But despite Hofstadter’s evident influence, Shenk is motivated by a very different underlying problem. While Hofstader surveyed the sweep of American political thought and came to the pessimistic conclusion that its recurrent theme was the evasion of conflict through appeals to a shallow individualism, Shenk wants to explain how and why structural change does sometimes happen, and often against all odds. Political activists, after all, have always tried to make space for themselves within the American political tradition; sometimes they have even succeeded in turning the country in directions no one had anticipated. For Shenk, the central dilemma is produced by majority rule itself: If democratic politics involves appealing to the majority of voters in order to win an election, how can anyone gain power with the goal of creating lasting structural change? Since real change involves asking people to take a leap into an unknown future, is this possible to achieve in an electoral system that demands creating majority coalitions—including many who may have a profound stake in keeping things the way they are?
The United States has gone through one period of truly revolutionary change in its history—the abolition of slavery—and the first half of Realigners is concerned with the development of political parties and the maneuvering around slavery in the early republic and the antebellum years. The political problem of ending slavery brings Shenk’s key concerns to the fore: How can a society vote to take actions that completely transform property, labor, and class relationships? Enslaved people by definition could not vote—indeed, they could not engage in any formal or recognized political activity; could not speak freely or publish their own newspapers; and could not enjoy freedom from search and seizure, being property themselves. They effectively existed in a dictatorship that was no less absolute for being decentralized, one master at a time controlling his own plantation through recourse to violence—a violence that all white people were implicitly able to enact, if need be, to maintain the social hierarchy. The people most oppressed by slavery could not take political action to abolish it.
The rest of American society, in the North as well as the South, did not seem all that interested in taking action either. After all, most Americans after the Revolution benefited from slavery to some extent, especially in the first three decades of the 19th century, as cotton and its profits dominated the national economy and drove its growth. In the early 19th century, there was no electoral constituency that could bring an end to the slave system, and so, as Shenk notes, one had to be created: a “coalition of free states, powered by mass democratic politics, dedicated to abolishing slavery.” This was the project of Republican politicians like Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, in contrast to earlier generations of abolitionists, who had looked at the complicity of the entire nation in sustaining slavery and argued that withdrawal was the only moral choice.