Heather Cox Richardson:

From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network, This is Now & Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman. Today we want to talk about a topic that I suppose won’t be very surprising, but I think some of the patterns we’re going to pull out of this will be certainly interesting and revealing. We want to talk about political parties, but in particular, we want to talk about the collapse of political parties, how that happens, some patterns within that collapse, and what we can learn about the causes of that kind of collapse and what pulls us out of it, or doesn’t, depending on how the case may be. So in essence, we’re going to walk through American history today and look at some moments when a particular party, in one way or another, becomes a little bit extreme and see what happens.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Why would we want to talk about that now, Joanne?

Joanne Freeman:

I don’t know, it was just sort of a gut impulse on my part. I have no idea why that has any relevance to anything we were going to talk about at all.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, we’re in a funny place right now because, of course, I’m sort of backhandedly referring to the Republican Party right now, which is paradoxically in a position because of the mechanics of government that make it seem extraordinarily strong. And yet at the same time, it in a position in which its demographics look particularly weak. That is, only about 25% at most of the American people self-identify as Republicans.

Now, there’s a bunch of things we could do with that statistic that understates how strong the party might be demographically, but that’s not a lot of people. That’s a quarter of the American people. And yet, of course, because of the mechanics of our system, they are exercising extraordinary power in the federal government. So right now there’s a lot of discussion about the future of the Republican Party. Is it in fact the wave of the future that is going to take over the American government once and for all? Or is it so internally rotten and weak that it’s going to collapse?

Joanne Freeman:

One of the interesting sort of larger points about this that I think is worth noting is that I think it’s easy to assume that political parties are sort of organic institutions that make sense and hold together. And the fact of the matter is they’re created units that are there for convenience and power.

And so, in a sense, it’s not surprising that when they are not convenient and when they are not using their power correctly, or are using their power too correctly, that things can change rather dramatically. We should never assume in American politics that a two-party system is the absolute only way it can operate. That was not at the fact at the beginning. And that remains not necessarily the fact today.

Heather Cox Richardson:

We thought it would be interesting to take two political party changes that most people don’t know about. And I’m particularly excited about the first one because we wanted to look at the Federalists and what happened to them around the time of the Hartford Convention. Because I think most of us, if they’re like me, I’ve heard of the Hartford Convention and I would go out on a limb and suggest it was probably, I don’t know, in Hartford. And I know it was the Federalists, and I know they were really mad about something, but the idea that what it happened to the Federalist presents lessons to us for the present, was kind of a surprise to me when you first suggested it.

And the more we talked about it, the more it struck me as that, that particular event and what happened to the Federalist lays down a bunch of principles that in fact still are very much on the table when we talk about today’s Republicans. Okay. So let’s start with the fact, the framers did not expect there to be political parties. Then we get political parties, and those political parties are…

Joanne Freeman:

There are two “parties,” the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans. Each side insists that it is not a party. It’s the other side that’s a party. So at that point in time, they have not yet accepted the idea that there’s a two-party system. But in fact, there are these two sort of semi-organized groups of people who are banging up against each other in the national government.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And you’re talking about the early-1800?

Joanne Freeman:

That begins in the middle of the 1790s. And it’s important to say at the outset of the story here is that for the entire first decade of the government in the 1790s, the Federalist Party controls the national government. And they very clearly assume that they are the right kind of men who should be controlling the government. They don’t have much question that they should continue to be in control of the government.

And also worth noting, they are not particularly comfortable with mass small D democratic politic. They’re nervous about the multitude. They’re nervous about things like ongoing political protest, apart from elections being a moment for people to step forward and say what they want to say in an election, and then that they should step back. So the Federalist Party is, I don’t want to say anti-democratic, but maybe not democratic. And the Jeffersonian Republicans are far more comfortable with that strain of politics.

Now looking over from the president into the past, we can see that the direction that American politics goes is more in line with Jeffersonian Republicans, but of course the Federalists themselves don’t know that.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So just so you know, I want to have an entire episode once where we fight about the Jeffersonian Republicans, because to hear that they are more small D democratic when ultimately they end up protecting enslavement makes me bananas and yet, you’re absolutely right, their ideology is that they are small D democratic, but there’s so much to unpack in that. But I just wanted to throw that in there. So you’ve got the Federalists, and that’s going to include Washington, right?

