Every party story is a race story
This week I have a piece up in a symposium convened by the Niskanen Center, which draws together some of the sharpest commentators on party politics and also me. The forum is called “Partisans without Parties,” and the various essays grapple with the issue of party strength and revitalization from several very different perspectives.
As I complete a book manuscript on race and the presidency, I’m returning to the thinking that got me started there in the first place: the ways in which periods of heightened racial tension and transformation expose not only underlying fault lines in political parties, but also the difficulties that parties have resolving them.
When I started the essay, it seemed like the racial intensity that informed both the 2016 and 2020 elections had faded a bit, with the exception of Trump’s strange efforts to talk about Harris’s racial identity, and her effective defusion by refusing to engage with those accusations, or whatever we want to call them.
While the piece was in press, the story about “eating the pets” broke, and the presidential contest took another turn. This is signficant to how I’m thinking about this period, in which we’ve recently had a racially transformative president (Obama, as the first Black American to hold the office) followed by a backlash one and two impeachment crises. This is a recurring pattern in history, as I identify in my forthcoming book, and in the aftermath, race has tended to recede from the national conversation. It’s been relegated to the states (Democrats after the Civil War), neglected by the formerly transformative party (Democrats 1970s-1980s, Republicans after the 1870s) or buried in dog whistle language (Republicans after Civil Rights). But the polarized dynamics of race and politics today suggest that this may play out differently - and that the time-honored American tradition of side-stepping difficult race questions may be coming to an end.
Here’s another link to my piece - I hope you’ll give it, and the others in the forum, a read.