Amid fears of recession at home and disillusion in Iraq, the collapse of Karl Rove’s once-acclaimed electoral strategy—mobilizing a ‘red-state’ alliance of Southern whites, Midwest Evangelicals and security moms around God, guns and the War on Terror—prompts a longer-term look at the bloc-building tactics of American political elites. The merit of Jerry Hough’s recent Changing Party Coalitions is the rigorously estranging eye it casts on these processes. A comparative political scientist at Duke University, Hough is best known for his work on the ussr, in which he set aside then dominant ‘totalitarian’ interpretations to focus on the actual institutional workings of the Soviet polity. Far from the monolithic dictatorship posited by the likes of Richard Pipes, Hough revealed a complex system of factions and countervailing tendencies; nor did he hesitate to draw parallels between the ussr’s one-party system and the practices of the us duopoly, including elite management of faction-ridden parties and interest-group capture of policy-making. Here, he brings a similar independence of mind to his discussion of American electoral processes and the emergence of what he sees as the deliberately anti-democratic red-state/blue-state paradigm; in the process, many of the central episodes of a familiar narrative appear in a new light.

Since Walter Dean Burnham’s Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics in 1970, a set of landmark presidential contests have been held to signal tectonic shifts of social and ideological support for the two hegemonic parties: 1800, 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932, 1968 and, latterly, 1980 and 2000. Hough recasts both the number of realignments and their meaning: he tends to see both parties as constructed from the top down, rather than as substantiations of the people’s will. Many features of the oligarchic polity of the 18th century were preserved by the parties that emerged in the 19th, who united to thwart the appearance of any populist alternative or party of labour—an almost unique achievement in the New World. Hough’s account draws on intensive archival work to detail the processes by which the two parties contrived to limit electoral participation, gerrymander constituencies and divide up the electoral spoils within the ferociously competitive landscape of modern industrial America—greatly aided, although he does not spell this out, by the first-past-the-post system. At stake, for both parties, has been the problem of mobilizing maximum electoral support for policies that are not primarily conceived in the interests of the median voter. According to Hough:

both parties have structured their economic policy so as to try to maximize support in the upper class of the population—the 25 per cent of the population that makes above $75,000 a year in family income. Without any meaningful choice on economic questions, voters have been forced to choose between the parties on cultural issues alone.

In his view, the recent withdrawal of the two parties behind the winner-takes-all ramparts of the red-state/blue-state division, leaving only a dozen states genuinely competitive, represents a further diminution of the real electorate, narrowing the already circumscribed space available for meaningful political participation.

Changing Party Coalitions starts with the Democratic-Republican Party constructed by Jefferson and Madison, tracing the logic of electoral calculation as land- and slave-owning elites manoeuvred to shore up their factions’ votes within an Electoral College modelled on ancien régime lines. The arithmetic had been sealed in the compromise at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which Hough describes as ‘a velvet military coup d’état against the Articles of Confederation, led by the man who controlled the army’. George Washington presided over the Convention and used his two former aides-de-camp—Alexander Hamilton from the North and James Madison from the South—to put in place a mechanism that would restore elite order and guarantee a unified state for external affairs, without interfering in domestic social hierarchies at local-state level. Parity for North and South in the Senate and Electoral College was understood by the Framers of the Constitution as providing the plantation-owners with a veto over any legislation that would undermine the slave system; but broader alliances would be needed once political competition ensued. A distinctive element of Hough’s book is its grasp of the dynamic nature of ethnic and religious allegiances within a fast-growing settler state. Early 18th-century colonists, he argues, still clung to the confessional loyalties of the English Civil War: the small towns and villages of Puritan New England were rife with suspicion towards the Episcopalian planters of Virginia. Between mid-century and the Revolution, however, a fresh wave of immigration was dominated by non-English Protestants—Presbyterian or Baptist Scots and Irish, Lutheran or Mennonite Germans and Dutch—who brought their own sets of loyalties and enmities. Many would settle in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

In the first contested presidential election of 1796, Hough suggests, Jefferson and Madison calculated that the support they would need from the mid-Atlantic non-slave states to add to their Southern base could not be leveraged by appealing to small farmers of upper New York or Pennsylvania to ally with plantation-owners on the basis of their own perceived class or economic interests. Instead, the early Republicans appealed to the Puritan and anti-English sentiments of Scottish and Irish immigrants against the ‘Anglo-Monarchical Tories’—i.e., Washington and the Federalists—and denounced Adams for wanting ‘an aristocratical form of government’; as Hough notes, ‘nothing was said about the truly aristocratic form of government in the South that Jefferson and Madison never tried to change.’ Though initially unsuccessful, Jefferson’s victory in 1800 formed the basis for the first party alignment. A decade later, Madison ‘deliberately’ provoked the War of 1812 against England on the same logic, to secure his own re-election, while the Federalists’ opposition to the conflict terminally damaged their credibility as a national party.

In the 1830s Andrew Jackson, ‘a Tennessee slave-owner of Ulster-Protestant stock’, and Martin Van Buren, ‘a Dutch-German New York’ politician, initially aimed to build a new Democratic Party that would mobilize the burgeoning electorate on the same basis as Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans: that is, an alliance of Southern interests with Protestant Irish, Scots and Germans in the vote-rich mid-Atlantic states. Hough sees this coalition coming apart as the result of a third, mid-19th-century wave of immigration, from 1835–60, this time dominated by Catholic Irish and (to a lesser degree) Germans, fleeing famine, eviction and repression at home. They crowded the fast-expanding Northern cities and soon became fodder for, and then operators in, the clientelist Democratic machine, whereby jobs and favours were allocated in exchange for political loyalty. In Hough’s revisionist view it was the tensions produced by the annexation of the vast Catholic territory of the south-west in the 1845 Mexican–American War that led to the breakdown of the mid-century Democrat–Whig alignment. When the Whigs, magnates and manufacturers failed to offer a refuge to Protestant workers alienated by the Irish-run lower ranks of the Democratic machine in the 1850s, they were swept away by the anti-Papist, anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party in a revolt from below. The Republican Party, formed in 1854 as the first all-Northern party in the country’s history, effectively rose to the task of consolidating ‘the economic positions of the Whigs and, in a polite manner, the anti-Catholic themes of the Know-Nothings’—winning enough support among Northern German and Irish Protestants to take the presidency in 1860.