We live in a world of multiple political practices. We choose among them and move between them, altering, combining, and recombining them as opportunity and necessity dictate. This is true of the United States (so far), and of every society in which civil liberties are honored, however imperfectly.

Take my experience, for example. In my lifetime, I have volunteered for perhaps a dozen electoral campaigns, knocking on doors, stuffing mailboxes, making annoying phone calls, and giving people rides to the polls. Often I sought not to promote particular people for office, but to pressure those already elected. I have phoned and emailed my representatives, participated in countless marches and rallies to demand or protest specific policies, helped circulate petitions. Some of my political undertakings have bypassed the government altogether, seeking change through voluntary collective action and agitating in the public sphere. I have been a grass-roots union organizer and organized support for other people’s unions. I have helped write leaflets and pamphlets for various campaigns. I participated in a movement that promoted change without resorting to representation or leaders. All decisions were made by everybody present; all our efforts were carried out without making any demands, appealing to people in authority, or appointing any leaders of our own. Occasionally I practiced civil disobedience. At other times, I donated money to organizations that Theda Skocpol calls “generals without armies”—organizations in which the important work is done by professional researchers and advocates, with little participation by any rank and file.[1] Then there are the countless para-political activities I have participated in: reading up on a particular issue or movement; donating money; letting an organizer or someone in town for a march stay in my guest room; debating with friends and antagonists.

I am not unique in my habit of drifting between different modes of political engagement. My political promiscuity is part of an enduring feature of American politics, one that has been here for a very, very long time. This is the main point of my essay, “Politics as Plural Noun,” which appears in this Fall’s Journal of the Early Republic. The plural character of public life was an important feature of the struggle against Britain, with plebeian and middling opponents of imperial policy mobilizing “the mob” against imperial taxes while genteel leaders published pamphlets and proclamations justifying their actions. It sparked not collaboration but conflict during the 1790s, when conservative revolutionaries sought to discredit the Democratic Republican societies and other popular political initiatives as solvents of constitutional liberty. It gained importance in the 1830s, as countless social and reform movements grew up alongside the nascent Democratic and Whig parties, fighting with them over policy, proper social and economic arrangements, and the appropriate conduct of public life itself.

A poster supporting the Anti-Rent movement in Rensselaer County, 1839. From Wikimedia Commons.

Despite my own flitting from one kind of political engagement to another, I was not aware of the wide variety of politics until I started to work on my dissertation. Researching the New York Anti-Rent Wars, the most widely supported farmers’ movement in the U.S. before the Civil War, I discovered that, like me, insurgent tenant farmers combined several different kinds of political activities. They formed voluntary associations that publicized their grievances and demands; they organized a rent strike; they created a political party and ran their own candidates for local office and the legislature; they dressed up as “Indians,” driving off the sheriffs and landlords’ agents who sought to enforce rent payments. Each wing of the movement had its own tactics. Each sustained a unique sense of what constituted proper political practice. Still, a majority of anti-renters supported all these tactics and efforts. Tenants agreed that landlords’ legal titles were fraudulent and hoped that anti-rent legislators would pass legislation that would allow them to challenge them in court. Until such a law passed, anti-rent “Indians” were essential to defend tenants from dispossession. But the Whig and Democratic allies of the movement cherished different ideas about what sorts of political practices were legitimate. Tenants, they insisted, should demand only laws that were constitutional, which would have ruled out any challenge to landlords’ titles. They also urged insurgents to abandon “Indian” activities, despite the fact that doing so would expose them to dispossession. Here was a situation where ordinary people engaged in a wide variety of political practices and fought with their political leaders over what constituted the proper way to exercise “the people’s” sovereignty—fights that had enormous practical implications for tenants.

1845 lithograph depicting the death of Delaware County Undersheriff Osman N. Steele by “a mob of disguised men, styling themselves Indians during the Anti-Rent troubles in that County.” Courtesy of the National Museum of American History.

As I wrote about the anti-renters, one question began to preoccupy me: Were conflicts over how to conduct politics unique to anti-renters? Or were fights over the boundaries of legitimate political practice commonplace? In my forthcoming book, I set out to answer that question. Democratic Aspiration, Democratic Discontent: The Triumph of Mass Politics in the United States, 1815–1840 retells the story of how mass persuasion, mass organization, and mass mobilization came to be the norm in American public life. Unlike previous studies, it sees this development as happening simultaneously in the emerging Whig and Democratic parties and among a plethora of social, reform, and reactionary movements—evangelical reform, trade unions, northern Black radicalism, Indigenous movements for autonomy, single-issue political parties, anti-abolitionists. In researching and writing the book, I found that the conflicts among anti-renters were not unusual. An occasional occurrence before 1815, fights over how politics ought to be conducted became a defining feature of American public life after 1825. Indeed, I am now convinced that the development of what most historians call American “democracy” took place largely through fights over what that “democracy” ought to look like—over how, exactly, the theoretical sovereignty of “the people” should be put into action.

Thomas Mickell Burnham, “First State Election in Detroit, Michigan, 1837.” Oil on canvas, 1837. From Wikimedia Commons.

Similar conflicts define political life today.  Black Lives Matter and the Occupy movement rejected routine ways of conducting public life—hence their contempt for established civil rights, labor, and elected leaders and their refusal to issue concrete demands. Instead, they developed an alternative practice of politics, sidelining elected leaders and professionalized progressive organizations. They hoped to substitute unmediated decision-making for such professional leadership.[2] Similarly, the Tea Party, Stop the Steal, QAnon, and right-wing militia movements were and are united by a belief that electoral politics and constitutional government have become a rigged game.[3] They, too, seek to remake American politics in the interest of what they call “real” Americans.

A QAnon counter-protestor flies a flag at a BLM rally in Springfield Oregon, 2020. From Wikimedia Commons.

Most observers talk about “politics” and “democracy” as if each were a single, stable set of practices.  I believe that we can gain a deeper understanding of both if we recognize that both contain multiple, competing ideas and practices and are, as a consequence, subject to ongoing change.  Politics becomes a richer, more complex object of study once we acknowledge that its definition is a subject of struggle, and that this struggle shapes not just the definition but the substance of politics.

Endnotes

[1] Theda Skocpol, “Associations without Members,” American Prospect, Dec. 19, 2001.

[2] William Cobb, “The Matter of Black Lives,” New Yorker, Mar. 6, 2016; David Graeber, “Occupy Wall Street’s Anarchist Roots,” The Anarchist Library Accessed Sept. 1, 2025.

[3] Theda Skocpol, “The Elite and Popular Roots of Contemporary Republican Extremism,” in Upending American Politics: Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites, and Citizen Activists from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance, ed. Skocpol and Caroline Turvo (New York, 2020), 3–28; Charles Homans, “How Stop the Steal Captured the American Right,” New York Times, July 19, 2022.