky Uncle Sam strolls down Presidential Avenue, inspecting posters for a slew of Presidential aspirants, among them William McKinley and William B. Allison, the “Farmer’s Friend.” Everyone ran as an outsider.

The disequilibrium of that political moment led not only to the beginning of the fourth party system but also to the birth of the primary system. Once the fourth party system got started, populists and progressive reformers began making the same complaints about the nominating convention that Jacksonians had made about the legislative caucus: the choice of the parties’ Presidential nominees shouldn’t be in the hands of a select group of party leaders, whether legislators or convention delegates. By 1917, states had started holding direct primaries, mini-elections in which all party members get to vote for the Presidential nominee. But the fourth party system was short-lived, toppled by a new media era. William Jennings Bryan recorded campaign speeches on wax cylinders in 1908. By the end of the First World War, the speed and the spread of political communication had picked up again. In 1920, Warren Harding became the last Presidential candidate to send his speeches to voters, on a phonograph record*. His successors turned to radio. Time, the first weekly newsmagazine, débuted in 1923; its aim was to cut the time it takes to read a week’s worth of news down to an hour. Radio started reaching everyday Americans in 1926, when NBC began broadcasting, followed by CBS in 1928. A Presidential campaign speech, by F.D.R., was recorded, and heard and seen, in movie theatres in 1932, the year that marked the end of the fourth party system, as both the Democratic and the Republican Parties rearranged themselves around the New Deal coalition.

The fifth party system began in 1932, the very year that George Gallup started conducting pre-election public-opinion polls and just months before the founding of the world’s first political consulting firm, Campaigns, Inc. These forms of political communication—voters communicating with candidates through polls, and candidates communicating with voters through consultants—characterize the era of the fifth party system, as much as the ideological positions of the parties themselves. Despite the upheavals of the Depression, the Second World War, the Cold War, and Vietnam, the era of national newsmagazines, newsreels, and network broadcasting was a period of remarkable party stability. True, with campaign ads from every side being broadcast night after night, voters might have been muddled. In one television ad from 1956—produced by political consultants, relying on public-opinion polling—a cartoon voter despairs, “I’ve listened to everybody. On TV and radio. I’ve read the papers and magazines. I’ve tried! But I’m still confused. Who’s right? What’s right? What should I believe? What are the facts? How can I tell?” But the parties made their choices clear: “Words have been flying at you hot and heavy,” a comforting narrator tells the cartoon voter, who considers the evidence and concludes, “Me? I like Ike!”