Joanne Freeman:

Correct. Now, Washington as president works really hard to not seem Federalist. He thinks that a president should be an umpire, but the fact of the matter is he is a Federalist. He agrees with Hamilton. Does not agree as much with Jefferson. And when he steps down from the presidency, it becomes clear just how Federalist he really is.

Joanne Freeman:

Now, over the course of the 1790s, the Federalists become more and more aggressive. And in the late-1790s, there is what comes to be known as the Quasi-War with France. And Federalists, who really are not excited about revolutionary France and all that It stands for, kind of like that quasi war to be a war. So they become more extreme in their legislation. They pass things like the famous Alien and Sedition Acts which are asking for any alien, quote unquote, in the United States to register his presence, which enables the government to punish people for pronouncing seditious statements about people in the government.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So they actually pass legislation that says you can’t criticize the government?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, what’s interesting about that legislation is you can’t criticize the government except for Thomas Jefferson.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Wait, you can-

Joanne Freeman:

You can criticize Jefferson. Yes. They, they basically say you can’t criticize members of Congress and the president.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That exception was for me, that you could criticize-

Joanne Freeman:

Precisely.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Had to be for one of my ancestors. I feel certain.

Joanne Freeman:

So it’s easy to look at that and say, well, that’s just a party in power silencing the party that isn’t in power and who happens to be opposing them. Their logic is, well, this is a time of war. And during a time of war, this national government has almost no power to it. So if anyone attacks the government in any way, even verbally, it might hurt the government. Little bit feeble, as far as an excuse. But that’s what they come up with as one of the reasons for what they’re doing.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But it’s actually not a time of war?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, it’s a time of Quasi-War. They consider it to be a time of almost war.

Heather Cox Richardson:

There is there nothing new under the sun.

Joanne Freeman:

Ain’t that the truth, Heather? That always the truth.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Okay. So they’re starting to come down on regular people?

Joanne Freeman:

Right. And so to give the quick and dirty version of this, the presidential of election of 1800 becomes crucial because that’s a moment when the course can be changed if people come forward and vote against it. So that’s a highly fraught election. And sure enough, Thomas Jefferson and democratic Republicans, Jeffersonian Republicans win and are put into power.

So now, the Federalists who have long assumed that they are the people who of course should have power, now they’re not in power of the national government. And although there are many of them still in Congress, as they will see in as time will tell, they are a shrink party at this point and will eventually collapse. But there they are on the national stage outraged that this party full of, in their mind, radicals has taken over the government. And they’re trying to figure out what to do as the party that doesn’t necessarily has power, but wants to get it back.

And the way I want to talk about what this feels like at the moment is just to bring up someone who probably most people have not heard of. His name is William Plumer. He’s a Senator from New Hampshire. He’s in the Senate at this time. He comes to Washington as a Federalist, but he’s a moderate Federalist. And the reason why he’s interesting at this moment with this discussion is he mingles with Federalists, he mingles with Republicans, and then he talks in his diary about what it felt like about how the Federalists were behaving and about what he feels like as a not extreme Federalists.

So he kind of feels out of sorts. He’s surprised. And he says this in his diary when he gets to Washington, that the Federalists, these people who agree with him, and many of them are friendly with him, they’re so extreme. He uses the word rigid a lot. And I want to offer a quote that shows him being surprised at what he sees by this opposition party at the time. He says, “The Federalist appeared to me not only imprudent, but much more than that. Today at our lodgings, Mr. Pickering of the Senate and Colonel [Tillage] of Connecticut of the House said they were in favor of a measure, quote, because they believed it would embarrass Mr. Jefferson, the president.

Mr. Tracy of the Senate and Mr. Benton of New Hampshire of the House today said they voted in favor of a claim upon the treasury of the United States not so much because they thought it just as that they wish to drain the treasury. And both of them have repeatedly said, in my hearing, they wished the majority would vote for claims they thought unjust so that the administration might feel the evil of an treasury.”

So what he’s seeing there, what Plumer is seeing there, the Federalist in opposition basically saying, “Well, our ideas don’t really mean much right now. So we’re just going to get in the way and chip away at the people in power and do what we can do to attack them just for the sake of attacking them as an opposition party.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, are you saying that the idea was really simply at that point for them simply to destroy the other party so that they could get themselves back in power, even though they didn’t have a majority?

