The clock on the wall in the cafeteria at Winnacunnet High School, in Hampton, New Hampshire, is mounted behind a wire cage that protects its face from the likeliest weapons (French fries, foam balls) deployed in the uprisings of adolescents (food fights, dodgeball). Or maybe that was to prepare it for politics. Two weeks ago, the day after the Iowa caucuses and one week before the New Hampshire primary, a makeshift stage had been built at the far end of the cafeteria, catercornered from the caged clock. Its backdrop was an American flag; a campaign poster, an “H” with an arrow running through it; and three rows of Granite State citizens, a political Greek chorus positioned behind the lectern, awaiting the candidate. Minutes passed. The slender black hand of the clock ticked and twitched, like an old man tapping and jerking his cane. Hillary Rodham Clinton was running late.
“I feel great being back in New Hampshire after winning in Iowa!” she said when she finally arrived, walking onto the stage with Gabrielle Giffords, the former U.S. congresswoman from Arizona who was shot in the head while meeting with voters in 2011, and Giffords’s husband, the astronaut Mark Kelly. Clinton had won in Iowa, but just barely. Her only remaining rival, Bernie Sanders, was expected to win New Hampshire, and by a wide margin. She didn’t look like she was feeling great. And after the New Hampshire results came in—Sanders went on to win, in a rout—she’d have cause to feel worse.
During their months vying for the right to carry the Democratic Party standard, the former Secretary of State and the senator from Vermont have been on the same stage often, if not always at the same time. Sanders had spoken in this very school in December. “Winnacunnet High School Feels the Bern,” ran the headline of a lead story in the Winnachronicle, the school newspaper. Two crackerjack student staff writers had reported, “The senator ended his speech by saying, ‘Brothers and sisters, welcome to the political revolution.’ ”
For Clinton’s visit, the cafeteria was packed with stalwart Clinton supporters, mostly women, mostly white, mostly within a decade of Clinton’s age. Members of the press had been escorted through the kitchen, and then corralled into a pen at the rear of the cafeteria, separated from the rest of the room by steel police barriers. Those who stood shouldered cameras; those who sat cradled laptops. Instruction sheets had been taped to the chairs:
Three television reporters sat in a row: ABC, CBS, CNN. “We’re the slow-news team,” one of them told me. A hipster photographer had perched his super-skinny tripod atop a blue plastic chair, setting its camera to peer over the crowd. He’d found a good spot, but his unobstructed view didn’t last for long. The instant Clinton began speaking, dozens of arms reached high into the air, all across the room, wielding smartphones. It was like watching a flock of ostriches awaken, the arms their necks, the phones their heads, the red recording buttons their wide, blinking eyes.
Clinton and Sanders had been waging a remarkably polite battle. “I’m proud of the campaign we’re running on the Democratic side,” Clinton told the crowd. “It’s in stark contrast to the insults you see on the other side.”
Less than ten miles away, Marco Rubio had just finished speaking at the town hall in Exeter, a brick Federal-style building made famous by Abraham Lincoln, who spoke there in 1860. A statue of Justice stood on the cupola, high above an asphalt lot where satellite-dish-equipped television trucks were parked, one from Liberty Uplink, another from the Freedom Broadcast Group. On the front steps were stacks of yard signs: “Don’t Believe the Liberal Media.”
Rubio had made a strong third-place showing in the G.O.P. race in Iowa, not far behind Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. Before Chris Christie deflated him in a debate over the weekend, he seemed to be surging, the establishment’s last best hope, not too weak, not too mean, not too wild, not too bland, the G.O.P.’s Goldilocks. The hall in Exeter had filled early with an enthusiastic crowd, more men than women: blue Red Sox caps, black knitted Bruins hats. Police officers stationed at the doors had turned away disappointed latecomers. Inside, where the walls are painted Colonial green, blue-and-white campaign banners had been draped across the balconies: “New Hampshire Is Marco Rubio Country.”
Rubio has an appealing Mickey Mousiness. Also, he can be funny, especially if you haven’t seen his shtick more than a few times. (A stump speech at a campaign stop is a lot like standup comedy. It would turn out that Rubio had learned his lines only too well.) While he was listing all the things he’d do on his first day in office—swear to uphold the Constitution, defend the Second Amendment, and repeal “every single one of Obama’s illegal and unconstitutional executive orders”—the crowd began chanting, “Mar-co, Mar-co, Mar-co.”
