From the Federalists to Trumpism, how parties and their coalitions transformed the American Republic

The United States has lived under the same Constitution since the late eighteenth century. Yet it has never lived under a single, unchanging political order. Behind the continuity of the text adopted in 1787, several Americas have succeeded one another: Alexander Hamilton’s commercial republic, Andrew Jackson’s white democracy, the Union preserved under Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt’s welfare state, Ronald Reagan’s conservative revolution and, now, Donald Trump’s national populism. Each redefined the role of federal power, the composition of the parties, the boundaries of citizenship and the way the nation understood its place in the world.

This succession is often obscured by the permanence of institutions and party labels. The Democratic Party claims a history reaching back to the Jacksonian era; the Republican Party retains the name of the organization that carried Lincoln to power. But a segregationist Southern Democrat, a unionized New Deal worker and a contemporary metropolitan voter do not belong to the same political family in any ideological sense. Similarly, the party of Union and emancipation, the party of Gilded Age industrialists, the party of Reagan and the party of Trump represent different coalitions, sometimes divided by opposing views of the economy, government and foreign policy.

American political history cannot therefore be reduced to an immutable confrontation between two camps. It is the history of parties flexible enough to absorb movements that, elsewhere, might have founded durable new organizations, yet powerful enough to confine almost all competition within a binary contest. Understanding the political landscape of 2026 requires returning to this mechanism: in the United States, crises generally do not replace the Constitution. They transform the coalitions that make it work.

The parties the Founders never anticipated

The Constitution says nothing about political parties. Many of the Founders associated factions with the pursuit of particular interests that could undermine the common good. George Washington himself warned against their grip. Yet disagreements emerged almost as soon as the new government began operating. Agreement on the existence of the Union was no longer enough; Americans had to decide what that Union should become.

The Federalists formed around Alexander Hamilton. They favored a national government capable of establishing public credit, supporting a central bank, protecting commerce and encouraging the emergence of a manufacturing economy. Their base lay especially among the merchants and financiers of the Northeast. In foreign affairs, they regarded the relationship with Great Britain as essential to the young country’s economic stability.

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison responded by leading the Republican movement, later called Democratic-Republican to distinguish it from the Republican Party founded in the following century. Their ideal rested on a republic of agricultural landowners, a restrictive reading of federal powers and deep suspicion of concentrated financial power. They were more sympathetic to revolutionary France and saw state autonomy as a safeguard against the formation of a national aristocracy.

This first conflict already contained several fault lines that would run through the whole of American history: finance against land, federal power against the states, the commercial coast against the agricultural interior, elite expertise against popular sovereignty. It did not yet unfold within a universal democracy, however. The definition of the electorate was largely left to the states and, with local variations, favored white male property owners. The Republic proclaimed the sovereignty of the people while preserving slavery, excluding women from the vote and severely limiting the participation of the poor.

The transfer of power in 1800, which brought Jefferson to the presidency, nevertheless demonstrated that a change of majority could occur without a change of regime. The Federalists declined after the War of 1812, but their ideas did not disappear. Several of their instruments—federal credit, a bank, support for infrastructure and industrial development—returned under other names. From this earliest period, one rule became clear: a party may die while some of its ideas survive in the party that defeated it.

Jackson and the rise of white mass politics

During the 1820s, the removal of property requirements in many states greatly expanded political participation among white men. Campaigns became national, newspapers turned into partisan instruments, conventions gradually replaced elite caucuses and voting became a mass ritual. Andrew Jackson’s election in 1828 symbolized this transformation.

The new Democratic Party presented itself as the defender of the common man against banks, privilege and the elites of Washington. It brought together farmers from the South and West, urban workers and parts of the immigrant populations of Northern cities. It celebrated territorial expansion, states’ rights and a limited conception of federal intervention in the economy. Yet Jackson considerably strengthened the presidency, notably through his use of the veto and his claim to embody the popular will directly. The party that denounced concentrated administrative power thus helped personalize executive authority.

