The predominant passion of all men in power,” wrote John Adams in 1787, “whether kings, nobles, or plebeians, is the same; that tyranny will be the effect, whoever are the governors…if uncontrolled by equal laws, made by common consent, and supported, protected, and enforced by three different orders of men in equilibrio.”

David S. Brown—in a new history of America’s “vital center”—thinks Adams is right: Tyranny is around the bend whenever a political system strays far from moderation. Far from serving as transitory players in factional struggles, or as foils for the ideologues who shaped history, those who have constituted the political center represent their own distinct political tradition. They have not only, Brown argues, “constituted a separate force in American politics,” but also “one that continues to inform and give substance to our ideological choices.”

Brown—the author of a biography of Richard Hofstadter—defines his moderate tradition in a distinct way: His vital centrists do not just seek the space between right and left, but also elevate politics above the interests of any single faction or group. Brown’s exemplars aren’t just squishes who split the difference. At their best, they’re swashbuckling pragmatists cutting through extremists’ cant, and in pursuit of America’s national interest.

Yet precisely because moderates see the dangers of a society that tips too far in any direction, moderation must assume a mask of tragedy. When confronted with the plural interests and freewheeling populism of mass democracy, moderates find that their vision of faction-less politics breaks down, and they face a choice: If they harness public opinion in service to the common good, they risk demagogy. If they reject popular politics altogether, they retreat into a curdled elitism. If they set the interests of one group over another, they flirt with the very politics they seek to oppose. In the central paradox of Brown’s book, moderates offer a modernizing politics, but they’re less sure about modernity. And so the story of America’s vital center is, in Brown’s telling, all at once a celebration of meliorist politics and a narrative of decline and fall.

rown makes his case for the moderate tradition inductively. Rather than defend it from first principles, or trace centrist voters over time, he focuses on the politicians: in particular, six “moderate coalitions”: the Federalists in the Adams mold; the Democratic-Republicans in the Era of Good Feelings; early free-labor Republicans before the Civil War; reform-minded Republicans during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era; moderate GOP-ers from Wendell Willkie to Gerald Ford; and, a final twist, Democrats in the age of Obama—who, by Brown’s lights, also fall squarely within the Adams tradition of moderation. To tell this story, Brown strings together lively capsule portraits of John Adams, George Cabot, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Henry Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., before shifting to the two Bushes and the vital centrism of today’s Democrats.

As the list makes clear, Moderates isn’t quite what it seems: Brown isn’t doing intellectual and political portraiture for its own sake. His argument is for a certain kind of ideal political temperament that transcends any particular politician, period, or party; it is also for a certain kind of moderation that seeks to elevate politics above petty partisan divisions. Moderation, for Brown, is therefore not only a political tool but a good unto itself, and one that takes on many different manifestations along the way.

To make sense of this variegated tradition, Brown tries to establish three continuities among the moderates he considers. He wants to track the moderate temperament across time; he wants to outline the affinities between the intellectual habits of moderates and their practical politics; and he wants to relate political moderation to the ideological dead center in any given era.

The first task Brown handles largely by family resemblance, though he sometimes strains the parallels that connect his moderates, and the second task, the core of comparative biography, inevitably works better for some figures than others. Between the high art of statesmanship and the low art of majoritarian politics, Brown deems the former the true sign of moderate virtue. But it’s the third task where he is least successful, and where his defense of moderation begins to fall apart. Brown wants to keep his moderates at the center along a univariate dimension, but the players and ideologies keep changing, and so he wobbles around as to whether his moderate center is the center of the electorate or of the party in factional disputes or of some intellectual spat.

Perhaps some of the trouble comes from Brown’s vision of moderation. If the overall notion of political moderation can often feel like a moving target, its historical lineage, for Brown, is decidedly specific: It springs from Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke. In a 1738 essay, Bolingbroke brought forth the supple and beguiling notion of the
“Patriot King” whose political party would transcend particular interests and rule on behalf of the entire nation, “united by one common interest, and animated by one common spirit.” Though Bolingbroke accorded the word “moderate” no special significance, Brown takes this notion of a “Patriot King” as the germ of a politics that, he believes, has animated American public life from Adams to Obama.