“As long as you don’t say ‘Polo,’ ” Rubio said. He smiled. “I hated that game.” He made as if he were returning to his Oval Office to-do list. “When I’m President, we’re banning that game!”
Rubio is funny mainly in order to call out his seriousness. He offered another of his one-liners: “Bernie Sanders is actually a nice guy, and he’d be a really good candidate for President—of Sweden.” Then he gathered himself up, turning grave: “Hillary Clinton is no laughing matter.” Rubio says that Clinton is not qualified to be President.
The scene in Exeter, uplinked by Liberty and broadcast by Freedom, was captured by a media army composed of artillery (five large video cameras mounted on a stage at the rear of the hall, and a dozen more perched on each of the hall’s balconies) and infantry (reporters propping computers in their laps). But with every third person in the crowd tapping at a phone, sending words and pictures out to the world, it was hard to tell the civilians from the military. Who are the people, and who are the press? “I wasn’t tweeting,” a young long-haired woman in a blue wool coat told me. “I was Snapchatting.” Even before Rubio finished delivering his stump speech, an A.P. photographer plunked down on the floor, opened his laptop, and began cropping a shot. “I can’t talk now,” he said, excusing himself. “I’m filing right now.”
In the right now, when what happened in New Hampshire already feels as old as the Parthenon, it’s hard to care about the long ago, but there haven’t always been parties, and there haven’t always been primaries, and this may be the first Presidential-primary season with free Wi-Fi pretty much everywhere. A lot of people, not least the candidates themselves, have been talking about political revolution and, more modestly, about party realignment. None of the candidates, not even the party favorites, are campaigning on behalf of their party; most are campaigning to crash it. Outsiders are in. Insiders are out. “We’ve always taken on the establishment,” Rubio says. “Of course we’re an underdog,” Sanders says. On the day of the Iowa caucuses, Cruz’s campaign called voters and sent out an e-mail blast suggesting that Carson was about to quit the race, and so Trump was saying that Cruz had stolen the election. Rush Limbaugh took Trump’s protest as the latest, best evidence that “Trump is not your typical Republican-establishment candidate.”
The people who turn up at Sanders and Trump rallies are wed, across the aisle, in bonds of populist unrest. They’re revolting against party élites, and especially against the all-in-the-family candidates anointed by the Democratic and the Republican leadership: Clinton and Bush, the wife and brother of past party leaders. (More attention has been paid to the unravelling of the G.O.P.; the Democratic Party is no less frayed.) There is, undoubtedly, a great deal of discontent, particularly with the role of money in elections: both Sanders and Trump damn the campaign-finance system as rigged and the establishment as corrupt. But to call the current state of affairs, in either party, a political revolution isn’t altogether accurate. The party system, like just about every other old-line industry and institution, is struggling to survive a communications revolution. Accelerated political communication can have all manner of good effects for democracy, spreading news about rallies, for instance, or getting hundreds of thousands of signatures on a petition lickety-split. Less often noticed are the ill effects, which include the atomizing of the electorate. There’s a point at which political communication speeds past the last stop where democratic deliberation, the genuine consent of the governed, is possible. An instant poll, of the sort that pops up on your screen while you’re attempting to read debate coverage, encourages snap and solitary judgment, the very opposite of what’s necessary for the exercise of good citizenship. Democracy takes time. It requires civic bonds, public institutions, and a free press. And in the United States, so far, it has needed parties.
The American two-party system is a creation of the press. “The idea of a party system,” as Richard Hofstadter once pointed out, is an American invention, one that not only tolerates but requires the practice of loyal opposition, political criticism, and organized dissent. It began in 1787, during the debate over the Constitution, a debate waged in ratifying conventions but also, more thrillingly, in the nation’s hundreds of weekly newspapers. Some favored ratification; these became Federalist newspapers. Others, the Anti-Federalist newspapers, opposed it. If it hadn’t been for the all-or-nothing dualism of this choice, the United States might well have a multiparty political culture. But the model held, and the Federalist–Anti-Federalist cleavage, with some adjustments, became the basis of the first party system, which took shape in 1796. It pitted Federalists, who supported the election of John Adams, against the Democratic-Republicans, who supported Thomas Jefferson. In the seventeen-nineties, the number of newspapers, each of them partisan, grew four times as fast as the population. At a time when there were very few national institutions, parties exerted a tremendous, and vital, nationalizing force. Once much maligned as destructive of public life, parties, driven by newspapers, became its machinery. “The engine,” Jefferson said, “is the press.”