This democratization rested on a fundamental exclusion. The political inclusion of white men accompanied the forced removal of Indigenous nations, the continued expansion of slavery and the exclusion of women from the electorate. The Jacksonian age was not a passage from oligarchy to democracy in the contemporary sense; it was the enlargement of a democracy bounded by race and sex.

The Whig Party formed in opposition to the Democrats. Its leaders, including Henry Clay, challenged popular participation less than Jackson’s plebiscitary use of the presidency. They favored Congress, a national bank, tariffs and public investment to connect and modernize the country. Their coalition included entrepreneurs, merchants, Protestant reformers, some Southern planters and all those united by opposition to Jacksonian power. Democrats leaned toward expansion and decentralization; Whigs toward coordinated economic development and a better institutional balance.

This second party system functioned as long as both parties could contain Northern and Southern interests. Slavery gradually made that balance impossible. Every new territorial conquest raised the same question: would slavery be allowed to expand westward? The Mexican-American War, disputes over the new territories and then the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 shattered the compromises. The Whigs disintegrated; the Democrats split between their Northern and Southern wings. When a conflict becomes more powerful than existing party loyalties, the system can no longer absorb it.

Slavery destroys a party system

The modern Republican Party was born from that failure in 1854. It brought together former Whigs, members of the Free Soil Party, Northern Democrats opposed to the extension of slavery and abolitionist activists. Not all demanded immediate abolition in the states where the institution already existed, but they refused to allow it into the Western territories. Their vision linked “free labor,” access to land, infrastructure, railroad development, tariffs and a federal government capable of organizing national expansion.

Lincoln’s election in 1860 triggered the secession of Southern states before he even took office. The Civil War then transformed the Republican Party. Founded to oppose the expansion of slavery, it became the party of the Union, then of emancipation and Reconstruction. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments abolished slavery, established national citizenship and prohibited denial of the vote on racial grounds—even though that final guarantee would soon be circumvented. The war did more than preserve the country: it permanently strengthened the federal government and changed the constitutional meaning of citizenship.

The Democrats emerged from the war weakened at the national level for decades. Their coalition joined a white South hostile to Reconstruction with Northern urban machines supported by immigrant populations. They generally favored a more restrictive conception of federal power and, in the South, the restoration of white political rule. After federal troops withdrew in 1877, Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, literacy tests and violence gradually deprived most Black citizens of their political rights. The “Solid South” became a Democratic stronghold for generations.

Republicans, for their part, dominated much of the North and West. They retained the support of Union veterans and Black voters wherever the latter were still able to vote, while becoming the party of protectionism, industry, railroads and expanding business interests. Lincoln’s party remained associated with emancipation in national memory, but its power rested increasingly on industrial capitalism.

This period shows why the present-day opposition between left and right cannot simply be projected backward. Republicans combined civil rights, national power and industrial interests. Democrats combined distrust of centralization, urban popular networks and defense of the Southern racial order. Neither party corresponded exactly to contemporary political categories.

Industrial America outgrows its parties

By the end of the nineteenth century, loyalties inherited from the Civil War remained powerful, but they were increasingly ill suited to the tensions of industrial America. Large corporations concentrated capital, railroad networks unified the market, cities absorbed waves of immigration and labor conflicts reached a new scale. The two major parties were effective electoral machines, rooted in patronage and regional or religious identities, but they struggled to represent indebted farmers and wage earners confronting monopoly power.

In the 1890s, the People’s Party, or Populist Party, sought to unite farmers, debtors and workers around railroad regulation, monetary reform, more progressive taxation and the direct election of senators. It never secured a durable foothold in federal power. Its alliance with Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan in 1896 weakened its autonomy, but several of its demands were later adopted. This would become the fate of many American third forces: they disappeared as organizations while changing the programs of the dominant parties.

The Progressivism of the early twentieth century also crossed party lines. Theodore Roosevelt and Robert La Follette came from the Republican Party; Woodrow Wilson governed as a Democrat. Despite important differences, all took part in a movement favoring the regulation of monopolies, a more professional civil service and more direct political participation. The federal income tax, the popular election of senators and women’s suffrage changed the relationships among citizens, states and the national government.