The idea of governing for the sake of one nation has long been at the heart of the British Conservative Party, even down to the 1950s, when Rab Butler, who later became Harold Macmillan’s deputy prime minister, pointedly contrasted the supposed national interest of the Conservatives with the class interest of the Labour Party. But Brown is not interested in Bolingbroke’s British descendants so much as he is with his American ones. He quickly makes the Patriot King the avatar of an antiparty-ism that, from America’s founding, has fervently committed itself to the constitutional tradition and looked askance at popular politics.

For Brown, John Adams was the Patriot King par excellence. As he situated himself between the Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians, he exemplified moderation. He was sharply critical of the unfettered belief in human reason, which he saw in Thomas Paine (“a star of disaster”), but he was also forever on guard against the ill effects of speculators’ wealth, which distinguished him from Alexander Hamilton. Each, for Adams, threatened the balance and virtue that a civic community requires.

Brown persuasively links this vision of moderation to Lincoln, who, Brown argues, also sought a state that resisted predation “by either plutocracy or plantocracy.” But after Lincoln’s death, the moderate tradition that Brown depicts began to crack open. In America’s complex polity after the Civil War, moderation on issues of race, capitalism, and the contest between Democrats and Republicans often pointed in different directions. Nor—as the retreat of Henry Adams into his study in the face of America’s gilded excesses shows—did intellectual and political moderation necessarily go hand in hand. “As for traditions, constitution, principles, past professions and all that,” Adams wrote, lamenting the state of politics in his day, “the devil has put them back into his pocket.”

In the sordid world of Gilded Age politics, Northern moderates worried more about political corruption than about the bloody “Redemption” of the South. Men like Charles Francis Adams Jr. and E.L. Godkin, the founding editor of this magazine, also displayed rather immoderate support for the National Guard as it put down labor unrest.

As one moves through Brown’s book, one begins to realize that the various biographies offer few general lessons on how to choose among competing values, or how to distill the essence of the moderate tradition as a whole. The continuities among Brown’s vital centrists began to chafe against their discontinuities. Brown’s profiles also only spotlight distinguished moderates, thereby depicting their statesmanlike success, or in the case of Henry Adams, their noble failure, and as a result we miss the stories of moderate mediocrity. There’s no chapter, say, on Thomas Dewey.

n considering some of the other moderates in American politics that Brown has left out, the problems with viewing moderation as a coherent tradition becomes all the clearer. Political machines in cities, often with friendly partners at the state capitol, long exchanged tangible benefits—-turkeys at Thanksgiving, coal for immigrants’ stoves, paving contracts to contributors—in return for support. While the political boss may not have been a Patriot King, he was all the same a moderate in that he could only wield power if every element in his coalition was held “in equilibrio.”

Perhaps an even more damning example is the form of political moderation pursued by the Southern Democrats who dominated Congress for most of the 20th century and who, from the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 down through welfare reform in 1996, fundamentally shaped the American state. Like John Adams, the Southern Democrats feared wide-open politics and faraway bankers. But the end result was a sprawling national government that, directly and through the tax code, doles out benefits for the middle class, predominantly white, while relying on the states as intermediaries in stingy social programs aimed at the poor. Rather than pursuing the common interests of all Americans, their breed of political moderation meant racial subjugation, and Brown tellingly leaves them out of the story.

By the same token, Brown devotes great energy to the moderate sensibility, yet he has a much less precise sense of where and how, in the framers’ complex system, moderation might matter politically. The ambivalence starts with his view of political parties: Brown decries the blind loyalty of grubby wire-pullers, but he also looks askance at moderate Republicans who bolted for the Democrats in 1872 and 1884 and for Roosevelt’s Bull Moose in 1912. Nor does Brown’s vital centrism tell a consistent story about the presidency. The Adamses and George Cabot fretted about demagoguery, but Brown also cuts slack for Theodore Roosevelt, from whose rhetoric flows so many pathologies of a presidency that claims to speak alone for the people.

Above all, the central place where compromises happen in American politics—and where moderation is most essential—is in Congress, which Brown more or less ignores. John Quincy Adams’s finest days of moderation came, in Brown’s telling, while he served in the lowly House of Representatives, but after that, nobody Brown surveys had a congressional career that, on its own, amounted to anything. The moderate Republicans most important in Congress have been loners from the periphery, and they have proved thorns in the side of their own party. George W. Norris of Nebraska is the outstanding example, but Brown doesn’t say anything about him.

rown closes out his old moderate lineage with Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., a more restrained figure than perhaps the more obvious choice of Nelson Rockefeller. The decision makes a certain poignant sense. Lodge burst onto the scene in 1936 when he nabbed a place in the Senate, at the age of 34, from the roguish governor, James Michael Curley; then, in 1952, having masterminded Dwight Eisenhower’s run for the presidency, he lost his seat to a very different Irishman, John F. Kennedy.