The men who drafted the Constitution hadn’t anticipated parties, and made no provision for them. Parties are an add-on. They make their own rules. At first, they chose their Presidential nominees by legislative caucus: each party’s congressional caucus nominated its Presidential candidate. That practice lasted until Andrew Jackson campaigned against “King Caucus,” calling the method anti-democratic, and said that the people needed to have a more direct role in the choice of the party nominee. Jackson came to power through a new form of political communication, the campaign biography: after the publication of “The Life of Jackson,” in 1824 (when Jackson won the popular vote but lost the election), no campaign season was ever again without one. Jackson’s rise also marked the end of the first party system and the beginning of the second: Jacksonian Democrats versus Whigs. Historians like to date the shift from one party system to another to a single year—in this case, 1828, the year Jackson won—but, in truth, such shifts are, by their very nature, gradual. And, while they’re obviously driven by ideological movements, by the emergence of new economic issues and circumstances, and, especially, by changes in the composition of the electorate, they’re also influenced by novel forms of political communication.
So are the methods by which Americans elect their Presidents. The first Presidential nominating convention was held in 1832; state delegates met to make the choice after hearing stump speeches from the contenders. Critics said this was a bad idea, too. “This convention system, if adopted by both parties, will make our government a prize to be sought after by political gamblers,” the governor of Illinois warned.
The second party system lasted until 1854, by which time its inability to address the matter of slavery was proving to be the undoing of the Whigs, and the Know-Nothings, and the Free Soilers, and the Liberty Party. It wasn’t only slavery, though. The system had entered a state of disequilibrium because political communication was undergoing a revolution. Revolutions in communication tend to pull the people away from the élites. (The printing press is the classic example; think of its role in the Reformation. But this happens, to varying degrees, every time the speed and scale of communication makes a leap.) In 1833, refinements in printing technology lowered the cost of a daily newspaper to a penny or two; in the eighteen-forties, newspapers got their news by telegraph; the post office set a special, cheaper rate for newspapers; and, in the eighteen-fifties, newspapers began printing illustrations based on photographs. Meanwhile, literacy rates were skyrocketing. Candidates began campaigning, speaking and writing to the people directly. For a while, party élites lost control, until the system reached equilibrium in the form of a relatively stable contest between Democrats and a new party, the Republicans. Walt Whitman complained about “the neverending audacity of elected persons,” damning men in politics as members of the establishment, but voter turnout rose from 36.9 per cent in 1824 to 57.6 per cent in 1838 and 80.2 per cent in 1840. And so it churned, and so it churns.
The third party system lasted until 1896. (Dating party realignments is an uncertain affair; it depends on how and what you’re measuring. By some accounts, the second party system ended in 1860, and we’re still in the third.) Like the first party system, it came to an end with a populist revolt, which took place during another acceleration in the speed of communication, brought about by the telephone, the Linotype, and halftone printing, technologies that allowed daily newspapers and illustrated magazines, in particular, to carry political news faster, and to more readers, than ever before. The eighteen-nineties saw a war between the Pulitzer and the Hearst newspaper empires; the number of newspapers exceeded ten thousand, including more dailies than exist today, some with a circulation of more than a million. Meanwhile, campaign posters papered the walls of buildings on every city block. In 1896, Puck printed a two-page color spread called “The Poster Craze in Candidateville”: a lanky Uncle Sam strolls down Presidential Avenue, inspecting posters for a slew of Presidential aspirants, among them William McKinley and William B. Allison, the “Farmer’s Friend.” Everyone ran as an outsider.