Joanne Freeman:

Absolutely. Clearly, their assumption still at this point is, “Okay. Yeah. So the system we created that has presidential elections in it gave the election to these guys, but they wouldn’t be there. They’re dangerous. We should be there. We are the people who are right for the country.” And you see them say that all over the place in letters and diaries of the time. So yeah, they are now saying we’re just going to keep attacking here until we can destroy the power of these people and put ourselves back into power as we should be. Actually, as Plumer says, rigid Federalists, I think, are bad members of Congress, right? They’re not about anything having to do with ideas or policy. They’re just about getting back in power.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I think this is going to be really important in that the fact that they’re not advancing any policies so much is simply trying to tear down the other side. I think that’s going to be really important because you can’t really build a new coalition or bring new people to your standard if you’re not offering anything other than hatred.

Joanne Freeman:

Right. There’s not a lot to rally behind other than fear and hatred of the other side.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Okay. So how does that play out?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, so the Federalists increasingly shrink on the national stage. They remain powerful in New England. They kind of become really extremely doing with party, but their last sort of gasp, the moment where they actually lead to their own collapse, happens in line with the war of 1812. Now, by that point, Jefferson, as president, has done the number of things that they’re really not happy with. Among them, he has caused an embargo on trade, trying to force England into accommodating whatever the United States wants.

Heather Cox Richardson:

This is one thing that really hits home because the coast of New England is full of towns that have these big, beautiful homes, these federal homes from before the war of 1812. And the war of 1812 just pulled the rug out from under all of them. I mean, then the towns go into this huge depression.

Joanne Freeman:

It destroys the New England economy. So New England is in an uproar and they feel that there’s not much that they can do about it because on the national stage they’re a minority. So a number of New England Federalists come up with the idea to hold a convention, comes to be known as the Hartford Convention, which sure enough, as Heather suggested is in Hartford, Connecticut. And it’s a convention. It ends up being a secret convention that kept no formal record of what it did because they knew that what they were doing could potentially seem dangerous to the government, but they need to decide what they should do, what New England Federalists and basically the Federalist Party should do at this difficult time.

So between December 15th, 1814, and January 5th, 1815, 26 leading members of the New England Federalist Party hold this series of secret meetings at the old state house in Hartford, Connecticut. And they come up in the end with a series of resolutions which they plan to give the national government to hand along to Congress and the president.

Now I will say before I pronounce these that over time, and for good reason, the Hartford Convention comes to be seen as all about secession. I’m going to come back to that idea, but I want to lay that out here because people who are listening, if they know about the Hartford Convention, that’s probably what they know.

But so interestingly, and this is going to get us back for a moment, too, slavery and being liberal versus being conservative. The list of demands that the federals come up with include these. For one thing, they want taxation and representation to be apportioned only according to free people in the states. So they’re actually trying to undo the three-fifths compromise so that the South will not have more power than it deserves.

They say that Congress should not have the power to lay an embargo on ships or vessels of citizens of the United States for more than 60 days. They say that Congress shouldn’t have power without the concurrence of two-thirds of both houses to stop commercial intercourse between the United States and foreign nations. They want presidents to have to come from different states. So you can’t have two presidents coming from the same state, one after another. And no president should serve more than one term.

Now, what this is all doing is a really clear response to people who feel that they have no power. The constitution has set things up so that they can’t claim power. And in a sense, they’re tweaking things so that democratic Republicans in the South will have less power, and New England can maintain and increase their power, which increasingly is, on a slide, partly because the Louisiana Purchase just added a chunk of land to the union. So New Englanders are thinking, “Uh-oh, it’s bad now. It’s just going to get worse.”

So those are the resolutions of the Hartford Convention. Not talking about secession. There may have been discussion there about it, perhaps, but in the end, those are logical to some of the time would’ve seemed extreme, but logical measures to try and claim back power.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Did they not call for secession? I thought they did.

Joanne Freeman:

They did not formally call for secession. This was a secret meeting of people who were clearly dissatisfied with the government who were not just anti Jefferson, but were anti everything about that administration, who had a history of not being particularly small D democratic. And now they’re meeting in secret to do something it’s unclear what. And there were Federalists throughout this time period murmuring about succession. That was happening before the Hartford Convention. So you put all of that together and it makes perfect sense that people were assuming that all that convention was about was New England seceding from the union.

Unfortunately for them, timing-wise, they send these demands to the national government right as, number one, the treaty ending the war of 1812 hits Washington, and number two, American victory at the battle of New Orleans with Andrew Jackson coming out of that a hero. Both of those things happened at the same time that these demands hit Washington, D.C. So the nation is in a nationalistic fear. They’re happy. We’re victorious. And the Federalists now are stepping forward and saying, we don’t like the way things are going because we don’t have power. It looks bad.