A firm Cold Warrior, Lodge served Ike at the United Nations, balanced Richard Nixon on the 1960 ticket, and twice headed to Saigon on diplomatic missions (shades of his grandfather’s imperialist mission). When Lyndon Johnson met with the so-called wise men in March 1968 to discuss the war, Lodge was a member of the delegation. By the time of his death in 1985, almost 39 years after he’d won his last election, Lodge’s moderate Republican Party had moved on. And so in Brown’s telling the moderate dream (at least among Republicans) perished not when Rockefeller infamously met his maker in the arms of his assistant, Megan Marshack, but in Beverly, Massachusetts—overlooking the waters where ships in the China trade once set sail—after Lodge died following a long illness.

Brown does append a penultimate chapter on what happened to Lodge’s party under the Bushes and a final one on the last three Democratic presidents. There’s a certain perverse pleasure, after a couple hundred pages spent with Brown’s brilliant grandees of moderation, to get a glimpse of the Bushes. Even in comparison with the Tafts, who also made money in the Ohio railroad boom, they look undistinguished: Prescott, who defended his view of Republican moderation as pure me-too-ism, proved to be every bit as much small and expedient as his son and grandsons. But it is the treatment of the Democrats, which concludes Brown’s book, that poses deeper problems to his argument. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton are the only Southerners in a book whose major subjects are Yankees, and Barack Obama, the most interesting of the bunch, gets a mere four pages, so we never really learn if Obama’s great dream of bipartisan unity carried with it anything more than faint echoes of the Patriot King.

Brown also offers little insight into the broader story of how the moderate elite, now largely ensconced in the Democratic Party, has been transformed in recent decades. Even if its members often still attend Harvard and Yale, the party’s moderates have become diversified, and with that diversity, they have absorbed the ideology of meritocracy to buttress their claim to power. The old qualms about mass politics have also returned to the fore, now encased in an economistic technocracy.

The current president’s name appears nowhere in Moderates, as the book was written before his victory, but its heroes anticipated him. John Adams condemned “landjobbing” and Theodore Roosevelt those rich men “purely of the glorified huckster or the glorified pawnbroker type.” Republicans may one day seek an identity beyond tax cuts and resource extraction and embrace something other than the Reagan mythos when they look for a usable past. But Republican moderates are, three senators’ votes on health care notwithstanding, in short supply. Whether they fear a primary challenger or whether they don’t much mind Trump is hardly the point: Events have borne out Brown’s longer story on the decline of moderation, at least in the Republican Party. Republicans may direct their gaze to figures like Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, and William McKinley, but the party that long served as home to Brown’s vital centrists is Donald Trump’s now. The last threads that tied it to the moderate tradition have snapped.

Scarcely a day goes by without political seismologists offering new evidence to suggest that the tectonic plates of American politics are on the verge of a profound and unsettling shift. Too much stress has built up along too many ideological and demographic fault lines for things to remain as they are. Will 2016 be the year of “the big one”—long feared by some, eagerly anticipated by others? Are we witnessing a fundamental realignment of political coalitions, perhaps even the birth of new parties? As part of “That’s Debatable,” our new series on issues that remain unresolved on the left, published on TheNation.com and occasionally in the magazine, we asked three scholars of American politics to consider these questions. A political theorist, a historian, and a political scientist, respectively, they approach the topic not as clairvoyants peering into a crystal ball, but as observers intent on identifying some of the subtler forces at work in this unnerving year in order to hazard a few guesses as to what it all means. —Richard Kreitner


Danielle Allen

Communications Breakdown

In 1999, the libertarian party helped transform American politics by launching a campaign that ultimately sent hundreds of thousands of e-mails to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to protest its proposed “know your customer” banking regulations. The FDIC withdrew the rules, and the era of digital politics was born. Roughly a decade later, social media propelled “birtherism” to the forefront of the national conversation, reinstating nativism as an active ideology in the United States. In 2009 came the Tea Party movement, followed by Occupy Wall Street in 2011, both of which drew on new online organizing mechanisms to build solidarity networks around a particular analysis of social reality. The question for students of American politics now is whether these changes can drive a fundamental realignment of our political parties.

