ABSTRACT
Timothy Shenk reorganises the familiar narrative of American political history. Shenk, a history professor at George Washington University and a former co-editor of Dissent, is an engaging and lucid writer, able to convey complexity with clarity. Realigners leaves us to ponder interesting questions about the limits imposed by America’s two-party duopoly on prospects for far-reaching change, but also the potential incentives it offers for seeking areas of common ground between otherwise diverse constituencies. Reversals of founding party principles are not unique to the Republicans in American politics. The Democrats also pivoted from the states’-rights agrarianism of their slave-owning Jeffersonian founders to the multicultural, big-government party they are today. Political partisanship in present-day America goes well beyond electoral alignment with one party or the other.
