When Biden took office, there were questions among presidency scholars about where he would fall in the political time cycle. A prominent theory, advanced by Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek, argues that presidential leadership follows a recurring pattern: some presidents are free to break with the past in meaningful ways, creating and destroying institutions, and defining their political parties for a generation or more. Presidents in this category tend to be the ones categorized as great, sometimes uneasily – Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan (maybe – more on about that later). These “reconstructive” leaders follow periods of disjunction – presidents stuck in between the old ideas prescribed by their parties and the growing crises of their own time. This category includes Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover, and Jimmy Carter. In the middle we have presidents who struggle to define themselves while they carry out the vision of the most recent reconstructive president – the LBJs, JFKs, and Bushes of the story, and those who try to make their way politically despite being from the party that’s out of favor.
There was widespread, though not universal agreement, that Trump fit some of the criteria for a disjunctive president, coming in as an outsider promising that “I alone can fix it” after the 2016 election. I wrote several versions of that take myself. But in a longer piece in this volume, I considered the ways in which Trump’s resembled the each of the leadership categories. More importantly, thinking about how this framework applies now pushes us to think about the political forces that carry the cycle forward. Party politics are central to how the theory works – coalitions rise and fall, coming together under reconstructive leaders and falling apart under disjunctive ones. This rests on a theory of coalition fluidity that assumes that presidents can, under some conditions, cleave off groups from their opponents in the short-term, or reconfigure politics in such a way as to build significant and durable majorities. The decline of traditional parties and the rise of intense partisanship challenge these assumptions.
In keeping with the prospects that politics have changed in ways that fundamentally alter the political cycle, I outline a few prospects for where we are in political time.
Perpetual preemption
The version of Skowronek’s landmark book that I first read (in grad school in 2003) was published in 1997, and it predicted the possibility of a politics of “perpetual preemption.” The idea was that it’s much harder to fundamentally change American politics than it once was. Reaganite Republicans could promise to get rid of the Department of Education or talk about privatizing Social Security, but actually doing it is another story.
This prediction looked weaker twenty years ago, when George W. Bush looked like a classic reconstructive leader trying to adapt Reagan Republicanism, following a prototypical preemptive leader in Bill Clinton. Clinton adopted Republican policies and talking points, presented himself with a hybrid identity (New Democrat), and faced character assassinations that culminated in impeachment.
Today, it looks like a solid prediction – neither party really enjoys a stable majority or a solid lock on the terms of debate. All presidents face serious challenges to their political legitimacy.
But this approach assumes that politics has become highly individualized, with presidents able to pick and choose political commitments they want. This hasn’t entirely panned out, with leaders able to define themselves with the individual charisma and popularity of the likes of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Maybe this explains some things, but presidents seem much more weighted down by partisan expectations than this idea would predict.
In other words, the idea of perpetual preemption seems to explain some of what we see in American politics generally – hope for a new direction in the country that reflects the policies favored by the majority, replacement of stale institutions, and renewed party politics. But this vision just doesn’t achieve liftoff.
However, this isn’t really a great explanation of the Biden presidency. Biden is a creature of parties and institutions, not a popular general or a governor with a reputation for challenging party orthodoxy. He is party orthodoxy. Preemptive presidents in the media age have the advantage that they can define themselves. Arguably, definition has been one of Biden’s most persistent challenges: explaining the meaning and significance of his signature legislation, reactive legislation like the 2022 gun bill, and debates over what has been achieved economically and what work is left to do. Biden has been able to do quite a bit, but he’s been unable to define much of it politically. Which brings me to…
Perpetual disjunction
The central questions of the Biden presidency are disjunctive ones. First, there’s the question of why politics seems so divorced from policy: why has Biden not gotten “credit” for his legislative record and diverse administration? (This predates the Gaza situation.) The disconnection between legislative accomplishments and political ownership of them recalls Jimmy Carter, surely the most dreaded comparison for modern presidents seeking reelection.
Disjunctive presidents, especially Democrats, typically face problems reconciling different parts of their coalitions. In the 1850s, it was North and South; for Carter, it was this plus the reformers and the vestiges of the urban machines. For Biden, the policy differences between the progressive and establishment wings of the party look increasingly difficult to navigate. This isn’t necessarily a comment on Biden himself; I observed some of the hallmarks of disjunction in Pete Buttigieg’s candidacy in 2019, as the latter tried to position himself as part of the Biden (moderate) wing of the party.
