Mass participation, feverish partisanship, and class dealignment: we have seen an American electoral politics organized along these lines before. Notwithstanding the noisy debate over Trump and the threat of “fascism,” a concept imported from interwar Europe, this country’s own history furnishes a more useful precedent for our politics today.
From the Civil War to the early twentieth century, two evenly matched national parties traded biennial bouts of apocalyptic rhetoric and claims of election fraud, amid an atmosphere of widespread, even routine, political violence. Across this “age of acrimony,” as the historian Jon Grinspan calls it in a forthcoming book, American electoral politics operated on a principle of partisan vituperation. As an Ohio governor lamented in 1885, it was a “common thing to call the man with whom they do not happen to agree, a liar, a thief, a villain, a scoundrel, a Yahoo, a marplot, a traitor, a beast, anything and everything they may be able to command in the way of an epithet.”
Democrats and Republicans hated each other as much as they ever have, and their antagonism revealed itself in Congress and at the ballot box. Partisans disputed election results, incited mobs, and enouraged paramilitaries, while high-toned pundits denounced the “Mexicanization” of American politics. If today’s elections feel less like a struggle over state policy than a series of mass entertainment or sporting events — complete with predictable fan riots at the end of each season — Gilded Age politics, too, became a kind of national pastime, bursting with color, drama, and spectacle.
The presidential races between James Garfield and Winfield Scott Hancock in 1880, or Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison in 1888, for instance, are not remembered for their ideological stakes, nor should they be. But they were contested as ferociously as any election today, and they both brought more than 80 percent of eligible voters to the polls. Despite the violent suppression of black votes in the post-Reconstruction South, late-nineteenth-century elections saw the highest sustained voter turnouts of any period in US history.
Yet the partisan politics of the Gilded Age, for all its storminess, was also the politics of class dealignment. Both Republicans and Democrats claimed the mantle of the American worker, accusing the other side of being owned by some privileged stratum of the elite — and they were both right. Although the two sides argued endlessly about economic issues, including tariffs and monetary policy, it was often difficult to identify any class-based fault lines underneath the ruckus.
The real divisions lay elsewhere. Blue-collar workers remained fiercely divided by geography, race, religion, ethnicity, and culture — in a word, identity — with white Southerners and Catholics voting for Democrats, while northern Protestants and African Americans (where they could vote) backed Republicans. The voracious capitalist class at the helm of the economy, of course, remained flexibly bipartisan.