Our New Political Era

We are now clearly in the Seventh Party System. Democrats need to adapt to the new political divide, lest they go the way of the Whigs.

Welcome to my first post on Substack! I’m planning to write my next few blog posts here, rather than my WordPress site. There’s a few reasons for this — I find the interface a little cleaner, and Google has become somewhat broken as a way to discover smaller blogs — but primarily, I believe that the way people use social media is shifting rapidly. The reasons range from technological trends, to political affiliations, to mental health. For now, I think Substack’s focus on long-form writing makes it an ideal place to express my thoughts on the internet. Don’t worry, I’m not planning to monetize this site anytime soon. But you can (hopefully) expect more content from me here in the near future!

There ain’t no party like a political party. (source)

I needed some time to process the 2024 election results. I must admit, I’ve taken a step back from day-to-day political news. Obsessing over the details of every Trump scandal in his first term didn’t accomplish anything other than making me addicted to Twitter. Of course, there’s still a lot of hot takes flying around. Did Harris pivot too hard to the center? Was she weighed down by her past history as a “woke” progressive? Was Tim Walz a bad choice? When you lose, the criticisms are endless.

Democrats saw this election as a referendum on Donald Trump. One final push to make him go away for good. Republicans are happy to declare it as an ideological victory and a rejection of the Democratic Party. Sure, for a lot of voters, that’s a big part of it. But the most important context for this election is that, in nearly every Western democracy, incumbent parties of all political beliefs have lost in the aftermath of the Covid crisis. Fair or not, people are mad at the establishment. Furthermore, the way they get their political news has fundamentally changed. The inescapable reality is that we are in a new political era. For this reason, I’ve grown quite frustrated by the prevailing commentary I’ve seen in the aftermath of the election. Debates over whether Democrats should move left or right feel stuck in an outdated understanding of the contemporary political spectrum. In order to succeed, Democrats need to embrace their new reality. There are new coalitions and new methods of appealing to voters. If they are slow to respond to these changes, they will face dire electoral consequences — a familiar pattern in American history.

Party Systems of the Past

Supporters partied so hard after Andrew Jackson’s inauguration that they took over the White House. (source)

Electoral eras in American politics are often categorized into “party systems.” The First Party System was the generation of the Founding Fathers, when passionate ideological factions fought over the formation of our young nation. As these debates cooled in the aftermath of the War of 1812, the country entered the “Era of Good Feelings” — a time when most national politicians belonged to the same political party (the Democratic-Republicans). But the feelings weren’t so good for everyone. The Panic of 1819 and subsequent economic depression fueled distrust in political and financial institutions. This anti-establishment fervor manifested itself in the candidacy of General Andrew Jackson, a controversial and hot-headed war hero. His supporters formed the Democratic Party, a faction much more organized than those that came before it. Jackson’s victory in the presidential election of 1828 ushered in the Second Party System and a new era of ideological fighting.

Jackson was a wildcard. While he promoted small-government values, in practice, he took the power of the Executive Branch to the extreme — appointing party loyalists to federal jobs, encroaching on Native American land, and dismantling the National Bank. His opposition was slow to respond. A collection of former Democratic-Republicans, states’ righters, and anti-Masonic insurgents, they had few ideological commonalities. They eventually united as the Whig Party, though it wasn’t until 1840 that they found their own populist, war-hero candidate in General William Henry Harrison. The Whigs’ “log cabin campaign” emphasized their nominee’s (slightly exaggerated) frontiersman roots, and finally made the party competitive on the national level. Their coalition remained difficult to manage long-term, however, and the issue of slavery in the western territories gave rise to the Republicans and the Third Party System.

Although the party names, Republicans vs. Democrats, have remained the same since the 1860s, the coalitions have shifted dramatically over time. Most people reading this have spent the majority of their lives in the Neoliberal Era — a redefining of free society to be one driven by free markets (a reaction to perceived overspending and high inflation in the 1970s). Ronald Reagan was the face of this movement in the US, but it was Bill Clinton who later cemented this ideological shift when he declared that “the era of big government is over.” This Sixth Party System was one in which socially-liberal, market-regulating Barack Obama faced off against business-minded, budget-slashing Mitt Romney.

Then What Happened?

(source)

Around the time of the 2012 election, Republicans and Democrats alike came to believe in The Emerging Democratic Majority — a coming era when continued demographic changes (increased diversity, movement to urban areas, and the rise of knowledge work) would make the Democratic Party unbeatable in national elections. Democrats responded by leaning in to social issues, an attempt to maximize their appeal to all interest groups. Republicans, on the other hand, bounced between acceptance and penchant for bending the rules of government to get their way. From this perspective, Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign could have been viewed as an anomaly. The last gasp of a dying brand of conservatism. Instead, eight years later, the fact that Trump has led us into a new political era is undeniable.