The election of 1912 illustrated this fluidity. Breaking with Republican president William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt ran on the Progressive ticket and achieved the strongest presidential performance by a candidate outside the two major parties in the country’s modern history. The Republican split nevertheless allowed Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win. The lesson was clear: a third force could impose ideas and disrupt an election, but the electoral system made it difficult for that force to become a durable national organization.

Progressivism was not uniformly emancipatory. Some reforms coexisted with segregation, nativism and authoritarian ideas of social engineering. As so often in American history, the expansion of democracy for some groups accompanied the preservation or reinforcement of barriers for others.

The New Deal changes the role of government

The crash of 1929 shattered the Republican order built around industrial prosperity, private initiative and a federal government with limited social responsibilities. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt did more than win an election: he assembled a coalition that would organize American politics for nearly three decades.

The New Deal made the federal government the guarantor of banking stability, relief for the unemployed, economic regulation, agricultural support and the first national architecture of social protection. This transformation did not abolish American capitalism; it gave capitalism new rules and brought Washington into everyday economic life. From then on, the question would no longer be whether the federal government had a social responsibility, but how far that responsibility should extend.

The New Deal Democratic coalition brought together worlds that seemed difficult to reconcile: Northern union workers, farmers, urban machines, Catholic and Jewish immigrants, progressive intellectuals, white Southern voters and, increasingly, Black citizens in major Northern cities. In 1936, a majority of Black voters abandoned their historic allegiance to the Republican Party, even though the Roosevelt administration had neither ended segregation nor distributed all its programs equitably. The Democratic Party thus became, simultaneously, the party of the welfare state, the party of emerging urban minorities and the party of Southern segregationists.

This contradiction explains an often forgotten feature of the mid-twentieth century: the parties were not ideologically homogeneous. Democrats included a liberal Northern wing and a powerful conservative Southern wing. Republicans combined conservatives hostile to the New Deal with moderates who accepted its central institutions. Coalitions could therefore form across party lines. Republicans and Southern Democrats jointly blocked several social reforms; moderate Republicans, by contrast, could support some advances championed by Northern Democrats.

Dwight Eisenhower dismantled neither Social Security nor the essential structure of the regulatory state. The Second World War and the Cold War also consolidated a broad consensus around military power, American international leadership and a presidency endowed with considerable resources. The New Deal had established the domestic framework; global mobilization had strengthened the national apparatus. But the partisan balance still depended on postponing the racial conflict.

Civil rights redraw the parties

The civil rights movement forced both parties to resolve a contradiction their coalitions had long contained. Under Harry Truman, and then with John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, the national Democratic Party gradually committed itself to legal equality. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed by a coalition of Democrats and Republicans against the opposition of many Southern Democratic lawmakers. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 gave the federal government the means to combat the mechanisms that had nullified the Fifteenth Amendment for nearly a century.

This did not produce an instantaneous exchange of identities between the two parties. The shift unfolded over several decades and proceeded at different speeds in presidential, congressional and local elections. Black voters became firmly anchored in the Democratic coalition. A growing share of white Southern conservatives moved toward the Republicans, first in presidential contests and later in congressional and local elections. Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan represented distinct stages of this realignment, which combined reaction to civil rights with disputes over taxation, anticommunism, suburban growth and distrust of Washington.

New cultural questions were added to the racial divide. Abortion, religion in public life, feminism, gun rights, crime, school integration and changes in the family became partisan markers. White evangelicals acquired a decisive place in the Republican coalition. The Democratic Party increasingly brought together minorities, labor unions, urban liberals, women committed to equal rights and a new class of college-educated professionals.

The change was therefore less an exchange of programs than a process of sorting. Conservatives who had coexisted with liberals inside the Democratic Party migrated, disappeared or lost influence. Liberal and moderate Republicans in the Northeast underwent the same decline. As partisan affiliation came to coincide more closely with ideology, cross-party compromise became rarer. Elected officials no longer merely advanced different programs; they represented increasingly distinct territories, cultures and conceptions of the nation.

