Report

American Enterprise Institute

Key Points

In an era of political division, economic anxiety, and social divides, a look back to the period from 1873 to 1896 provides useful insight into our current times, both in the long-term political effects of our current cultural upheavals and the increasingly erratic nature of our politics.

The way parties adapted to increasing tension in the electorate during the 1890s tells us something about the direction our party system seems to be headed. Much of our current politics can be viewed in light of a controversial war, financial collapse, and polarized politics. Our society has transformed from an industrial to informational one, concentrated in urban areas. And our congressional politics have destabilized.

The changes seen in the parties over the past few decades are not accidental and will not be short lived in an era of social upheavals, when citizens are constructing new social orders, and our parties are shifting to address these upheavals. The trend toward populism within the GOP and leftism in the Democratic Party is unlikely to abate.

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Executive Summary

A careful examination of the period from 1873 to 1896 provides useful insight into our current era of political division, economic anxiety, and social separation. The upheavals of our times echo the disturbances of those times, and the effective deaths of the two major parties in the closing years of the Gilded Age warn those who hope the rise of Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren is merely a passing phase.

After the Civil War, America’s economic expansion was halted by the “Long Depression,” which spanned 65 months from October 1873 to March 1879—the longest contraction in US history. All this coincided with a society in flux, as America transitioned from an agricultural republic to an industrialized nation. At the beginning of this period, the US was not well connected: Communication systems were still primitive, education levels were low, and transportation was slow. By the end, a recognizably modern America had begun to emerge, with sprawling metropolises, large-scale manufacturing interests, changed morality systems, and the problems that still plague American urban life.

Yet the parties remained fundamentally unchanged, at least at the presidential level. The parties sought to avoid the major issues of the day by relitigating fights over the Civil War itself and pre–Civil War debates over protective tariffs. At the congressional level, politics were more fluid, and we saw evidence of an increasingly destabilized polity.

This is much like now, as a stable presidential electoral system with candidates litigating issues that have been fought over for the past four decades has masked a much more contentious debate about the direction of society. Congressional elections have become more fluid, as debates over the nature of our transition to an information economy percolates through American society.

The changes we have seen in the parties over the past few decades are not accidental and will not be short-lived. We are living in an era of social upheavals, when citizens are constructing new social orders, and our parties are shifting to address these upheavals. The trend toward populism in the GOP and leftism in the Democratic Party are symptoms of these changes and are unlikely to abate. Future GOP candidates will presumably be more populist than previous candidates and Democratic candidates more technocratic. And in a basically democratic system, that is not such a terrible thing.

Introduction

It began, as these things frequently do, with a war and a financial collapse. When the housing bubble that had built over the previous half-decade burst, it took the global economy down with it. The recession hit at the worst possible time, as society was already struggling to cope with a wave of technological change while assimilating a massive wave of immigration. Sadly, the major political parties proved incapable of dealing with these changes and found themselves refighting the last war, leaving the debate over new issues to outsider candidates. The end result was unstable politics, with congressional elections swinging wildly in short periods.

Much of this might sound familiar to readers, and a casual reader might even mistake the events described above for the period between 2008 and 2018 (assuming the reader were casual enough to miss the report’s title). This, however, also describes the period from roughly 1873 to 1896. This report’s thesis is that this earlier period provides useful insight into our current times, both in the long-term political effects of our current cultural upheavals and the increasingly erratic nature of our politics. It also concludes, to the likely sorrow of many readers, that the trend toward populism in the GOP and leftism in the Democratic Party is unlikely to abate.



Of course, we must be careful when drawing parallels to previous periods of history, especially when we are looking at events 150 years ago. To be clear, the argument here is not that we can expect a step-by-step repeat of late-19th-century American political history. In other words, the report does not take to heart Friedrich Hegel’s famous claim that “great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice,” even if combined with Karl Marx’s famous caveat that these occurred “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”1 Rather, it takes the softer, more American view that “history does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”2

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Notes

1. Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1978), 594.

2. This quotation has been attributed to Mark Twain, although the attribution is widely regarded as apocryphal.