The disequilibrium of that political moment led not only to the beginning of the fourth party system but also to the birth of the primary system. Once the fourth party system got started, populists and progressive reformers began making the same complaints about the nominating convention that Jacksonians had made about the legislative caucus: the choice of the parties’ Presidential nominees shouldn’t be in the hands of a select group of party leaders, whether legislators or convention delegates. By 1917, states had started holding direct primaries, mini-elections in which all party members get to vote for the Presidential nominee. But the fourth party system was short-lived, toppled by a new media era. William Jennings Bryan recorded campaign speeches on wax cylinders in 1908. By the end of the First World War, the speed and the spread of political communication had picked up again. In 1920, Warren Harding became the last Presidential candidate to send his speeches to voters, on a phonograph record*. His successors turned to radio. Time, the first weekly newsmagazine, débuted in 1923; its aim was to cut the time it takes to read a week’s worth of news down to an hour. Radio started reaching everyday Americans in 1926, when NBC began broadcasting, followed by CBS in 1928. A Presidential campaign speech, by F.D.R., was recorded, and heard and seen, in movie theatres in 1932, the year that marked the end of the fourth party system, as both the Democratic and the Republican Parties rearranged themselves around the New Deal coalition.
The fifth party system began in 1932, the very year that George Gallup started conducting pre-election public-opinion polls and just months before the founding of the world’s first political consulting firm, Campaigns, Inc. These forms of political communication—voters communicating with candidates through polls, and candidates communicating with voters through consultants—characterize the era of the fifth party system, as much as the ideological positions of the parties themselves. Despite the upheavals of the Depression, the Second World War, the Cold War, and Vietnam, the era of national newsmagazines, newsreels, and network broadcasting was a period of remarkable party stability. True, with campaign ads from every side being broadcast night after night, voters might have been muddled. In one television ad from 1956—produced by political consultants, relying on public-opinion polling—a cartoon voter despairs, “I’ve listened to everybody. On TV and radio. I’ve read the papers and magazines. I’ve tried! But I’m still confused. Who’s right? What’s right? What should I believe? What are the facts? How can I tell?” But the parties made their choices clear: “Words have been flying at you hot and heavy,” a comforting narrator tells the cartoon voter, who considers the evidence and concludes, “Me? I like Ike!”
Historians and political scientists have been arguing for a long time about when the fifth party system yielded to a sixth. Some say it happened in 1964, with Barry Goldwater and the G.O.P.’s conservative turn. Some say 1968, given the mayhem at the nominating conventions. A great many, with good evidence, date the beginning of the sixth party system to 1972, by which time Southern whites had abandoned the Democratic Party and the G.O.P., having lost African-Americans to the opposition, began folding evangelicals into its ranks. This was when the current era of political polarization arose; it was about then that “Republican” began meaning conservative and “Democratic” began meaning liberal. Also, the populist anger that had spelled the decline of the legislative caucus, the rise of the nomination convention, and the first primaries led, in 1972, to the first Presidential nominating caucuses. (Iowa was the first state to hold them.) More significant, a Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection established new rules to include more women, minorities, and younger people (a response to their lack of representation during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and the attendant protests). It led, as well, to a huge rise in the number of states that conducted primaries. And then there was, after 1972, a feeling of grim dismay about American party politics, a new kind of cynicism, and even a new kind of political reporting, drunk with anti-establishment swagger. “It was just before midnight when I left Cambridge and headed north on U.S. 93 toward Manchester—driving one of those big green rented Auto/Stick Cougars,” Hunter S. Thompson wrote, in “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72,” about travelling north to report on the New Hampshire primary, “running late, as usual: left hand on the wheel and the other on the radio dial, seeking music, and a glass of iced Wild Turkey spilling into my crotch on every turn.” (My worry, on the drive, was whether I’d remembered to put the lasagna in the oven for my kids.) The year 1972 is even taken, sometimes, as not only the end of the fifth party system but the end of the two-party system altogether. “The Party’s Over” was the title that the political columnist David Broder gave to a polemic published in 1972, which was also the year that a despairing Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., wrote the introduction to a four-volume “History of U.S. Political Parties,” in which he declared, of the system, “Its prospects have rarely appeared more clouded than they do today.” No one’s ever published volume five.
