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.

In the Declaration of Independence, the American colonists complained of the impossibility of receiving redress from the English crown, stating that “In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.” That could be the tagline for the new documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, directed by Alison Klayman, except that the famous Chinese artist and dissident’s constant petitioning, closely detailed in the film, was never exactly humble. But then, neither was the colonists’. Like them, Ai Weiwei is courageous, self-confident, blackly ironic.

Between 2008 and 2011, Ai invoked China’s Freedom of Government Information Law to send government agencies more than 150 inquiries about the victims of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, whose official death toll was nearly 70,000. When he received no response, he filed suit against the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

In the course of his work on behalf of such earthquake investigations, Ai suffered a police beating in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. This inspired a separate round of petitions and suits. Eight months after the beating, he returned to Chengdu to file an official complaint and request an investigation. Several months later, having seen no action, he returned again to Chengdu with the strategy of filing requests for a hearing in as many government offices as possible. This series of encounters with government officials—nervous, bored, perfunctory, violent—is one of the film’s most powerful segments, and also one that Ai has broadcast via Twitter.

When one journalist who accompanied him on these visits asked him why he kept at it, he was told by Ai that “you can’t just say that the system is flawed; you have to work through the system and show it in all of its detail; that’s the only way you can ultimately make a critique.”

Will Ai Weiwei’s efforts make any difference? He is an artist whose work of petitioning is straightforwardly political, but whose use of the blogosphere to publicize that petitioning is artistic and political at once. But what exactly is the relation between voice as expression—the artist’s voice—and voice as influence: the citizen’s voice? And do social media change that relationship? These are the questions raised by Ai’s in-your-face petitioning.

Historically, petitioning has been a fundamentally performative act. In ancient Greece, supplicants—those, for instance, who petitioned for asylum—chose dramatic public venues and made a spectacle of themselves: appearing, say, in their underwear or baring their breasts. Crowds gathered around to watch; knowledge of the controversy spread—and with it, questions about the justice, or injustice, of the ruler. By their strenuous moral demands, such acts of supplication jeopardized the political authority of the petitioned by raising questions about whether that party could effectively maintain moral authority.

Ai Weiwei has always had an eye for the point where art and politics meet in performance. During the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square massacre, Ai was in New York. The son of a famous Communist poet and intellectual, Ai Qing, he had grown up in domestic exile in far western Xinjiang province, to which Mao Zedong had condemned his father. Upon the family’s release in 1976, Ai went to Beijing and studied film until, frustrated by the Chinese government’s repression of artists and intellectuals, he moved to the United States in 1981. In response to Tiananmen, Ai staged a hunger strike in front of the United Nations, wearing a headband that read “Fuck your mother.” That would be a lot like sitting in the ancient agora of Athens in your underwear. It’s also a move that Ai has turned into art. Twenty years later, as a Beijing-based artist, he filmed an art project in which a series of eight people—he is the eighth—say, each in his own dialect, “Fuck you, motherland” while standing before a backdrop with the same text in Chinese characters.

To understand Ai’s expletive, though, we have to remember that this is the curse of a man who, in the end, decided to go home, both literally—he returned to China in 1993—and figuratively. Long ago, economist Albert Hirschman identified loyalty as the motive force driving the commitment to dissident self-expression. In Hirschman’s terms, Ai chose voice over exit. By returning home, he chose the voice of the artist and citizen instead of simply the artist. One commentator in the film says, “Among all the Chinese artists I know, he’s probably the only one who, deep down, really cares about this country and what happens to it.” Yet the import of this choice didn’t unfold to its fullest extent until the Sichuan earthquake in 2008.

* * *

If we wish to understand the relationship between the expressive voice of an artist and the influence-seeking voice of a citizen, we would do well to think about the social importance of mourning. What can be more purely expressive than a cry of grief, the effort to commemorate? Yet societies in different times and places have long known that such purely expressive cries are very destabilizing. Grief often leads straight to anger—and anger, commonly, to calls for action.

Think again of the Greeks. Think of Antigone. Ancient Athens put limits on the right of women to mourn in public, and Pericles concludes his funeral oration during the Peloponnesian War by enjoining the women to silence. In May 1999 during the Kosovo war, Serbian wives and mothers took to the streets by the thousands because relatives they had sent to the front fourteen months earlier had not come home from tours of duty that were supposed to last only twelve. Because the unrest threatened to evolve into war resistance, the government dispatched a leading general to the provinces “to defuse the anger of the women.”

When on May 12, 2008, a 7.9-magnitude earthquake rocked Sichuan province in western China, roughly 7,000 classrooms collapsed. For seven days after the temblor hit, Ai—who had been blogging daily since 2005 on Sina Weibo—didn’t post any entries at all. The scenes of children’s backpacks strewn amid the dusty rubble silenced him. When he did start to blog again, his project was mourning.

Ai first visited the devastated region in June 2008 because he wanted to use the names of the dead schoolchildren in an artwork to commemorate the tragedy. He sought information from the Sichuan Post-Quake Reconstruction Office and recorded a cellphone conversation, featured in his 2009 documentary Hua Lian Ba Er (Dirty Faces), in which he is told, “The death toll is a secret.” Indeed, the government was not forthcoming with statistics about the dead, and because so many schools had collapsed, suspicions of corruption-fueled, shoddy building practices (“tofu construction”) began to circulate widely. The official death toll of 68,712 was released in late July, two and a half months after the quake. The government paid the parents of the dead schoolchildren for their silence.