Reagan establishes the market order

Stagflation, the oil shocks, defeat in Vietnam, Watergate and the tax revolt weakened the New Deal order during the 1970s. Ronald Reagan gave this discontent a doctrine. Elected in 1980, he made tax cuts, deregulation, private initiative, the devolution of powers to the states and a military buildup the pillars of a new Republican ascendancy.

His coalition joined business interests, religious conservatives, anticommunists, the growing suburbs, the now-Republican South and some white working-class voters who had once been Democrats. It did not eliminate internal contradictions. The promise of smaller government coexisted with rising military expenditure and deficits; the language of economic freedom was coupled with a moral conservatism eager to use public power on social questions. Yet Reagan succeeded in turning these currents into a shared story: that of an America held back by taxation, bureaucracy and doubts about its own strength.

Democrats did not respond simply by restoring the New Deal. After three presidential defeats in the 1980s, Bill Clinton and the “New Democrats” adapted the party to the framework Reagan had established. The North American Free Trade Agreement, welfare reform, budget discipline and greater confidence in markets marked this evolution. The party continued to defend social protection, civil rights and an active federal government, but it accepted much of the economic architecture of globalization.

From Reagan to Clinton, and then through the early years of the twenty-first century, partisan conflict therefore concerned less the existence of a globalized market than its rules and the distribution of its benefits. Republicans favored tax cuts, deregulation and individual responsibility; Democrats sought to accompany economic openness with education, social transfers and the protection of minorities. The differences remained substantial, but they existed within a largely shared economic horizon.

This partial agreement coincided with financialization, the deindustrialization of certain regions, rising inequality and the movement of production chains outside the United States. It was also weakened by the growing nationalization of congressional elections, the media revolution, the confrontations surrounding the Clinton presidency and the disputed election of 2000. After the attacks of September 11, the expansion of security powers and the war in Iraq further strengthened the presidency while gradually eroding trust in institutions.

2008 opens a transition Trump does not close

The financial crisis of 2008 dealt a decisive blow to the post-Reagan consensus. The government rescued the financial system while millions of households lost jobs, homes or part of their wealth. Barack Obama entered the White House promising to reconcile economic reform, racial transcendence and institutional restoration. His election revealed the increasing diversity of the electorate; it also provoked an intense conservative mobilization.

The Tea Party combined opposition to deficits, rejection of health-care reform, hostility to the federal government and a broader repudiation of political elites. It pushed the Republican Party toward a strategy of permanent confrontation and prepared a generation of candidates for whom compromise with Democrats looked less like a method of government than an act of surrender. At the same time, social media fragmented the public sphere, accelerated mobilization and rewarded outrage more than mediation.

The two coalitions then sorted themselves more sharply by education, geography, religion and attitudes toward institutions. The Democratic Party became more metropolitan, more highly educated, more racially diverse and more liberal on cultural questions. The Republican Party strengthened its hold on rural areas, small towns, white voters without college degrees and practicing Christians. Racial categories remained important, but education, population density and a sense of cultural belonging carried growing weight.

Donald Trump exploited in 2016 the fractures that the old Republican leadership could no longer contain. He retained several pillars of conservatism—tax cuts, deregulation, conservative judges and gun rights—while breaking with free-trade orthodoxy, the language of immigration as an economic benefit and traditional multilateralism. He placed borders, tariffs, national sovereignty and personal loyalty to the leader at the heart of the party.

Trumpism is therefore not simply a return to Reagan conservatism. It combines a business-friendly program with protectionist rhetoric, attachment to popular benefits with the Republican tradition of fiscal discipline, and a promise to withdraw from foreign conflicts with an expansive conception of presidential power. Its coherence rests less on a complete economic doctrine than on a political interpretation: institutions, cultural elites and the international order have ceased to serve ordinary America and must be reclaimed by an executive willing to break with their conventions.