Less convincingly, some scholars have suggested that the sixth party system began in 1980. “Without parties there can be no organized and coherent politics,” the Committee for Party Renewal, a bipartisan group of political scientists, proclaimed that year, just before the Reagan revolution realized what Goldwater had only promised, and cable guys began knocking on American doors. Reagan, the Great Communicator, led the G.O.P. at the dawn of a new era of political communication. The F.C.C. abandoned the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, leading to the creation of a new breed of partisan political communicators. “The Rush Limbaugh Show” was heard nationally for the first time in 1988. A fair argument can be made for the significance of 1996, too. That was the start of the first Web browser—during his campaign, Bob Dole famously provided voters with his Web site, but gave them the wrong address—and the first year of Fox News and MSNBC, which were equally keen to animate the party base. A new party system, a new age of news.
“I’m so glad to be back with so many friends, so many patriots, so many lovers of liberty,” Ted Cruz said to a packed auditorium at Elm Street Middle School, in Nashua, New Hampshire, on Wednesday, the night after Rubio spoke at the Exeter town hall and Clinton at Winnacunnet High School. I’d driven to Nashua in the rain, and parked on a residential street behind the school. When I got out of my car, in the dark, I walked straight into a big, boxy television set that had been left on the sidewalk, to be hauled away with the trash.
In the auditorium, Cruz’s stage had two American flags flanking his campaign banner: “TRUSTED.” Cruz was introduced by Jeff Kuhner, the host of a political talk show on AM radio in Boston. He led the crowd in the Pledge of Allegiance, facing a third flag, held by Gary Dipiero, a Cruz supporter from Saugus, Massachusetts, who was carrying a “Hillary for Prison” sign. (Dipiero told me that he expects this of a Cruz Presidency: “He’s going to prosecute her and throw her in jail.”) “As many of you know, I’m an American historian,” Kuhner, who was a graduate student at Ohio University, said. “And what I can tell you now, with one-hundred-per-cent absolute certainty, is we are now at a fundamental crossroads. This election—and I know it’s a cliché, but it’s true—this election is the most important election in our lifetimes.” Dipiero waved his flag. The crowd rose to its feet. Kuhner said, “Senator Ted Cruz, I honestly believe, is a Latino Reagan.”
Cruz strode onstage. He was wearing a navy sweater, bluejeans, and rugged boots. He reminded his audience that, in 1980, Reagan won the New Hampshire primary. With their votes that year, he said, Granite Staters had made the world safe for democracy: “Because of the men and women of New Hampshire, we won the Cold War and we tore the Berlin Wall to the ground.” The smartphones came out: portrait for the candidate, landscape for the stage.
Apart from the bluejeans and the boots, which Reagan liked to wear, too, very little about Ted Cruz is reminiscent of Ronald Reagan. Where Reagan was warm and prided himself on being welcoming, Cruz is cold: he likes to make threats. Also, Cruz is a product of political disequilibrium rather than a creator of it. Howard Dean’s MoveOn.org-fuelled campaign, in 2004, was, in hindsight, a dry run. Facebook launched in 2004, YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006, the iPhone in 2007. By 2008*, Twitter had a million users, and only about one in six Americans had a smartphone. Today, Twitter has more than three hundred million users, and two out of three Americans own smartphones. These have become political tools, a handheld pollster, lobbyist, donor, and, maybe one day, voter. Trump, the Kardashian candidate, has six million Twitter followers, which is more than five times the population of New Hampshire. “What is this Snapshot thing and why do I only get ten seconds?” Sanders tweeted in November, joking, the day he signed up. He now has the biggest Snapchat following in this campaign.
At the Cruz rally, I talked to a fellow from Nashua named Paul Fortier, forty-six, who was there with his daughter. He thinks that once people get to know Cruz better they won’t like him. Fortier considers Trump to be the only true outsider: “He’s the only candidate that can turn Washington upside down.” Fair enough. Trump is likely to turn a lot of things upside down; he already has. But, while his gambit is anti-establishment, his success is entirely due to the establishment: his. The G.O.P. and the Democratic Party are reeling in the disequilibrium created by the latest communications revolution, the membership careering out of the party leaders’ control. It didn’t help that the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee presumed that Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton would win the party nominations, despite each candidate’s known weaknesses. But Trump is the last person to credibly claim to be an outsider. He is a media emperor, tweeting from his Tower.