Transformations in communications technology have made it more possible than ever before for dissenters from the Democratic and Republican parties to find one another and to form sizable communities of interest. The result is lowered barriers to entry for the work of political organization, with consequences announced daily in headlines about the 2016 presidential campaign. Insurgent candidates in both parties have drawn on the organizational power that has developed over the past decade within ideologically defined communities: Donald Trump has summoned the anger and xenophobia of the birthers, Bernie Sanders has channeled Occupy’s critique of rampant inequality, and Ted Cruz has marshaled the forces of the Tea Party universe. By attaching other groups of voters to their original, more ideologically concentrated constituencies, these candidates have achieved greater success in their respective primary campaigns than anyone thought possible just one year ago.

Regardless of whether they succeed in taking over their parties, these new coalitions have the potential to remake American politics if either the insurgents or the party faithful are driven to seek refuge in existing third parties or to create entirely new ones. For the 2016 campaign at least, that latter possibility is already foreclosed, so a takeover (hostile or otherwise) of a third party seems more likely—both the Libertarian Party and the Green Party can place candidates on the ballot in a significant number of states. Even so, our first-past-the-post electoral system makes it very hard for third parties to challenge the top two. Barring the emergence of new habits of collaboration and alliance formation among small parties, only a fundamental change to our system of voting—the introduction of proportional representation, for example—would allow for a more fluid political system to develop.

Speculating on what the future holds for America’s political alignment requires thinking through a complex array of factors: voting rules, political egos, the time horizons of charismatic leaders, questions of succession, the intensity of various ideological commitments, and a famously mutable public opinion. What we are most likely to see is more of the new normal: incredibly bitter fights among plurality-sized groups for total—if temporary—control of one of the major parties. Will this also worsen gridlock at the national level, thereby exacerbating the intensity of those intraparty battles and further destabilizing our political system overall? If these dynamics play out simultaneously in both parties, the most unified side will triumph.

Rick Perlstein

It’s Happening Here

What are the prospects for a realignment of American politics? On the Democratic side, practically nil. The presidential front-runner—the one with the endorsements of 15 out of 18 sitting Democratic governors, 40 out of 44 senators, and 161 out of 188 House members—is running a campaign explicitly opposed to fundamental transformation. Her signature campaign promise—no new taxes on households making $250,000 or less—renders serious change impossible. The chance for her opponent to win the nomination approaches mathematical impossibility. He is running as a “revolutionary.” But governing is a team sport. If, by some miracle, Bernie Sanders entered the White House in January, he would do so naked and alone—in command of a party apparatus less prepared ideologically, institutionally, and legislatively to do great things than at any other time in its history.

One side promises competence. The other promises the impossible. This is the Democratic Party in 2016.

And the Republicans? Senator Ted Cruz, believe it or not, was also a candidate of continuity, the nearly pure product of a conservative-movement Petri dish. His father was an evangelical pastor from one of America’s most reactionary immigrant communities. Cruz received his tutelage in the thought of Milton Friedman and Frédéric Bastiat while still in high school; he also memorized the US Constitution, was a champion debater at Princeton, and worked as the conservative movement’s all-but-official Supreme Court litigator in his years as solicitor general of Texas. His creepy extremism is precisely the extremism we have known in the Republican Party ever since Barry Gold- water in 1964. His electoral coalition was Goldwater’s—which, blessedly, in our increasingly younger, browner, and leftward-leaning nation, means it was always going to be very hard for him to become president.

That leaves our orange-maned wild card—who, for the same reasons, will also have a very hard time winning a presidential election. But if there is any chance of a fundamental realignment in American politics, it would come from the candidate to whom none of the familiar rules apply. Donald Trump has primed millions of his followers to believe that a corrupt national establishment—a conspiracy of politicians, the media, and business—has stolen their birthright as Americans. The techno-sociology scholar Zeynep Tufekci, studying Trump’s social-media following, notes that his fans treat him as the sole source of truth and authority: In their view, “every unpleasant claim about Trump is a fabrication by a cabal that includes the Republican leadership and the mass media.” Recently, Robert Costa and Bob Woodward of The Washington Post asked Trump what he would do in his first 100 days as president. The candidate replied that he would focus on trade deals. “What about economic legislation?” Costa asked. Trump responded, “Before I talk about legislation, because I think frankly this is more important—number one, it’s going to be a very big tax cut.” He spoke, in other words, as if tax policy isn’t a product of legislation, but rather gets handed down by presidential fiat.

