Are We Headed Towards Another "Era of Good Feeling"

Brad Delong had a post on the political role of bi-partisanship and the role of think-tanks in a highly partisan political environment. Of course, the denizens of The Village regularly decry the erosion of the spirit of bi-partisanship in policy making. This got me thinking about what features of the American constitution lead to a bi-partite politics. It also lead me to consider the era of American politics where politics was monopartisan.

The "Era of Good Feeling" extended from the early 1800s when the Federalist party collapsed as a national political force to the mid-1830s when opposition to Andrew Jackson lead to the emergence of the Whig party. My speculation about this caused me to consider, could we end up with monopartisan politics again.

In Brad's blog I commented:

I believe the roots of bipartisanship lie in the peculiar institutions we American's employ for electing our President. In order, to be elected one must assemble a coalition sufficient to garner electoral pluralities in enough states to represent a (sort of) majority of the population. Historically such broad coalitions represented diverse interests some of whom could be accommodated in bargaining to secure support from both parties.

The Democratic party (ne Republican) created such a dominant coalition in the early 19th Century because the Federalists were committed to an aristocratic republic. Such a republic based upon networks of elite patronage was transferred almost intact (absent the monarch) from the Whig politics of Great Brittain in the 18th Century. However, as Alan Taylor's William Cooper's Town: demonstrates this model collapsed in the election of 1800. No plausible alternative developed for almost thirty years until the "gut hatred" of Andrew Jackson lead to the emergence of the Whig party.

Since that time there have been two more or less balanced factions in national presidential politics, although one or the other party has been able to dominate for extended periods. (E.g. the Republican party from 1868 to 1884 and again from 1896 to 1929, or the Democrats from 1932 through the late 1960s)

The period of the 1950s and 1960s remains the dominant image of bi-partisanship in the minds of many, since the Cold War consensus permitted and encouraged alliances across parties.

The post-1968 realignment started as I noted in commenting on Brad's blog:

Starting with the Southern strategy of Richard Nixon, the Republican party went all in on the strategy of representing culturally conservative whites as an interest group. This demographic is declining nationally. Much of the rest of the population has moved on to other issues. It strikes me as not inconceivable that we are heading for another period like the "Era of Good Feeling" wherein there is only one truly national party. As that era (1812-1832) demonstrates 1) politics doesn't cease, it just takes the form of interparty squabbling. 2) an eventual realignment will result in a second,rightish coalition.

Of course, there were more than southern racial conservatives in the Republican coalition of the era. As Brad noted in a later post:

One way to look at Nixon's "Silent Majority" strategy was that it involved the redefinition of lots of people as "white"--people who wouldn't have been "white" even thirty years before, back when they were seen as not-quite-real-American ethnic immigrants living in ghettos and serving the corrupt Democratic political machines against which the Republicans fought--probably entangled in organized crime, too.

Given the fact that this demographic is, as noted above, declining, Karl Rove deserves credit for recognizing that Latinos were a rising demographic whose innate social conservatism made them potential members of the Republican coalition. Since the Republicans appear to have decisively blown that opportunity, it appears that an "Era of Good Feeling" with only a one and a half party system is at least plausible.

What this means for legislative process is well summed up by another of Brad's posts:

Paul Krugman's line is that bipartisanship as a legislative and an electoral strategy could work only as long as the ideological lines of party cleavage were blurred, which would be the case only as long as there were (a) a larger number of relatively liberal northerners who voted Republican because Lincoln freed the slaves, and (b) a large number of relatively conservative southerners who voted Democratic because Lincoln freed the slaves. Once the parties realigned, zero-sum partisan loyalties would dominate: centrist legislators would think hard whether it was more important to vote for a bill because it was good for America or vote against it because then you could paint the opposite-party president as a failure and pick up seats in the next election, and make their decision. Influence over policy can no longer be found by placing yourself in the center: you wind up lying next to a squashed armadillo with a yellow stripe painted down your back.

For now though the smart money is building your coalitions from the left towards the center.