It is rare to meet a non-supporter at an event like Cruz’s. Fortier had managed to wander in; his fourteen-year-old son had a basketball game in the gym down the hall. Cruz’s night at the Elm Street School, like Rubio’s evening in Exeter, was billed as a “town hall,” an invocation of a long-standing democratic institution, in which ordinary citizens get to ask candidates questions and weigh their answers. But, really, these gatherings are rallies for supporters (Cruz’s was advertised on and sponsored by Kuhner’s show), performances as much for the Internet as for the audience. Some Republican candidates deny press passes to journalists they consider to be part of the “liberal media,” preferring to bypass the press in favor of a direct feed. Trump’s decision to sit out the last debate in Iowa before the caucuses took this one step further, but in the very same direction. “Reporters want Hillary to win,” Cruz said in an interview on Fox News last month.“The answer is to do what Reagan did, go over the head of the media.” But, as Cruz pointed out, that’s a lot easier today than it was when Reagan was running. “We don’t live anymore in a world of three networks that have a stranglehold on information,” Cruz went on. “We have got the Internet. We have got the Drudge Report. We have got talk radio. We have got social media. We’ve got the ability to go directly around, and directly to the people.”
“What’s wrong with a revolution?” Anderson Cooper asked Hillary Clinton at CNN’s Democratic Town Hall, in the three-hundred-and-fifty-seat Derry Opera House. “Well, that’s for Senator Sanders to explain,” she said. “I think the progress that we have made, and particularly the Democratic Party has made, has been hard fought for, hard won, and must be defended.”
There will not be a revolution, but this election might mark the beginning of the seventh party system. The Internet, like all new communications technologies, has contributed to a period of political disequilibrium, one in which, as always, party followers have been revolting against party leaders. So far, neither the R.N.C. nor the D.N.C., nor any of their favored candidates, has been able to grab the wheel. Trump, meanwhile, is barrelling down the highway toward the White House, ignoring every road sign, a man without a party.
The fate of the free world does not hinge on this election. But the direction of the party system might. And that’s probably worth thinking about, slowly and deeply. Parties, while not written into the U.S. Constitution, do sustain our system of government. As the political scientist V. O. Key pointed out, half a century ago, “They perform an essential function in the management of succession to power, as well as in the process of obtaining popular consent to the course of public policy. They amass sufficient support to buttress the authority of governments; or, on the contrary, they attract or organize discontent and dissatisfaction sufficient to oust the government. In either case, they perform the function of the articulation of the interests and aspirations of a substantial segment of the citizenry, usually in ways contended to be promotive of the national weal.”
The American party system is not only a creation of the press; it is dependent on it. It is currently fashionable, indispensable, even, to malign the press, whether liberal or conservative. “That’s the media game,” Sanders said, dismissing a question that Cooper had asked him during CNN’s town hall. “That’s what the media talks about. Who cares?” But when the press is in the throes of change, so is the party system. And the national weal had better watch out. It’s unlikely, but not impossible, that the accelerating and atomizing forces of this latest communications revolution will bring about the end of the party system and the beginning of a new and wobblier political institution. With our phones in our hands and our eyes on our phones, each of us is a reporter, each a photographer, unedited and ill judged, chatting, snapping, tweeting, and posting, yikking and yakking. At some point, does each of us become a party of one?
I watched Wednesday night’s Democratic Town Hall from inside the Halligan Tavern, an Irish pub housed in an old brick fire station across the street from the Derry Opera House. CNN had reserved the entire restaurant for the press, since there was no room inside the dollhouse-size opera house. CNN played on screens above the bar and on the walls. More than a hundred reporters huddled with their laptops at tables, upstairs and down. A few people followed the response on #DemTownHall. On side tables, fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, and potato skins were served from platters warmed by cans of Sterno, their blue flames flickering. Power strips rested on every table, like so many centerpieces. The coffee was free. So was the Wi-Fi. The password was the date, 02032016.
Six days later, New Hampshire voters went to the polls. Sanders beat Clinton; Trump beat everyone else. Rubio had been demoted to a meme: a talking machine. Cruz had wobbled. Kasich gained strength; Bush got out the vote. But, among both Republicans and Democrats, even the second-place candidates lagged behind the winners by double digits. The party had been crashed; the system had been hacked. ♦
*An earlier version of this article misstated how Harding sent his speeches to voters.
**An earlier version of this article misstated when Twitter had a million users.
