In a wealthy society on the cusp of generation-defining technological advancement, a political party grapples with the kind of polarization that compels some pundits to predict imminent civil war. Western powers are fruitlessly fighting for influence in the Middle East. Back on the home front, a sizable contingent of religious Americans find themselves feeling alienated and excluded by this party’s extreme rhetoric, while true believers face massive ideological blowback and a shifting political landscape. The year is 1856.
Here follows an account of the short, embarrassing tenure of the Know Nothing Party (on first blush, something Pyncheon would have rejected for being too on-the-nose). Empowered from 1844 to 1860, the Know Nothings were staunch anti-Catholic nativists, characterized by a populist bent and uncommonly progressive politics. The Know-Nothings backed exactly one notable Presidential candidate – Millard Fillmore, 1856 – who subsequently lost the election in a landslide. Political historians have since argued compellingly that the Know Nothings’ failure to stake out a clear position on slavery was a fatal mistake, making the party unattractive to both Southern landowners and abolitionists. They were focused on a different cultural battle: that between an influx of Catholic Scots-Irish immigrants and the longstanding Reformed Protestant tradition which had characterized America from its founding by Separationists. The fifteen-odd years during which these peculiar creatures very nearly inherited the American political ecosystem provide a fantastic case study on the decline of parties in times of existential national division. After the Whigs dissolved in 1854 when the Kansas-Nebraska Act bulldozed the Missouri Compromise, the immediate pre-Civil War years left a power vacuum unusually amenable to populism.
All was briefly well until 1856. James Buchanan had just won the White House – to the great embarrassment of Fillmore, who had, less than a year ago, called the Know Nothings “the only hope of forming a truly national party.” The Know Nothings were saddled with an impossible coalition, torn between pleasing anti-Catholic Southern nativists and the pro-regulation progressive urban dwellers of the North. They spent their few years of Congressional tenure in Washington dithering around high-spending proposals – all while the nation careened toward the kind of disagreement that eventually requires artillery to resolve.
Sound familiar?
The Know-Nothings shared more DNA with today’s Democrats than either party would care to admit: both parties run on federally-funded public education, women’s rights, and increased government regulation of corporate America. The Know-Nothings provide an interesting historical parallel to Democratic decline, one which might help us chart the future trajectory of the party. Prescribing a course of treatment, though, requires a diagnosis. The common malady is terminal contradiction; a party trying to sell division as unity at precisely the moment American politics has reached extreme social division (only accelerated by the pandemic). Like the question of slavery, Israel/Palestine has functioned as political mitosis, splitting the Left, all while the party seeks to spend money it doesn’t have on entitlements and stimuli. The only solution to organizational fragmentation of this scale is decisionism. The Democratic Party must start taking clear stances if it hopes to retain its dwindling voter base – even if a vocal minority deems some of them problematic.
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2024 was a historically terrible year to vote blue. Biden, living out his golden years like a late Beckett character, shuffled out of the White House without fanfare, while Harris ran a lackluster campaign that spent billions, took very few official positions of any kind, and lost every single swing state in the country. For the first time in decades, the American Left faces the squeamish truth of its own perishability. Young men, traditionally Democratic voters, began to switch affiliations early in 2024. This should have been a warning that the old playbook wasn’t working anymore. It appears that America’s tolerance for progressivism ran out exactly when the ghost of Engels became a full-time DNC poltergeist.
The consequences of the 2024 election might cripple the Democratic Party for years to come. Since Trump’s inauguration, the United States has pulled out of the WHO, abolished diversity requirements in hiring and admissions processes, and quietly built a Supreme Court so overwhelmingly conservative it reignited discussions about court packing. Recent polls show national approval of the Democratic Party hitting an all-time low of 27%, while the old guard, like Schumer and Sanders, display an unexpected willingness to capitulate on questions of shutdown and illegal immigration. Most interestingly (and most pertinent to the case of the Know Nothings), the party is alienating everyone. NBC reporting says “[t]here are no clear dividing lines among Democratic voters on this question across gender, socioeconomic status and ethnicity.” If the left has managed to bring the approval rating down with every demographic, then their influence and issue-selection must be taking a nosedive in multiple arenas. The effect is only compounded by the soaring popularity of the New Right, especially among young people.
