We appreciate Joshua Zingher’s review of What Happened to the Vital Center? Just as we found value in Zingher’s attention to changes that have reconstituted political behavior in the United States, it is gratifying to read of his respect for our efforts to understand the deep historical roots of a polarized America. At the same time, we welcome the probing and troubling questions he raises about the “vital center”: Did the post–World War II consensus rest on a “foundation of African American exclusion?” Is a vital center possible when African American civil rights are allowed to come to the political forefront?
Our major objective in exploring how the vital center unraveled was to diagnose how the cultural and institutional conflicts unleased by the 1960s contributed to the contemporary problems plaguing self-government in the United States, a task Zingher credits us with doing well. We were careful to make clear, however, that we do not prescribe a return to postwar consensus marred by the Democratic Party’s “Faustian bargain,” as Ira Katznelson calls it, with Southern defenders of white supremacy. We agree with Zingher, and so state in the concluding section of the book, that “the greatest challenge faced by those who would restore the vital center is coming to terms with the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow” (p. 292).
America’s “original sin” is central to our story. The party system, forged during the early days of the republic to reconcile the stability of constitutional government and populist uprisings, could not prevent a Civil War or the neutering of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments in its aftermath. Still, the achievements of emancipation and the Civil War amendments would not have been possible without the emergence of a variegated Republican Party that built a broad coalition of former Whigs, disaffected Democrats, and abolitionists. Similarly, the civil rights revolution of the 1960s was the destination of a coalition of labor and civil rights activists who began a partisan realignment on race during the late 1930s and 1940s. Progress was resisted by powerful countermovements, but partisan politics animated by a mating dance between the gatekeepers of party politics and populist insurgents posed hard and ultimately successful challenges to the ramparts of white supremacy.
The civil rights revolution was so polarizing because it finally forced the United States to confront, after a century of false promises, the shameful limits of its grand experiment in self-rule. Only then did America begin to live up to its foundational principles. There is no prospect that the contemporary battle for the “soul of America” will be resolved by bargains struck between elites. Like all fundamental partisan contests in the development of American democracy, any resolution would entail a hard-fought contest over the foundational question of what it means to be an American. The tension between mediating institutions like parties and populist uprisings is a hazardous but inevitable feature of democracy.
Our core argument is that the expansion of executive power since the 1930s combined with the rise of movement politics during the turbulent sixties replaced political parties as collective party organizations with an executive-centered partisanship—an improbable joining of presidential prerogative, social activism, and high-stake struggles over domestic and foreign policy. We hope that representative constitutional government is still capable of principled party contests over the polarizing issue of American identity. But a nation under the spell of a presidentialism that fosters a winner-take-all Manichean politics cannot be the vanguard of a multiracial democracy.