Trump’s defeat in 2020, his challenge to the result and the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, placed electoral legitimacy at the center of the partisan divide. His return to power in 2024 nevertheless demonstrated that Trumpism was neither a parenthesis nor merely a grassroots revolt. Trump won 312 electoral votes and the popular vote. According to the Pew Research Center’s analysis of validated voters, his coalition was more diverse than in 2016 and 2020: his support grew notably among Hispanic and Black voters, even though his electorate remained older, more Christian and less highly educated overall than Kamala Harris’s.

This development makes it impossible to reduce the contemporary Republican Party to an exclusively white or rural coalition. It now seeks to assemble a multiracial working-class electorate around the cost of living, immigration, order, patriotism and distrust of institutions. Its success is neither uniform nor guaranteed, but it changes the competition: some minority identities no longer translate into Democratic loyalty as automatically as they once did.

The two coalitions of 2026

In 2026, the Republican Party has become a party dominated by Trump rather than one merely led by him. Its national-populist current dictates the language, selects many of the candidates and defines political loyalty. Several families remain within it: religious conservatives, advocates of tax cuts and deregulation, national-security hawks, elected officials close to business interests, residual libertarians and new protectionists. Their coexistence produces genuine tensions. Tariffs may satisfy industrial voters but worry the business community; preserving popular social programs conflicts with the goal of cutting expenditure; the military restraint favored by part of the base collides with traditional interventionism.

For now, the personal bond with Trump holds this coalition together. Republican primaries no longer merely arbitrate between shades of conservatism; they measure acceptance of his authority and legacy. Because the Twenty-Second Amendment bars him from another term after 2028, the party already faces a succession question. It will have to determine whether Trumpism can become a doctrine that others can inherit or whether it remains inseparable from the man who imposed it.

The Democratic Party has an almost inverse structure. It brings together Black voters, a now narrower majority of Asian and Hispanic voters, major metropolitan areas, many college graduates, labor unions, advocates of reproductive rights, climate movements and a growing share of professionals in education, health care, technology and public administration. It is more inclined to support federal action in health care, social protection, climate policy and economic regulation, while remaining more attached to international alliances and institutional norms.

This coalition is broad but difficult to order around a clear hierarchy of priorities. Progressives want stronger action against inequality, corporate power and the cost of housing and health care. Moderates emphasize electoral competitiveness, spending restraint and the need to win back working-class voters. Other tensions set a politics organized around identities and rights against a strategy centered more closely on social class; a liberal approach to immigration against demands for border control; and traditional internationalism against a left more critical of certain interventions and alliances.

The Democratic problem, then, is not the absence of an electorate but the difficulty of turning a defensive coalition into a legible political project. Opposition to Trump unites many voters without resolving disagreements over the economy, foreign policy or the priority to give cultural issues. The 2026 primaries are testing both the strength of the progressive left and the ability of moderate candidates to speak to contested districts.

Polling data also show that a two-party electoral system does not mean enthusiastic support for the two parties. In the summer of 2026, Pew estimated that 47 percent of adults identified with or leaned toward the Democrats, compared with 43 percent for the Republicans. Yet 44 percent initially described themselves as independents or used another label, and most of those independents nevertheless leaned toward one of the two camps. Another Pew survey published in May found that 58 percent of Americans viewed the Republican Party unfavorably and 59 percent viewed the Democratic Party unfavorably; 26 percent held negative views of both.

America is therefore not divided into two perfectly coherent blocs. Pew’s 2026 political typology identifies nine groups defined by their values, only some of which are strongly ideological and politically engaged. The electoral system compresses this diversity into two coalitions. It gives the appearance of a simple bipolar divide to a society marked by far more contradictory positions on government, the economy, immigration, religion and institutions.

The two-party system and its prisoners

The United States has seen a multitude of organizations outside the two major parties: abolitionists, Free Soilers, Populists, Progressives, Socialists, segregationists, reformers, Libertarians and Greens. Some won elected office; others influenced a presidential election or forced a major party to alter its program. None has durably displaced the contest between Democrats and Republicans since the mid-nineteenth century.

