Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy

These days it seems that nobody is satisfied with American democracy. In Realigners, the historian Timothy Shenk offers an eye-opening new biography of the American political tradition that asks why so many of us feel like the country is both stuck in place and falling to pieces. Running from the drafting of the Constitution to the storming of the Capitol, Realigners tells the history of American democracy by examining the country’s dominant electoral coalitions—and the people who made them. From James Madison and Charles Sumner to Phyllis Schlafly and Barack Obama, it examines at earlier moments when popular majorities transformed American life. We’ve had those moments before. And if there’s an escape from the doom loop that American politics has become, it’s because we might have one again.

Timothy Shenk is an assistant professor of history at George Washington University. The coeditor of Dissent magazine, he has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, and Jacobin, among other publications. His first book, a biography of the Cambridge economist and communist Maurice Dobb, was published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2013. He has been a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the New America Foundation. He lives outside Washington, D.C.

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partner (the George Washington University History Department) for their continued support.