By Dan Lazare

In the end, the historical cavalcade Timothy Shenk presents doesn’t tell us much about how America ended up in such straits or how it will pull out of them, if at all.

Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy by Timothy Shenk. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 464 pages.

The old joke about Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization, eleven volumes published between 1935 and 1975, is that it was 10,000 anecdotes in search of a theme. Something similar can be said about Timothy Shenk’s new book Realigners. It’s a collection of political portraits of people like Martin Van Buren, Charles Sumner, Mark Hanna, and Walter Lippmann, individuals who were never at the absolute forefront of American politics for the most part but who nonetheless stood in their day for a fundamental shift in the political firmament. Van Buren, who went on to serve a term in the White House, “sketched the Jacksonian majority in the 1820s,” Shenk writes. Sumner, a leading abolitionist, “envisioned a Northern party of freedom in the 1840s.” Hanna, the political genius behind William McKinley’s election in 1896, “anticipated the next Republican Party in the 1890s.”

And so on. But what this long parade of stories adds up to is a different story. Did Van Buren and the rest cause such shifts or merely reflect them in some fashion? Was their impact on American political development for the better or worse? What do such tales mean in terms of where the United States is now heading? Shenk, an assistant professor of history at George Washington University and co-editor of Dissent magazine, comes down squarely in the middle. On one hand, he says that “the failure of self-proclaimed champions of democracy to assemble a coalition large and durable enough to reform this antiquated system” means that it “will continue decaying, bit by bit, holding together just enough to continue stumbling along” – until, he adds, the day comes when it stumbles one last time and collapses in a heap. On the other, he allows that “there are moments when glimpses of a better future have come into sight, and those moments are worth holding on to,” which suggests that by drawing on such visions from the past, the United States may be able to pull itself together and gain a new lease on life.

Which is it? Shenk doesn’t seem to know.  “The case for fatalism, in short, is strong,” he says.  In other words, que sera sera. In the end, the historical cavalcade he presents doesn’t tell us much about how the country ended up in such straits or how it will pull out of them, if at all.

There’s no theme, no thesis, no “there” there, just as there wasn’t in the case of the Durants. Still, Shenk is an engaging writer, and his casual stroll through American political history is not without its pleasures. He shows how Van Buren, born in Washington Irving country in the Hudson Valley in 1782, pioneered a new kind of mass politics beginning in 1810s and 20s. This might sound nice and democratic were it not for the minor detail that it was all based on an especially nasty form of racism. Van Buren helped implement the Indian Removal Act as Andrew Jackson’s vice president, which led to the Trail of Tears, and vowed to defend the South against the “dangerous agitation” of northern abolitionists following his election as president in 1836. His stroke of genius, if that’s the right word, was to assemble a political line-up that pitted free-state laborers and southern planters against northern bankers, New England reformers, and African-Americans, both slave and free – with him and his fellow Democrats firmly on the side of the former.

Historian Tim Shenk

If ever there was an alliance from hell, this was it. But Sumner, ironically, wasn’t all that different. A brilliant student at Harvard Law School but an indifferent lawyer, he only came alive after throwing himself heart-and-soul into the cause of anti-slavery. The trouble with slavery, he decided, was that it contaminated everything it touched – and by 1840s it was touching everything. “Slavery stops everything that is good,” he wrote. “He saw its pernicious influence wherever he looked,” adds Shenk, “in Congress, where the ranks of the slave power were multiplied by the three-fifths clause; in the courts, where judges chosen by slave-owning presidents staffed the bench; even in the North, where former slaves who had escaped to freedom could be snatched back at any second.”

Where other abolitionists wished to boycott politics so as not to soil themselves with a system they loathed, Sumner threw himself into the fray. “If bad men conspire for Slavery, good men must conspire for Freedom,” he said. “The moralist and the philanthropist must become for this purpose politicians – not forgetting morals or philanthropy, but seeking to apply them practically in the laws of the land.” Sitting at his desk after being elected to the US Senate by the Massachusetts state legislature, he found himself the victim in 1856 of an outraged Southerner named Preston Brooks who used a heavy walking stick to beat him repeatedly over the head. Northerners were shocked. “Behind the furor,” Shenk writes, “was disbelief that a flower of Northern society like Charles Sumner could be treated like … well, like a slave.”

This is entirely correct. The north went to war because the slave power was over-spilling its bounds and threatening the country as a whole. For all his heroism, however, Sumner was distinctly cool to the labor movement that emerged once the Civil War was over. As a Boston Brahmin, he was a hard-money man who opposed excessive taxation, flip-flopped on the eight-hour day, and believed that contracts were inviolable. One union organizer remarked that workers could “hope of no sympathy from the class of which Mr. Sumner is a representative.” When asked why he believed in government aid for newly-freed ex-slaves but not for southern whites who had stuck by the Union throughout the conflict, he replied, “White men have never been in slavery.”

Sound familiar? It should because it’s an early version of the Black Lives Matter thesis that even impoverished whites benefit from something called “white privilege” and are therefore separated from poor Blacks by an unbridgeable chasm even though their class interests are the same. It’s not hard to see Sumner as a forerunner of today’s limousine liberals or Van Buren, for that matter, as a proto-MAGA Republican.

The class structure of American politics has thus remained remarkably consistent over the years as upscale white reformers side with minorities against hard-pressed white people in between. Rancor and rightwing populism have overwhelmed anything resembling class consciousness.  But while Shenk is aware of the problem, he’s not much interested in why.  To be sure, he alludes at one or two points to the structural issues leading to such perverse effects.  There’s a chart he reproduces that the Black historian W.E.B. Du Bois drew up showing that, thanks to Black disenfranchisement, the seniority system, and over-representation of rural areas, southern whites had three times as much clout in congressional elections by the ’30s as voters elsewhere in the country.  Elsewhere, he mentions “the distorting effects of an electoral system that all too often converts a strategically placed minority of voters into an electoral majority.” But that’s it. He doesn’t discuss why those distorting effects have proved so persistent, why the electoral system hasn’t been reformed, or a why a country that regards itself as the greatest democracy in creation has put up with minority rule for so long. Structure is not his thing, apparently. Who has time when there are so many fascinating personalities to explore?

It’s unfortunate because inequities like these are growing by the day. Thanks to the distorting effects of the Electoral College, two of the last four presidents took office despite trailing in the popular vote. Thanks to equal state representation, Republicans control half the Senate despite representing 45 million fewer people. Thanks to gerrymandering, the GOP has enjoyed an eleven-percent advantage in House elections since 2010. And thanks to an unbreakable six-three majority on the Supreme Court, Republicans are in a position to continue pushing the country farther and farther to the right well into the 2030s.

Yet there’s nothing the democratic majority can do. Surely, growing inequities like these has something to do with the fact that the ancient republic is coming apart at the seams. Perhaps Shenk’s next book will deal with the real realignment that is pushing the United States off a cliff.

Daniel Lazare is the author of The Frozen Republic and other books about the US Constitution and US policy. He has written for a wide variety of publications including Harper’s and the London Review of Books. He currently writes regularly for the Weekly Worker, a socialist newspaper in London.