This stability does not arise from a natural American preference for two political ideas. It results largely from the institutions. Single-winner elections, district boundaries, varying ballot-access rules and the Electoral College encourage strategic voting. In almost every state, the presidential candidate who finishes first wins all the electors. A party that receives a significant share of the national vote but carries no state can therefore win no electoral votes, as Ross Perot did in 1992. Primaries also allow dissident movements to attempt the conquest of an existing party rather than build a rival organization.

The result is paradoxical. The system protects the two major party brands, but it does not guarantee the stability of their content. The late-nineteenth-century Populists were partly absorbed by the Democrats; Progressives influenced both camps; Southern conservatives gradually migrated to the Republicans; the Tea Party conquered the Republican Party from within; Trump did the same on a larger scale. In the United States, a partisan revolution often takes the form of a takeover rather than the creation of a new party.

This mechanism explains why the high proportion of voters who describe themselves as independents does not necessarily produce a third force. Many reject party labels while continuing to vote regularly for the same side. Independence then expresses an emotional distance from the parties, not a uniform readiness to support a third party. The duopoly is unpopular, but it remains rational for voters who do not want to help the camp they fear most by splitting its opposition.

A new age still undefined

As of August 26, 2026, with the November 3 midterm elections approaching, Republicans control the White House and the Senate, as well as a very narrow majority in the House of Representatives. The vote will determine Donald Trump’s ability to govern during the final two years of his term, but its importance extends beyond the immediate distribution of seats. It will show whether the Republican coalition of 2024 is taking root, whether the gains made among some working-class and minority electorates are holding and whether Democrats can turn discontent with those in power into support for an alternative.

An electoral victory, however, will not be enough to define the next American order. The great political eras of the past took hold when a coalition produced a durable answer to the dominant crisis of its time. Lincoln resolved the question of the Union’s survival through war and opened the question of national citizenship. Roosevelt gave a political architecture to industrial society and the Great Depression. Reagan responded to stagflation, the crisis of confidence and the exhaustion of New Deal liberalism. Trumpism has identified the real or perceived losers of globalization, the issue of borders and distrust of elites, but it has not yet reconciled its economic and international contradictions. Democrats defend institutional continuity and public action more clearly, but they have not yet combined their social, economic and cultural priorities into a proposition capable of recreating a durable majority.

The American political landscape is therefore undergoing a transition that began well before Trump and accelerated under him. The consensus around the globalized market has broken down; both parties now speak of industrial policy, supply-chain security and competition with China, even as they differ over instruments and objectives. The boundary between domestic policy and geopolitical power is fading. Tariffs, energy, immigration, technology and defense are simultaneously becoming economic, social and geopolitical questions.

The difficulty also lies in the encounter between nationalized parties and institutions designed to fragment power. Federalism, the Senate, the courts, the Electoral College and the separation of powers were intended to slow majorities and compel negotiation. When the parties themselves contained several ideological currents, this architecture could produce cross-party coalitions. When each side sees the other as an existential threat and elected officials are punished in their primaries for any compromise, the same institutions encourage paralysis, growing reliance on executive action and the transformation of electoral rules into battlegrounds.

American history nevertheless counsels skepticism toward definitive diagnoses. The Republic has already passed through periods of partisan violence, extreme inequality, corruption, war and attacks on rights. Its continuity does not arise from any special harmony, but from its capacity to transform its coalitions without abolishing its constitutional framework. That capacity has often come at a cost: some compromises were achieved through exclusion, others through war, and several merely postponed the conflicts they claimed to resolve.

The question in 2026, then, is not simply who will win Congress, or even who will inherit Trump’s movement or lead the Democrats toward 2028. It is whether a new coalition can respond to downward mobility, demographic diversity, technological power, control of the borders and the return of strategic rivalry without turning half the country into a domestic enemy. The next political America will be defined by whoever succeeds in connecting these issues. But its durability will depend on a deeper requirement: that victory remain compatible with common rules and that power can still change hands.

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