The Democratic Party in the United States was formed in the breakup of the first uniparty, the Democratic-Republican Party that had first triumphed electorally in 1800 and had by 1816 eliminated the Federalist Party as a going concern, so much so that in 1820 James Monroe, that amiable nonentity who served as the last member of the Virginian dynasty of presidents, won with only a single dissenting electoral vote from a faithless elector who believed that no one other than George Washington deserved a unanimous victory. In 1824, though, the Democratic-Republican Party was anything but united, and perhaps to a surprising degree, it is that election which provides some useful context to the absolute bonkers craziness that 2024 is providing, and demonstrates some of the tensions that have always been inherent within the Democratic Party that are coming to light in a big way this year.

As the 1824 campaign for the presidency opened, five ambitious men sought to become president. One of the younger men, John Calhoun, quickly decided to compete to be Vice President, and despite having many policy disagreements with one of the presidential candidates and a great deal of hostility to two other ones, he managed to win the Vice Presidency easily because he was the preferred choice of Vice President for the two leading candidates. Among the four candidates for president, each presented their own picture of a different wing of the Democratic-Republican Party that then existed. Adams, from Massachusetts, was the son of John Adams, the incumbent Secretary of State, and had already shown a long record of faithful service to the United States in both the Senate as well as especially in European diplomacy. He was closely allied with Henry Clay, who had made his start as a war hawk in 1812 and was already developing a reputation for his support of internal improvements, where he strongly agreed with Adams. William Crawford, a native-born Virginian who had moved to Georgia, had suffered a stroke in 1823 and his health was viewed as suspect but he was the incumbent Secretary of the Treasury and was the favorite of the smoke-filled caucuses within Congress. In addition, Andrew Jackson stood for the office after having served as a successful military commander during and after the War of 1812 notable for his victories at New Orleans and his takeover of Florida that forced the Adams-Onis treaty of 1819. Interestingly enough, he and Adams had a lot of similarities and Adams had a great deal of respect for Jackson, but sadly that respect was not reciprocated or really well understood or recognized by Jackson, with fateful consequences.

The campaign itself ended up as an indecisive mess, in what was until now perhaps the most chaotic election campaigns in American history. With four candidates and no clear front-runner, no one won a majority of electoral votes and the election was thrown into the House of Representatives, where state delegations had to choose among the top three candidates. This eliminated Henry Clay, who then threw his support behind Adams and received the offer to be Adams’ Secretary of State, which was viewed at the time as a springboard to the presidency. Crawford was dismissed because of health concerns relating to his stroke and retired from national politics, becoming a local judge in Georgia who was never able to get back into the national political scene due to poor timing and fierce competition. Although Jackson had not been personally ambitious for the presidency to the level of other candidates, his populist supporters viewed his defeat as sign of a corrupt bargain made within the House of Representatives between Adams and Clay and sought to make their majority vote in 1828 too big to steal, and the end result was the breakup of the Democratic-Republican Party into two hostile parties, which eventually coalesced into the Second Party system of Democrats and Whigs, a party system that lasted until the 1852 election, where the Whigs were torn apart by sectional division over slavery, which led to the Third Party system that we have had up to this day.

From the beginning, therefore, the Democratic Party has had a complicated relationship with the legitimacy of democratic politics. This complicated history has not changed in the last 200 years to any great degree. There has been and likely always will be a tension between the desire of the party to see itself and be seen as the party for the common person along with the issues of party discipline, smoke-filled rooms and corrupt political machines, identity politics, and the like. These issues remain consistent problems for Democrats as a political party to the present-day. If it seems rather ridiculous that a medically compromised candidate in William Crawford would seem to be a ridiculous nominee for president in a day and age that required a president to be able in body and mind, surely the coronation of Biden despite his visible and obvious mental decline will appear equally ridiculous to future historians who look over the wreckage of the 2024 election campaign. If the caucus of professional politicians seems a poor way to choose a candidate, so too will the distinct lack of competition and lack of transparency that turned a very leftist cackling hyena into a photoshopped portrait of an alternative to a “threat to democracy” despite never having received a single vote to be president in any presidential primary whatsoever. If concerns about election legitimacy seem very much of-the-moment, so too were they very relevant in 1824 as well, when it appeared that the will of the people was thwarted by office trading in Washington DC. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

It is striking to note that part of what keeps the same sort of concerns about the legitimacy of self-government relevant within the American experience is the tension between different aspects of the American political system. The first-past-the-post and general winner take all tendencies of American politics, when combined with what has always been a high degree of power in the presidency, has encouraged the development of a political system with rough parity between two parties that considered themselves as always having at least a chance for victory. Dramatic changes in the American party system have tended to occur only when an existing major party looked to be a permanent minority one, thus encouraging the party to be replaced by a more competitive one that would provide the chance for victory. Parties like the Whigs which were clearly the minority party of the two were focused on electability concerns, knowing that they could only win elections when something other than the pure party strength of the two parties was at stake. This balancing act between seeking to pass an agenda through Congress while struggling to find a popular enough candidate to bring the party to presidential victory could only be maintained as long as there was sufficient strength in both sections of the country. When, in 1852, Northern and Southern Whigs could no longer be civil to each other and cooperate because of their immense hostility over slavery, the Whigs were replaced as a party with what began as a sectional party which had added strength in the North due to the attraction of antislavery politics (or at least free soil politics) to Democrats who were upset with the pro-slavery perspective of the Democratic Party. It did not matter that Republicans could not compete for long stretches of time in the South (which is itself worthy of much more discussion), so long as they were viable in winning enough electoral votes to win the presidency itself in the North and West, which proved to be the case often since 1860.

When we view matters in this light, it is admittedly a bit puzzling that the Democratic Party has to work so much harder at disguising its candidates than Republicans do. If Trump was not popular with the professional politicians of the Republicans in 2016, he was accepted, warts and all, as a standard bearer in free and fair competitions for the nomination in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Republican elites felt no need to change the rules to prevent him from winning an open contest, and he did not feel the need to change the rules to prevent the selection of any of his competitors this year. This has not been true for the Democrats. In 2016, pressure was put on Biden not to run against HRC so that Clinton could have her long-delayed chance to run for the presidency without dividing the mainstream Democrat vote competing against Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders. In 2020, Biden was coronated as the mainstream Democratic choice against Sanders to prevent an open competition where Sanders may have prevailed against divided “mainstream” Democratic candidates. In 2024, Biden faced more competition from “none of the above” than anyone in what was a remarkably closed primary, and so far Harris appears to be chosen by as smoke filled a caucus as ever made Crawford a viable candidate for the presidency in 1824. Why has the Democratic Party shown so much less faith in its own voters than Republicans have had in the same period, despite the fact that both Republican and Democratic voters seem to be in the mood for far more populism than has shown itself for the offering by political elites in general. This mystery deserves to be untangled.