And then the Republicans, the Jeffersonian Republicans create this assumption that of course, it was all about se secession. That’s all it was about. And there are cartoons in any number of other sort of popular culture things that get put out to insist that the Federalists were actually secessionists. So the combination of the Federalists demanding power, not liking the way the system was running as it was running, and then the other party making them look bad, they never regain power, certainly on the national stage. And eventually on the local level, they also lose power.

Heather Cox Richardson:

What you are suggesting is that by looking at the Federalists, what we see as a party that overreaches because it no longer has a democratic base, small D democratic base, and becomes authoritarian?

Joanne Freeman:

Correct. They really don’t care about that base, per se. What they care about is power and claiming power.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The piece that I find fascinating, because in a way it’s easier to see in this early period, is how they come to believe that they should be in charge, regardless of what people want. That they’re just the best men, if you will, which is a phrase that comes from 1872. But how does your mind get into that place of the very people who wrote our founding documents that maybe that whole, all men are created equal and we should all have a say, eh, maybe not so much, maybe we gotta make sure I’m the one in control?

Joanne Freeman:

And so at the base of that question is, how do you come to believe you are the best men regardless of what the democratic process tells you?

Heather Cox Richardson:

In a democratic system, which theoretically is not supposed to be based on anything like that. And the piece I wanted to add to this was not the 1850s, which seems so obvious, was what happens to the Democratic Party in 1879. And that’s an issue that a lot of people have never heard of. A lot of historians had never heard of it. But in terms of the collapse of political parties, it’s a really important moment, because the story is very similar to what you’d just told us about the Federalists.

So coming out of the Civil War, the Republican Party dominates American politics, but the Democratic Party never goes away. And I’m not going to do the whole run of what happens between those two parties after the Civil War, but it is vitally important to understand how parties fall apart. And that in the 1870s, the Republican Party begins to lose popularity, and it begins to lose elections. And it loses them primarily because of a terrible economic crash that begins in 1873.

And in response to that economic crash, the Republican Party decides that the way to recover the economy is basically to manipulate the system in such a way that it’s going to help the very wealthy to stabilize the economy. So that infuriates a lot of ordinary Americans. And they begin to elect Democrats to office.

So in 1874, the Democratic Party takes control of the House of Representatives. So this is for the first time since the Civil War. And if you think about that, the Civil War is not fully a decade in the past. And there’s still black voting in the South, but white reactionary Southerners are increasingly cutting down on black voting in the south. So it’s a period that is very chaotic politically.And when the Democrats take the House of Representatives in, they take it in 74, they sit in 75, they say that they’re going to go ahead and make sure to trim back the Republican sales, if you will.

And then in the election of 1878, the Democrats win the Senate as well. So beginning in 1879, Congress is dominated by Democrats. The president is Rutherford B. Hayes. He’s a Republican and he’s trying to enforce black rights in the South, but the Congress, in 1879, for the first time since the Civil War, is controlled by Democrats. What they do is something very similar to what the Federalists do in your period, Joanne, because when the Democrats take control of the Congress, they’re really doing it because of this economic recession.

That’s what people are focused on. They’re mad at the Republicans. They put the Democrats in power. But the Democrats interpret that as a sign that they should take control of the entire government. That they should get rid of all the Republican programs since the Civil War. They should get rid of black civil rights. They should go ahead and basically take the country back to where it was before the Civil War.

Joanne Freeman:

So they read the democratic process, which as you’re saying is largely based on the economy. They see that and say, “Oh yeah, see? We are supposed to be just in power with all capital letters.

Heather Cox Richardson:

In power, and crucially what they do is they don’t read the moment so much as they read the ideology and say, “Yes, we should be in power. And while we’re in power, we need to restore ourselves to permanent power in the country.” And the way that they decide to do that is similar to the Federalists. They want to destroy the American economy. They want to go ahead and defund the government so that it can’t actually function any longer. And what they figured that will do is it will force the Republicans to do what they want them to do.

Joanne Freeman:

So reeking havoc so that they then can step into power.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s right. And it’s a really interesting moment compared to the Federalists, because in fact the Democrats look like they’re gaining power in that moment. But what they do is when they actually become anti-democratic, when they actually go ahead and try to destroy the country, voters turn against them. And the Democratic Party, as it is controlled at the time by the former Confederates.