Having petitioned the government for information and been denied it, Ai made another “ask.” He put out a call on his blog for volunteers to catalog the names of the dead schoolchildren. One woman who responded says in the film: “One day I saw a [blog] entry he wrote about investigating the student deaths from the May 12th quake. He said he was seeking volunteers to help him do this work…. The volunteers went to every town to ask parents and schools for the names of the dead.” With blog petitions, Ai built a team of fifty researchers to collect the names of deceased students in towns across Sichuan province.

At last, on May 3, 2009, a year after the quake, Ai announced on his blog that his Sichuan Earthquake Names Project had achieved a final tally: 5,212 dead students. In response, on May 5, the government finally released its own tally with a slightly higher number: 5,335. On May 12, the actual anniversary, Ai posted all 5,212 names. On May 29, his personal blog was shut down. On May 31, Ai signed up for a Twitter account. On June 2, China blocked access to Twitter across the mainland in anticipation of the twentieth anniversary of the June 4 Tiananmen Square massacre. Ai then used a Web proxy, VPN or other circumvention tool to leap over China’s Great Firewall and keep on tweeting.

On Twitter, he began a daily posting of the names of the dead children on their birthdays. He used a major September 2009 exhibit to commemorate the students, covering the façade of Munich’s Haus der Kunst with 9,000 backpacks in a piece called Remembering. And in 2010, for the second anniversary of the Sichuan earthquake, he decided to post recordings of individual people reading the names of each lost child. Via Twitter, he sent out another call and, in a country where Twitter is illegal, was able to post 4,546 spoken names.

In describing this project, Ai says: “We are always trying to think of a way to get everyone involved. The earthquake anniversary [was] coming up so I think this method is very good. It helps everyone to learn about using resources, making recordings, and sending messages online…. The content [of the project] is respect life and give [people] a way to find a new communication and to reach out.”

In April 2011, the Chinese government detained Ai for eighty-one days and then imposed a major fine on him for tax evasion, as well as restricting his right to travel outside China. In July 2011, when a deadly high-speed rail crash in Wenzhou was first reported on China’s microblogs, the volume of blogosphere commentary was simply too great to censor. For all of censorship’s power, grief for the dead finds out its limits. Ai Weiwei could be detained, but his example could not.

* * *

In December 2009, Ai signed Charter 08, a dissidents’ reform manifesto, which declares:

The political reality, which is plain for anyone to see, is that China has many laws but no rule of law…[and] especially, in recent times, a sharpening animosity between officials and ordinary people…. we see the powerless in our society—the vulnerable groups, the people who have been suppressed and monitored, who have suffered cruelty and even torture, and who have had no adequate avenues for their protests, no courts to hear their pleas—becoming more militant.

One of Ai’s supporters puts the same points in more personal terms: “What we want is normalcy, just a normal society in which we can express sorrow and mourn death, where those who do wrong are punished, and those who do good for society are encouraged, not jailed.”

In China, there is a real problem with avenues of redress. The dismay throughout the country in October 2011 at the hit-and-run death of a toddler grew out of frustration with a legal system that appears not to weigh gradations in culpability and in which, according to a recent article published by the Association of Corporate Counsel, politics trumps the law. (To practice in China, lawyers have to swear allegiance to the Communist Party.)

One of Ai’s visits to court included the following scene, as described by New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos:

There was a line of bank-teller-style windows, and, at the one closest to us, a tiny old woman in a pink padded jacket was bellowing into a rectangular opening in the glass. “How could the other side win without any evidence?” she shouted. “Did they bribe the head of the court?” On the opposite side of the glass, two women in uniform were listening with resigned expressions suggesting that she had been at it for a while.

History suggests that the need for redress, for justice—as distinct from problems of material distribution—often holds the seeds of transformation. Will the petitions of mourners hold such power in this case? This is precisely the question that Ai has raised with his Sichuan Earthquake Names Project, his ceaseless, performative petitioning, and his very public effort to use the Internet to resist the governmental suppression of mourning.

The opponent is formidable. Along with Iran and Vietnam, China is one of the most aggressive Internet censors in the world. At a maximum, 3 percent of China’s Internet users are able to get around the country’s Great Firewall to use Twitter or other blocked sites.

Yet as many as 450 million people may use China’s two main microblogging platforms, and millions have developed a culture of humor, wordplay and speed to get around the censors’ tools. These are the practices that made it impossible to censor commentary about the high-speed rail crash, according to Ethan Zuckerman, the director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media.

Significantly, the Chinese government has never released an official death toll from the great unmentionable, the Tiananmen Square massacre. According to Reuters, in the months leading up to the twentieth anniversary, calls for a re-evaluation of the 1989 protest movement circulated on the Internet. It was in this context that China shut down Twitter in June 2009.

But ten months later, even with the Twitter freeze ongoing, when Ai Weiwei went back to Chengdu to file his complaint against the police in April 2010, he tweeted all day about his dinner plans, inviting the people of Chengdu to join him. So many showed up that the restaurant had to put tables on the street. One man passed by just to say hello to “Teacher Ai” but chose not to stay. Police arrived to videotape those who did and, eventually, to shut the party down. Even in China, then—a country, one should note, without freedom of association—Twitter is powerful enough to get strangers and police officers to a flash party.

Of course, this was no ordinary occasion. The guests ate pigs’ feet together to celebrate one man’s relentless petitioning and affirm his steely pursuit of honor for the dead.

Repeated petitioning. Polemical parties. In the American colonies, this was the stuff of revolution. Perhaps, in artful, ironic performances lifted aloft by new media, such seeds are being cast abroad once more?