The New Deal and the Fifth Party System

Among American political theorists, there is a common method for describing the history of America's politics. We divide up American history into periods defined by the party system that prevailed. Each party system was defined by two major parties organized around the answer to the most important political question of that era.

There's a great YouTuber named Frank DiStefano who goes into this concept in great detail, and anyone who wants to know more should definitely watch his channel.

The point of this essay is to explain the party system that has been slowly crumbling around us for our whole lives, explain the proper communist orientation within this party system, and then explain how we should formulate our platform to dominate the not-yet-formed sixth party system that America is slowly but inexorably realigning towards.

A country as large and diverse as America has, as James Madison envisioned, too many different interests from different regions for any one to be able to set the national course alone for very long. The Southern planters attempted to do so before the Civil War, then the Radical Republicans attacked racists with the North after it, but in both cases their hegemonic sectional power was exhausted within decades.

Therefore, our national politics can't turn on minutiae. Any political program capable of winning roughly 51% of the vote must be simple enough for different sectional interests to see the benefit for often wildly different reasons, and fundamental enough to the running of the country that the question of supporting or opposing it cannot be avoided.

The fifth party system began in the ashes of the fourth. In that fourth party system, the issues of the Civil War were laid aside as the issues of industrialization came to predominate. The Democrats coopted the populist movement, aligning unreconstructed Klansmen and White Citizens' Councils with midwestern farmers trying to stay afloat in the face of railroad price fixing. The Republicans, having been the party of the evangelical abolitionist middle class during the Civil War, now found its response to industrialization in evangelical progressivism, things like temperance and labor laws.

We remember this as the Progressive Era, when the income tax was passed and the first laws restraining the monopolies of the robber barons were passed. This was also the era of the highest mass membership in the Klan, the era where Woodrow Wilson watched a Klan movie in the White House while jailing Eugene Debs for hating imperialism. This was the era of William Jennings Bryan wanting to loosen up monetary policy for the benefit of debt-burdened farmers, and also the era where William Jennings Bryan got the government to fine a man for teaching evolution to schoolkids.

What destroyed the fourth party system was the Great Depression. FDR was elected on a platform of bloated centrism but quickly realized the depth of the problems facing the country. For a bourgeois, FDR was fairly honest, at least not deceiving himself with the lies his class routinely peddles. However honest he may have been, he was also clueless how to fix the problem. His approach was to invite the Republican progressives into his coalition to talk to the Democratic populists, and then to implement whatever those experts recommended.

Their approach was a scattershot throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks endeavor that they branded the New Deal. Some parts of this New Deal were total bangers and continue to this day: the minimum wage and Social Security, especially. Some parts of this New Deal were too beautiful for this world, and were pruned back by the rich after the crisis had passed and enough time elapsed: the Civilian Conservation Corps, and labor militancy backed by the US Army marching into a picket line and turning their machine guns towards the bosses.

Some parts of it were odious and abandoned relatively quickly: price controls that grossly distorted the market and led to unconscionable waste, the attempted cartelization of all of American business with the National Recovery Administration through what were essentially thug tactics. And some parts of it - the parts nobody likes to mention, to be certain - were odious, and strangled all that was good in it in the long run.

The attempted cartelization of business was not fundamentally different than what Mussolini was doing at the time in Italy. Thankfully, the Republicans lodged a successful court challenge to the Chamber of Commerce-backed cartel system, probably their most successful blocking action in FDR's early administration.

This brings us to the nature of our current party system, the fifth. The big question that the Democrats and Republicans are meant to answer in this era is "Is the New Deal a good idea, or not?" And at the very beginning of this era, after FDR had picked the GOP nearly clean of its progressives, it was left with a rump of conservatives and libertarians that despised the New Deal for the flimsiest and most capitalist of reasons, and this anti-New Deal coalition was locked out of power for twenty years. When they finally did elect a President, it was only by nominating a centrist war hero like Eisenhower who vowed to continue the New Deal programs as-is, and drop a lot of cash on highway infrastructure to boot.

On to Part II!