And it is literally controlled by former Confederates after the debacle of 1879 when they pass five bills that are trying to force the president Rutherford B. Hayes to do what they want them to do, the Republicans actually regroup. And they regroup and they say, you’re destroying America, you’re destroying our democracy, you’re trying to do exactly what you did on the battlefield 15 years ago, you can’t do this, you can’t destroy our democracy. And they managed to go ahead and grab those people and turn them into the enemies of the state.

Joanne Freeman:

Are they broadcasting, so to speak, that message publicly? So is that part of their sort of campaign rhetoric? What you just said.

Heather Cox Richardson:

They are literally saying we are former Confederates and we are taking back the government and the Republicans. And popular media respond with, “They are former Confederates and they’re taking back the government.” But the real think that this is interesting to me, this moment is interesting to me is because it’s a moment that looks not unlike the present in that you look at those Democrats and they seem to be gaining ground, they seem to be taking over, they’ve gotten the House, they’ve gotten the Senate, they seem to have a following, but they so badly overstep what their voters want. That in fact, they have to back down.

And in 1880, the Republicans regroup on the basis of equality and civil rights for African-Americans. And they elect a person who previously had been unknown to the presidency. And that’s James Garfield. And James Garfield became prominent in that period solely by standing against those former Confederates.

So what’s interesting after that is that, once again, with the collapse of that Confederate Party, if you will, that has this extraordinary resurgence in the 1870s, once again, you get, as you say, after the Federals collapse, this it in which both parties are still in existence, but they are having to re-figure out how to attract people. And they begin to compete in that period, not for power the way the Confederates had, but rather for more voters. And what emerges from that is a new Democratic Party and a new Republican Party.

Joanne Freeman:

Which I want to point to for a moment here. Only because part of the story that we’re not telling but that’s worth noting right now is that Heather and I are using the word Republican over and over and over again, and Democrat for that matter, in a different kind of a way. So people like to assume that there’s one Republican Party through all of American history and one Democratic Party for all of American history.

And that is obviously not the case. And in a sense, the story, Heather, that you and I are telling today is a dramatic example of the ways in which metamorphosis happen on the national stage and on a local stage, politically, to the point that in some ways parties become unrecognizable from one era to the next.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It is unfortunate that they used the same names. And they did that deliberately because they were trying to hark back to those earlier periods. But yes, in fact, the Republicans I’m talking about have very little to do with your democratic Republicans. And the Democrats that I’m going to be talking about, some of them have a lot to do with your Democrats and some of them have nothing to do with your Democrats because the Democratic Party splits really dramatically after this debacle of 1879 and after 1880.

And what happens is that having overreached to the degree they did, the Confederate wing of the Democratic Party, which by the way, in the whole process of this, they literally tried to get the federal government to provide Jefferson Davis with a pension. I just got to lay that out there. They literally tried to get the federal government to give a pension to Jefferson Davis based on what they did it by trying to get the government to give pensions to people who had fought in the Mexican War as he had.

When they were talking about that and somebody said, “Well, we better exempt Jefferson Davis.” They were like, “Why? He’s no different than the rest of us over here on the democratic side of the aisle.” To which the Republicans were like, “Exactly. And that’s why you shouldn’t be here.” And they had this long fight. And they later tried to get the fight expunged from the congressional record because they recognized just how inflammatory they had been. It was late at night, probably drink had been taken.

Joanne Freeman:

Wait, you’re saying that people are trying to change the historical records so that things that are happening get erased from memory?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Didn’t work actually, obviously, or I wouldn’t know the story, but there was an effort to do that. But having done that and having basically said we are going to control the government because we are the ones who should be in power and we are the ones who know what’s best for the country. And that does not include all the legislation that you’ve put in place to protect civil rights after the Civil War, Americans recognized that that was completely anti-democratic. And they turned against the party that they had seemed to be putting in. And they also began to articulate a new vision of political parties that takes off in the 1880s. So the Democratic Party completely regroups itself around, and I hate to do this to you, Grover Cleveland. And nobody really-

Joanne Freeman:

Why is Grover Cleveland a threat to me?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Because everyone’s like, who are the presidents you’ve never heard of? And there’s always Grover Cleveland. But Grover Cleveland is an enormously important figure. And I would argue the fact that he’s written out of history is in part because he is such an important figure. Because he’s the Democrat who says, you know what? We’re not going to fight the Civil War any longer. We’re going to accept civil rights. We’re going to accept all the things that you Confederates didn’t like. We’re going to focus on the urban areas in the country, the Northern cities. And we’re going to rebuild a coalition in the Northern cities that’s going to protect ordinary Americans.