The same characters as usual are still crying fascism on Twitter, and yet, it seems that larger institutions of the culture are opening their arms to the New Right. Only a few mega-corporations have publicly refused to nix their diversity program; meanwhile, Columbia University capitulated quickly to the Trump administration’s oversight demands on its Middle Eastern Studies department. The body politic at large, from rural farmers to Silicon Valley billionaires, is commencing a rightward exodus. Trad is in, pink hats are cringe, and Catholicism is hot again. This is your brain on raw milk.
As a proxy for effectiveness as a national party, I’ll borrow a script from activist social movements, which emphasize WUNC (worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment) as the keys to success. WUNC is a decently helpful framework: its tenets accurately predict the success of the British abolition movement, anti-apartheid, and anti-colonial activism in India. Relying solely on a backward-looking perspective on “traits for success” would be a flawed methodology, but the correlation appears anecdotally strong enough to draw some conclusions about the state of the party as what it is – a huge, disjointed social movement.
The Democrats size up unfavorably. A combination of Trumpist anti-academic populism and high-profile switches (see: Elon Musk’s spectacular defection from the church of progressive capitalism) has decreased the “worthiness” impact of having the best-educated party on the national stage. Colombia’s recent surrender to the Trump administration’s demands only compounds the problem. There is a clear sense that the wealthy, powerful, and highly educated either cannot or will not make themselves a problem for the current government. Just as the Know Nothings watched their luminaries (Lincoln, Cleveland, Fillmore) peel away, today’s Democrats are witnessing institution after institution quietly backing away from their cherished initiatives. As for numbers? The 2024 popular vote was a bloodbath, with every swing state flipping red. The failure of cultural hegemons like Universities – notably Penn – to back their previously preferred ideals of diversity is an omen that commitment to progressivism is on its way out.
Within a decade of the party’s demise in 1856, America ran headlong into the Gilded Age and its philanthropic proto-tech overlords. Contemporary America has skipped the market-driven middleman and given our oligarchs the keys to the kingdom. Musk’s influence on President Trump’s decision-making should not be underestimated, nor should the growing cultural relevance of tech giants like Mark Zuckerberg and Bryan Johnson. Seeing this pattern repeat itself, fostering the same conditions which spelled death for the Know Nothings, Democrats must take seriously the potential that the party will not bounce back from their 2024 loss. If nothing changes, the Democrats risk joining the ranks of the Know Nothings and the Bull Moose.
Where can the Democratic empire go from here? The decline of the Know Nothings offers a helpful past case, even though nativism and populism are hallmarks of the current Republican Party. Because the Know Nothings held some distinctly unprogressive ideals, examining their journey from major national party to one-off in the history textbooks provides a strong argument for the legitimacy of my comparison; even applied across time and ideology, it can accurately describe some causal factors that consistently initiate a party’s organizational breakdown and eventual death.
The Know Nothings were too large and too ideologically diverse to command a clear majority of Americans. Politics in a time of globalization, change, and polarization demands, above anything else, a feeling of certainty. Truman dropped Fat Man. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Know Nothing Party could not do the one thing which could’ve won them the election: give a clear, unified position on slavery. Every voter knew that tensions between the North and South were reaching a breaking point, and violence might soon become inevitable. If your child were going to fight in a bloody civil war, you wanted a President who could verbalize some purpose for that bloodshed; who could “rally the troops” in the original sense of the idiom.