Trump has also announced the litmus test for his first Supreme Court nominee: a willingness to prioritize his crushing of a political rival. (“I’d probably appoint people that would look very seriously at [Hillary Clinton’s] e-mail disaster because it’s a criminal activity.”)

If Trump wins the presidency, we’ll have elected an aspiring dictator. In that event, speculation about the fate of the conservative movement, let alone the Republican Party, would be quite beside the point. But if Donald Trump loses the presidency, we’ll still be left with those millions of followers—many of them violent—trained by Trump to believe that their American birthright has been stolen from them once more. The only thing that will stand in their way is the strength of our constitutional system. One must hope it proves very strong indeed. The alternative is a sort of realignment that none of us want.

Daniel Schlozman

The Great Divide

Democrats and republicans will likely spend the coming decades as they have the last eight: fighting over the legacy of the New Deal, respectively defending and assailing its commitments to a robust welfare state and a mixed economy. In his 1944 State of the Union address, Franklin D. Roosevelt called for a Second Bill of Rights guaranteeing access to employment, housing, medical care, and education. A conservative coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats stopped those plans in their tracks. Yet far more than in FDR’s time, the parties are divided sharply over his vision. That is likely to continue, whatever the shape of things to come.

Early in the Reagan era, James L. Sundquist, an influential scholar of partisan realignment, observed that “when the New Deal alignment is strengthened, the New Deal coalitions are weakened.” These fissures have only grown starker: The Roosevelt coalition broke apart as liberals and conservatives sorted between the parties. Minorities and “pink-collar” workers supplanted white Southerners and Northern ethnics in the Democratic fold. Party coalitions, now oriented largely around race, fight pitched policy battles around class. The Democratic Party has embraced a version of what Northern liberals hoped for in the postwar era—a party more diverse in its leadership and no longer cemented to the male family wage.

With their own house largely in order, the New Dealers’ proverbial grandchildren watch with both fascination and horror the lurid spectacle of a Republican Party whose contradictions have, in the unlikely figure of Donald Trump, finally come to the fore. That upheaval has loosed from their moorings three very different blocs of voters. Their allegiances, once the dust settles, will determine the balance of power in American politics.

If Trumpism prevails and the Republican Party becomes principally a vehicle for white nationalism, Democrats will welcome the refugees: affluent suburbanites who tend to be socially tolerant but skeptical about redistribution. For Democrats, such a coalition could bring back congressional majorities, but they would be unwieldy ones. A party swollen with economic elites would bring to the fore the vexed politics of revenue: Expanding programs for the Democrats’ disadvantaged constituents would cost the wealthier ones dearly. The usual work-arounds— employer mandates, tax credits, and the like—make it even harder to enact public programs further down the road.

If the Republicans retreat into a familiar shell that appeals only to the likes of Ted Cruz, the less-bigoted white losers from economic dislocation might switch to the Democrats. With congressional majorities supporting redistributionist policies, this new coalition could create a new class politics built on Rooseveltian universal programs, largely redeeming the New Deal’s unfulfilled promises.

Finally, if the Republicans’ existing power centers—K Street and the Koch boardroom—maneuver successfully to defeat the insurgency, the plutocrats will retain control of the party’s apparatus and agenda, even as they redouble their efforts to diversify its base, marketing aggressively to Latinos and Asians. Unfortunately for them, as the 2016 campaign has shown, the Republican base has other ideas. Yet even if the presidency remains out of reach, the party’s leaders might well be content to control the national purse strings in the House of Representatives and sow tensions among Democratic constituencies whenever priorities conflict: housing versus healthcare, young versus old, race versus class.

Given the pyrotechnics of 2016, these prognoses may seem mundane. A fundamental realignment along the lines of 1860, 1896, or 1936, however, would require not just movement in a few voter blocs or on issues such as trade, but a change in the basic divide between the parties’ competing positions. That’s a remote prospect. The New Deal still casts a long shadow, and party politics will likely remain a battle over the size and scope of government.