And that’s a strand of the democracy that is going to pick up Republicans who are disillusioned with how the Republican Party has become all about making money and become corrupt and become about protecting the railroads. And so in 1884, when Cleveland runs for president as a Democrat, sort of divorcing himself from that reactionary side of the party, when he does that, he actually picks up a significant number of Republicans who become known as Mugwumps and who joined him to put him in office in ’84.

But crucially, that’s not the only piece of it. The other piece of 1884 is that the Republican Party, too, says, “Hold it. We have to move forward into this new era.” And they begin to regroup as Republicans. And it’s 1884 that gives us the rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Robert LaFollette in Wisconsin and Henry Cabot Lodge in Massachusetts as the people who are later going to become the heartbeat of the progressive Republicans.

Joanne Freeman:

But I want to draw the obvious line here, which is, as you gestured towards a little while back, Heather, you have Federalists who when they’re in power push too hard. And the Hartford Convention, although what they ultimately demand is not succession, there’s certainly fear that that’s what it’s going to produce. So to many, and that message is enforced by Jeffersonian Republicans, there’s a perception that they’re continuing to push too far.

And now you’re talking about, again, people who are pushing too far. And in one way or another, sometimes in blatant way, people are seeing this, and are now saying, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. They’re actually putting the brakes on what’s happening because people in power or people who are aggressively claiming power are going beyond what people are willing to accept.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Through becoming anti-democratic, small D democratic. They’re going ahead and trying to destroy our democracy. And what happens after that though, again, I think is so interesting because it’s very much like what happens with your earlier period, the Confederate democrats, they don’t go away. I mean, they don’t disappear and they’re going to continue to be a factor in American politics from then on, but they get relegated to their own region. And the rest of the country moves in a far more small D democratic direction.

You and I being political historians, there’s so many caveats to what I just said, but if we’re focusing on the rise and fall of political parties, or in this case, the fall and rise of political parties, we have two major political parties that become convinced they are the only ones who know how to run the country regardless of what voters say. And they must rig things so that they’re the only ones who can run things. And there’s a backlash in both cases that recreates a new, more democratic, small D democratic political system.

Joanne Freeman:

So this small D democratic political system gives these people power. And then once they have that power, they assume that they should keep it and they’re willing to move against democracy in one way or another, the democratic process to remain there?

Heather Cox Richardson:

And we should just stop right there, don’t you think?

Joanne Freeman:

Yup. Pretty interesting stories. Don’t you think? Yeah.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah. I wonder what they have to do with the present. So when we are talking about this, the obvious third place for us to go is to the present, the era in which we’re living. And there are clear similarities between the present day Republican Party and Democratic Party and these two less well-known pieces of our past, but there are also some critical differences. So the Republican Party in the present, and I went through the entire history of it, but of note is that when it became clear in 1986, which was still during Ronald Reagan’s second term, that the Republican Party was losing voters.

It began to turn to altering the mechanics of our system to stay in power. And it was helped by that, of course, by some things that went into place after the 1879 issue I just talked about, and that was the admission of a number of new Western states that went ahead and skewed the Senate towards smaller rural states. It was helped by the decision in the 1920s not to continue to add people to the House of Representatives, with the understanding that that would help people in cities. People like Grover Cleveland, although he wasn’t active then.

So it was helped by that. But in 1986, the Republicans start to suppress the vote, to suppress democratic voters. And that voter suppression has continued until the present. They also began to gerrymander enormously, effectively, especially after the census of 2010. And again, during the Reagan administration, they went ahead and began to try and pack the federal courts in such a way that their own legislation couldn’t be overturned regardless of what the American people wanted. And Reagan’s attorney general, Edwin Meese actually said that that was the plan, was to put people into office so that they could not overturn the Reagan Revolution no matter what the people wanted.

So you have in the present a political party that has, as we started at the top of this podcast saying a political party that has entrenched itself in the mechanics of the system even though it has increasingly lost the popular vote.