In the modern day, Americans have replaced their sons with their wallets, but the principle still stands. Why would people watch their tax dollars go to Ukraine, Israel, or Iran when the party in charge of the purse can’t even agree which side to support? So, too, the Know Nothings had a hand in too many buckets. They tried to represent Protestants writ large, balance pro- and anti-slavery factions, further women’s rights before the suffrage era, represent a disenfranchised working class leading up to the Gilded Age, and regulate industry while supporting the burgeoning railroad business. They experienced the same storm that’s currently settling over the Democrats: an overly diverse coalition, internal argument over which side to take in a major war, and a social ideology that revolves unimaginatively around fierce disdain for members of the outgroup. Naturally, the empowered members of the party – lawmakers – have failed to pass climate, foreign aid, and healthcare policies half as progressive as the ones for which its most vocal wing calls. The left consistently comes up short, incapable of practically taking a stance strong enough to arouse passions in its base. Instead, its leaders have impressively managed to let everybody down (and it is a legitimate shame that collective disappointment hasn’t bound the fractured party together).
The internal divisions of the current left span massive ideological chasms, threatening to replicate the mistakes of the Know Nothings. The Democratic party, positioning itself as the voice of the minority, has amassed quite a collection of supporters: devout Muslims, young women, and university professors. These various groups form about half of American voters, but only nominally. The wide blue brush with which they’ve all been painted can’t mask serious ideological divergences which no party can reasonably bring into harmony.
The contemporary Left is a teeming mass which cannot agree on a cohesive vision of American progress. “I disagree with school prayer” can mean I am an avowed atheist who thinks public displays of religion encroach on my religious freedoms. It can also mean that only Islamic school prayer should be acceptable/required. Maybe you like school prayer, but you’re willing to give it up because you feel so strongly about voting for the pro-choice party. Good luck having policy negotiations with the many Catholics and Muslims who vote Democrat despite being pro-life.
The example of the mid-nineteenth century seems to suggest that the next decade will be bleak for Democrats. After Fillmore’s loss in 1856, the Know Nothing Party dissolved, mostly along the lines of abolition. Taking no position while trying to keep supporters from both sides of the slavery debate proved impossible. Over the next thirty-odd years, Irish Catholics flooded into the United States, and Italians were soon to follow. Women didn’t get the vote until well into the twentieth century.
I am not quite so pessimistic regarding the Democrats – they’ve been around much longer than ten years, for one. Still, the only path forward is through the fire of actual decision-making. Define the enemy, if you must – but this time, think about the people you choose to alienate. There is no escaping the difficulties a nonsensical and too-diverse coalition will continue to offer, but trying to win them all over clearly hasn’t worked. A potential issue with my advice is obvious: how will the Democratic Party be able to keep even its current insufficient population of supporters if it starts to take firm stances on the issues that divide the base?
Republicans are not immune to infighting (see January’s H1B debacle), but they are far, far better about electing leaders who grit their teeth and pick a side. Trump limited H1B visas from India on his second day in office, a show of clear partiality that didn’t send his party into an all-out rebellion. Even the recent expansion of IVF accessibility – a profoundly moral question for many right-wing voters – has not prompted much outcry. Republicans know how to hold a party line, even when they disagree with individual policies advanced by their chosen administration. This should be a bolstering signal to the Democrats: decisiveness does not spell death.
Ultimately, I predict the Democratic cause will primarily be devoted to managing the effects of this election for at least another four or five cycles – and damage control isn’t aesthetically appealing. The kind of energy that gives movements a self-sustaining property, according to a recent much-discussed New York Magazine article, now belongs to New Conservatism. Democrats, who are only nominally still the party of youth, must recognize how powerful a litmus this demographic shift represents; it should be clear that there is no viable future for their status quo. Difficult as it may be to handle a discordant voter base, it’s plainly true that Democrats no longer control the political musculature required to get away with keeping policy views close to the chest. The Left will have to coalesce and start making clear, public decisions that re-establish their place as ideologically cohesive activists. Speaking softly only works when you’re carrying a big stick.
Image Credit: David Gilmour Blythe, “Justice” (1860)
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