Similar types of questions apply to the Republicans. The coalition one is not only about how disparate groups in the tent might pull the party in different directions. It’s also about whether the party’s core commitments – the kinds of candidates and ideas that succeed, say, in primary elections – are increasingly incompatible with the preferences of the broader public. This framework helps to explain why Trump has dominated the party: not Trumpism, nor even his name recognition, but his ideological flexibility.
But what really got me thinking about the politics of disjunction was the legal verdicts of the past couple of weeks: Trump’s guilty verdict on 34 counts in the New York case, and Hunter Biden’s guilty verdict earlier this week. The online commentariat has grown fond of pointing out the irony of Republicans being the “party of law and order” as their presumptive nominee is convicted of multiple felony counts, or the dilemma posed by Hunter Biden’s commission of a crime related to gun access. Disjunction is supposed to be about competing political logics that undermine each other. What if somewhere between racism (which helps divorce the politics of crime from the reality of crime), misinformation, and the bombardment of a non-stop news environment, politics has ceased to have any binding logic at all?
Is this what reconstructive politics feels like?
This seemed more plausible to me a few years ago. I think Corey Robin’s analysis of the situation – that Biden’s accomplishments have been a policy list rather than fundamental institutional change – is basically correct. But it’s now common to see a wide range of institutional changes in mainstream debate, even if mainstream Democrats are slow to embrace them: Electoral College reform (or elimination); Supreme Court reform; Senate reform. Even if most of these are never fully realized, I think it’s possible that we’ll look back on this period as one that opened up conversations about what American institutions could look like. The resurgence of unions, might also prove to be reshuffling of power.
Carrying out the politics of the old order
During the 2020 election, one of my reservations about Biden as a reconstructive leader was his ties to past politics – his long service in the Senate and role as Obama’s vice president. Like Lincoln and FDR, Biden is good at positioning himself in the center of his party. But neither were quite as deeply enmeshed in party establishment as he is. During the nomination contest, Biden and Julián Castro tangled over who was the real heir to the Obama legacy. And Biden’s presidency could be viewed in the same way – representative of a shift to the left from the 1990s version of the party, remixing a particular kind of diversity with some updates to New Deal-ish commitments like health care and infrastructure. Continuation suits Biden better than novelty.
In a provocative comparison, writer Osita Nwanevu links Biden to Lyndon Johnson (paid link, worth it) on the basis that both accomplished a great deal domestically while engaged in “indefensible” foreign policy (in Biden’s case, support for Israel’s war in Gaza). Through the lens of articulation politics, the comparison strains: the typical reason for these presidents to get mired in foreign adventures (Polk and the Mexican War, McKinley and the Spanish-American War, Johnson in Vietnam, the Bushes in Iraq) stems from an impulse to define themselves apart from the looming legacies of their predecessors.
That’s not really what Biden is doing with Israel policy – this is not to absolve him of policy-making responsibility, but the situation is not of his choosing. The other major foreign policy mess, the U.S. exit from Afghanistan, was also a reaction to decisions of past presidents.
This distinction points to a larger truth about the Biden presidency: it has largely been driven and defined by what’s come before. Whether it’s protecting Obama’s Affordable Care Act, exiting from Bush’s war in Afghanistan, or reacting to (even partially co-opting) Trump’s immigration and trade approach, Biden has been largely defined by the politics and choice of his predecessors. It’s not just that his majorities have been narrow; his ability to define the results has been as well.
Of course, this entire line of thinking is built on a structural approach that looks for similarities across time. By definition, the political time framework looks at how patterns repeat regardless of the particular personalities, ideologies, and issues involved. In an in-progress book, I take on that assumption and suggest that the presidential politics of race stand apart, placing Biden in an entirely different place in a different kind of cycle. For that take, you’ll have to wait a bit longer.
Your question/thoughts are so helpful: "Is this what reconstructive politics feels like?" Is it possible to know when you are at the start of a process/will look back and it will seem clear?
A bit late reading this, but it gave me a lot to think about! Really appreciating pieces like this from the newsletter that step outside the (horrendous) day-to-day political news and try to look at the structural factors.