Joanne Freeman:

Entrenched itself in the mechanics of the system and is rigging them, right? So it’s acting against the spirit of those mechanics.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Oh, absolutely. And again, as a person who studies political theory, it’s a really interesting and disturbing moment when a political party makes a decision that it’s no longer going to try and broaden its base and get votes, it’s simply going to try and rig the system. Because, invariably, that means they become walled off from the rest of the world. They become more and more extreme. And mechanically, there are reasons for that, because they no longer have to worry about competing for votes. They have to worry about competing for more extreme people on their side.

So it’s a real problem as a political theorist, but it’s also a really interesting problem for people who study politics. And you and I were talking about this with the Federalists before this and with the Confederate democrats. Once you have rigged the mechanical system, how lawmakers and members of one or another political party come to believe that they are the only ones who should rule?

Joanne Freeman:

You are the best ones for the country. You certainly convince yourself and even more aggressively convince your base that the other side is anti-American, is going to destroy the nation. You are convinced that you represent, and are as as a group, the best men who should have power. And you depict the other side as being the opposite of that, obviously for strategic reasons.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, it’s an interesting thing though. And I think it speaks to your Federalists. How do you go from, we believe everyone should have a say and we want them to elect us, to, they’re not electing us, so we got to rig the system so it does elect us well?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, but for the Federalists, in a sense, here’s a paradox, right? They come to power and they openly, definitively, are not comfortable with popular politics. And of course, while they have power, they’re not abiding by popular politics. So it makes perfect sense that they’re going to continue on in that direction with what got them power, assuming that that will keep them in power. So yes, they assume they’re the best men, but they also assume that if they’ve gotten power, they should keep power. That clearly, the fact that they got it means something.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So if you’re the best man, you got to shut up the people who aren’t the best man who might get you out of power? So you should pass the Alien and Sedition Acts?

Joanne Freeman:

Right. And with the message being, “They’re dangerous. The other side is dangerous. They’re going to hurt the government. You have to silence them. They’re bad. They’re evil.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

And I think it’s pretty clear to say that today’s Republican Party believes that it should be in power regardless of the will of the voters. And you can see this really dramatically after January 6th, of course, when, despite the fact that then candidate Joe Biden won by more than seven million votes and won by, I think it’s 232 to 306 in the electoral college, that nonetheless, some of those people who voted, the people who voted in such a way that it gave Biden a number of states that Trump believed he should have won, that we should simply throw out those votes.

And quite dramatically, the former president called the secretary of state, and now he says the governor of Georgia to say, you need to lose those votes or find me one more than those votes. Which is an astonishing thing to say. I mean, we’re talking about swinging an entire state and more than 10,000 votes just because he thinks he should be in power.

Joanne Freeman:

And here’s the thing about presidential elections in particular, and in elections, generally speaking. That’s the ultimate way of pulling in the reigns on whatever’s happening, right? That’s the ultimate way in which the American people can register what they think, assuming that the system is allowed to operate in the way that it’s supposed to operate.

If you go all the way back to the founding, after Jefferson came into power, someone asked him, “Well, what would happen if the Federalists had gone very extreme and had just seized the government or claim the government or refused to let you become president?” And Jefferson basically responds by saying, “Oh, we would have gone right back to the constitution and tweaked whatever needed to be tweaked because the system is what’s going to keep things running.”

That’s one of the key things when you think about the constitutional convention. They didn’t assume that what they were doing was going to stay in the absolute shape that it was at the time forever after. They assumed that what they were doing was setting a process in motion. And that that process was what needed to be continued on. That was, in their minds, I think the most valuable thing that they were doing at the convention, was creating an ongoing process that would allow a democratic politics to continue.

So part of what we’re talking about when we’re talking about some of the collapsing parties or parties grasping at power is we’re talking at people who are claiming power despite the system, not really through the system. They’re warping the system. They’re changing the system. They don’t really care so much about the system as about maintaining their claim on power.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And I want to come back to that because I think that would be a lovely place to end. But I think the real question that people are going to wonder is what are we predicting in this moment? Because what we’ve set up is that the modern-day Republican Party seems to be acting in an undemocratic way and doing things that the American people don’t like.

