The power of coalition merchants

How journalists shape politics

I am someone who believes in the power of ideas, or else I wouldn’t be doing this work.

Keynes famously said that “madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back,” making the case that even though the influence of writers and intellectuals is often indirect, it is real.

This is, unfortunately, something people have long disagreed about and that is inherently hard to resolve.

But there’s a particular hypothesis about how ideas matter in American politics that, thanks to clever research design, has some empirical support. The author of the hypothesis, Georgetown professor Hans Noel, obviously does not have Keynesian levels of renown. But I know that I’m not the only political columnist who’s a fan of his work on the role of opinion columnists in the evolution of American democracy.

His idea is that you can see the influence of ideas in politics by measuring the timing of changes in how the political parties fit different issues together.

If you go back to the elections pitting Benjamin Harrison against Grover Cleveland, for example, Harrison is for high tariffs and immigration restriction and sounds in a lot of ways like Donald Trump. But Harrison is also an advocate for voting rights for African-Americans and anti-lynching legislation. Neither party supports a comprehensive social safety net as we would currently understand it, but Harrison’s GOP does support high levels of spending on civil war pensions. That the parties realigned over time on the question of race is well known. But even though Trump ended up with the same views on trade and immigration as Harrison, it’s not like the Republican Party has consistently held those positions. The Reagan-Bush iterations of the GOP were more favorable to free trade than the Democrats, and the partisan split on immigration during those times was unclear. The idea of being a pro-business party that was also super-protectionist would have sounded bizarre to Reagan, just like Cleveland’s blend of white supremacy and pro-immigration politics sounds bizarre to us.

These historical contingencies remind us that however natural any particular partisan configuration of the issue space may seem, there is something a bit arbitrary, or at least contestable, about it.

Trump is a singular figure, but the idea that Republicans should ease up on welfare state rollback and embrace immigration restrictionism was clearly present in works like “Grand New Party” by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam in 2009. David Frum, who has become a leading anti-Trump writer, was also advocating for something like this synthesis in Obama’s first term. Writers, according to Noel, serve as highly visible examples of “coalition merchants” — people who propose ideas about what should go with what. Democrats, even in their 2025 mood of defeat, are absolutely united in their opposition to the OBBBA legislation, especially its cuts to Medicaid and nutrition assistance. That’s the tentpole holding the party together.

But people disagree about what the rest of the tent should contain, and that’s where the coalition merchants come in.

The civil rights realignment

The party position swap on civil rights is the most famous realignment in American history, and one that offers a marquee illustration of Noel’s account.