And yet, many observers (including, again, leaders of the Republican and Democratic Parties themselves), still interpret Trump’s electoral successes through the lens of the old status quo. It would be easy to regard his 2016 victory as an endorsement of the far-Right by voters. But the reality is, for many swing voters (or, at least, enough to win the electoral college), Trump was seen as an economic moderate relative to former candidates like Mitt Romney — who campaigned on privatizing Social Security and Medicare. Trump had plenty of extreme views, but he wasn’t a party loyalist. It’s important to remember that, before he won the general election, he spent months humiliating a slew of Republican primary candidates. It wasn’t about proving his conservative policy credentials, but rather, sticking a middle finger to the political establishment (see also: the Bernie Sanders’ campaign). The idea that the most likely matchup at the outset of the campaign was Jeb Bush vs. Hillary Clinton — relatives of the very leaders voters blamed for the economic recession and miscalculation on China — was simply unacceptable. That was a feeling that cut through the standard binary political spectrum.

The Seventh Party System

Not exactly the Romney/Ryan coalition. (source)

This misunderstanding of the real divides affecting our politics persists today. The 2024 election was projected to be close, but the media still seemed caught off-guard by the results. In retrospect, their flawed framing of the race only highlights the changes that have occurred over the last few election cycles.

The first major factor in this miscalculation is, once again, media bubbles. After 2016, liberals acknowledged that they had been blind to Trump’s electoral strength. But the problem in 2024, I think, was much deeper. Key voters weren’t people tuned into to opposing news sources; they weren’t tuned into the news at all. Previously, the public had shared sources of information (newspapers, radio, network talk shows), covering a range of topics that had varying interest to each individual. Now, thanks to the atomization of entertainment, people who are bored by politics (clearly inconceivable to me) can bypass major media outlets entirely. The political news they do receive comes from trusted sources that are normally apolitical (influencers, bloggers, podcasters). This can’t be recreated from scratch. These internet figures built their followings over years. The fact that their audiences have fallen out of the Democratic coalition is not an error that can be corrected by a counter-podcast.

This feeds into the issue of attention in the era of smart phones and social media. Given all of the competing forms of entertainment at our disposal at all times, the ability to capture people’s attention, positive or negative, has become one of the most important traits for success in the modern world. In the 2024 election, it was more important than fundraising, endorsements, and crowd sizes. Trump’s ability to stay in the news at all times is how he gains and wields power. It’s a skill he honed while dealing with the tabloids in New York, then as a reality television host. It’s fitting, then, that he is the face of our modern political era.

This shift in the way most people interact with politics should reframe the way we talk about Harris’ 2024 strategy. In any election, there is a debate about the merits of turning out your own base vs. reaching across the aisle. I think the Harris campaign thought they were effectively doing both. After Biden dropped out, Harris quickly consolidated power within the party and generated a surge of excitement. Appeal to the base: check. But when they shifted their focus towards appealing to swing voters, there was a dire miscalculation. The campaign hoped to attract anti-Trump conservatives, thinking that they were the key demographic they needed to win. But those voters weren’t undecided — they already knew they hated Trump because they closely followed the news. They are the Democratic base now. So when Harris took the stage with Liz Cheney, the problem wasn’t that she should have been spending her time bolstering her progressive credentials — it was that she was doubling down on voters who already valued the political establishment, while pushing away those who distrusted the system. To the real swing voters, moments like this proved that establishment politicians of both parties cared more about maintaining the status quo than even their own ideological commitments.

Looking Forward

Democrats could be forgiven for not fighting the second Trump Administration with the fierceness they felt in 2017. A popular vote loss is a huge blow to a party — and a rarity for Democrats over the last thirty years. It changes how we view the nation. As I complained at the top, pundits have been eager to declare whether Democrats should move left of right in response. But I suspect that the party’s next successful leader won’t represent either side of that debate. Building an effective national following in the Seventh Party System means understanding the axis on which our current political spectrum is divided. Authenticity and independence are key. As is the ability to get results despite a calcified bureaucracy. That probably means breaking with party leaders frequently and strategically. But most importantly, they need to be able to stand out in our deafening social media environment.

Eventually, the next political cycle will come. In 2004, political commenters similarly believed that Democrats needed to moderate in order to attract George W. Bush’s Christian base. In 2012, the Republican Party seemed to be dead in the water. We can’t predict what issues the 2028 election will be about. But we do know the values that divide the country right now, and we need to start acting like it.