Realigners

Few Americans seem content with their democracy. Commentators across the political spectrum warn that the country is hurtling toward disaster, yet many also feel that public life is stuck and nothing really changes. Some have begun to suspect that the distance between elites and ordinary citizens has turned self-government into a fiction. Often, the same person wants both to defend the nation's founding principles and to tear them down.

How did American politics reach this point, where the sense of paralysis and the sense of collapse arrive together? Timothy Shenk, a historian, traces the American political tradition from the drafting of the Constitution to the storming of the Capitol. Rather than a sequence of events, the book is built around sharp portraits of key figures, including James Madison, Charles Sumner, Phyllis Schlafly and Barack Obama. Each shows how a political leader assembled the coalitions of voters that shaped the country's democracy.

Shenk's broader aim is to reassess these coalition builders and to offer perspective on the present, when politicians from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to nationalists associated with MAGA are working to turn sweeping ambitions into policy. The book looks back at earlier periods when large popular majorities transformed American life.

Its underlying argument is that the current cycle of gridlock and decline is not inevitable. The country has been remade by such majorities before, and Shenk suggests that a way out may lie in the possibility that it could happen again.