One of the things that was interesting is on the day we’re recording this, there’s a new poll out from Quinnipiac about the Senate bill number eight from Texas, the one that gets rid of reproductive rights for women after the first six weeks of a pregnancy. And the Quinnipiac poll says that 77% of voters in Texas believe that abortion should be legal when a pregnancy is caused by rape or incest. And 72% of people say that the new abortion law should not allow private citizens to go ahead and be the vigilantes in the case of this. That’s not small numbers that is enormously unpopular

Joanne Freeman:

Right. I will say the same thing. That stunned me when I saw that this morning. Because the numbers are so huge. It’s not even just the point that a majority thinks otherwise, it’s that big a majority thinks otherwise, which really then makes you rethink what’s happening in Texas and who is making it happen.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But of course, we also have the 18 Republican-dominated states that have gone ahead and manipulated the mechanics of our voting in such a way that it looks as if they now can’t lose. And that will put them in charge as well of the electoral college in 2024. So I do want to talk more about the mechanics, but the interesting thing here is the parties. And what’s going to happen to this Republican Party? Is it in fact overreaching to the point that it’s going to collapse, or is it going to be able to jigger the mechanics in such a way that the Republicans are going to stay in power forever? And it’s rather as if the Hartford Convention never happened and the Federalists managed to stay in power or the Confederates managed to stay in power. Now, are the Republicans going to stay in power?

And I do want to point out that a couple of times recently, you’re starting to see, of course you saw the Lincoln Project during the Trump administration where former Republicans jumped ship and started to work against the people in power. And just recently Matthew Dowd, who was a strategist for George W. Bush’s reelection campaign, is running for Lieutenant governor in Texas, in Texas as a Democrat. That’s a heads-up moment, I think, where you’re seeing that party that’s left standing the democratic, small D Democratic Party left standing, picking up people who formerly were on the other side and finally saying, you know what, this party has gone too far. And I think we might in fact be looking at the democratic Republicans all over again.

Joanne Freeman:

But certainly what’s interesting is it’s one thing for people say I think they’re going too far. And it’s another thing to act behind that assumption. What you just mentioned as someone who actually is following through and acting on that belief that whatever’s happening out there no longer represents the Republican Party that I know of. So I’m just going to step off the conveyor belt and do something entirely different. So that’s a lot of what we’re looking at here, is the larger question of what are people going to do in the face of increasingly extreme behavior.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That has become undemocratic. And that has happened a number of times in our history. And in each occasion so far, Americans have said, no, actually we kind of like having a say in our government. And they’ve gone ahead and either taken a party and split it into pieces or they have taken their own parties in new directions as they did in the 1880s. But the one piece that I really want to emphasize here, and I would, and have written that this is exactly what’s going to happen to the Republican Party. But what I didn’t identify in the past was just how thoroughly the Republican Party, since 1986, has gotten control of our mechanics. Because I think modern-day communications and modern-day technology has enabled them to monopolize that mechanics in a way that was far more thorough than people could do an 1879 or 1815.

Joanne Freeman:

And doing so in part because of things like social media, with the assumption and with the image they’re sort of masking what they’re doing and making it look democratic. Because using social media and Watts and everything else, you can make it look like the masses, the majority, agree with you. If it seems as though the majority agrees with them, then you can step back and say, well, this is democracy.

Heather Cox Richardson:

If you had asked me 10 years ago, I would say that we were seeing the collapse of the Republican Party just demographically. And that what was going to happen is that it was going to do exactly what the former Confederates did or the Federalists did. It was going to become an extremist regional party. And either the Republican Party was going to split and half of it was going to reclaim its history. And the Democratic Party was going to slide back to where it belongs, so a little bit further to the left than it is now. Or that we were going to have the entire Republican Party collapse and the Democratic Party split into as the parties did after the election of 1824.

But now I’m not so sure until we get control over those mechanics in a way that was not as imperative to do before we had the rise of modern technology. And this is one of the reasons I’m fighting so hard for the Freedom to Vote Act. Because unless we fix those mechanics, I’m not sure that the voices of the American people can do what they’ve done in the past. We’ve done everything we can, it’s really time for the tinkerers with the mechanics to go ahead put some wrenches into the gears, I think.

Joanne Freeman:

In a democratic republic, what makes it distinctive is that the people, public opinion rules, the people have the power. And the way that they exercise that most aggressively, most forcefully, and most directly is through elections. Go all the way back to the founding. What that gets you is the founders saying the mechanics really matter. The mechanics really matter. How else can you preserve democracy? That’s a fine thing to say, but if you’re rigging them and warping them, and current-day forms of technology and media are aiding you in the process, and I think also democracy itself in a worldwide way, in a worldwide context, is being questioned, that puts us in a different kind of a moment where it’s harder to predict what comes next.