We have more agency than we like to admit

Individual decisions have profoundly shaped recent history

We don’t talk much about the 1908 presidential election, which featured William Howard Taft for the GOP against William Jennings Bryan for the Democrats, but I think it was a fascinating race.

By nominating Bryan, a candidate who had already run and lost on two previous occasions, the Democrats were practically throwing this election to the GOP. His signature issue in 1896 (opposing the gold standard) didn’t really make sense in the context of 1908. And while his populist broadsides against the economic elite of the Gilded Age had a certain durable appeal, the economy was doing fine. Worse for Bryan, the incumbent president Theodore Roosevelt had already pivoted the Republicans in a progressive/reformist direction. This was an era of close elections, but Bryan lost by a larger margin than in 1896 or 1900, and Republicans won big majorities in the House and Senate as well.

What’s most interesting about 1908, though, isn’t the outcome so much as who didn’t run: the aforementioned incumbent, Teddy Roosevelt.

Roosevelt was only 50 years old and he was also, to the extent we could measure public opinion at that time, very popular. There was no constitutional prohibition on him running for a third term. And while there was a tradition of serving only two terms, the tradition hadn’t really been put to the test. Ulysses Grant actively sought a renomination in 1876, but Republican leaders felt he’d become unpopular and didn’t want him to run. The 1908 race was different. Nothing was standing in TR’s way except the tradition that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had established in the early days of the Republic. What’s more, TR didn’t win his first term as president — he was elected as William McKinley’s VP and took over after his boss was assassinated — so he hadn’t even served two full terms. But he decided to stand down and more or less handpicked Taft as his successor.

Their relationship famously soured after that. But what I think is interesting, is that it’s one of the most clear-cut cases of idiosyncratic thinking. Individual agency and contingency played an enormous role in our national politics.

The fallacy of structure

Of course, only a very naive person would see history as the unfolding of random occurrences driven purely by individual choices.

But I think sophisticated people tend to overcorrect.

Once something happens — like, for example, Joe Biden getting himself renominated — smart people are often eager to explain how this was “always going to happen.” How the objective incentive structure gave him the upper hand against his intra-party adversaries. How no president voluntarily steps aside for the good of the country (which I’ve heard many people say, even though it’s not true). How selecting Harris was inevitable, given the demographic imperatives of 2020, but how her own scant support among electability-minded elites made it impossible to rally a consensus in her favor as nominee.

A lot of my favorite examples of contingency relate to World War I, because that war featured a particularly odd sequence of events and so many consequences. If Germany had won the war or had lost it faster, there’s probably no Bolshevik Revolution. And there are so many other ways in which the war could have gone differently. Was it really inevitable that the Habsburgs would lose the war rather than peacefully surrender land to Italy? I don’t buy it.

If Derek Chauvin doesn’t kill George Floyd and Amy Klobuchar becomes vice president, wouldn’t we have had a completely different conversation about age over the course of Biden’s presidency? Alternatively, I think it’s become kind of conventional wisdom that Beau Biden’s death wasn’t really the reason that Biden stood down in 2016, that he was listening to advice from party elders. And I’m sure he was, on some level, but we also know that Biden does not always take advice to stand down. If Beau was alive and well and urging him to swing for it and run, wouldn’t he have? Had he run, would he have won? My guess is that, no, Clinton would have beaten him. But even if she did, it’s possible that Biden being in the race would have meant Bernie Sanders never catching fire, which would probably mean no AOC in 2018 and no reacting to Trump’s win by lurching left, among other things.

We all exist in a particular context and our decisions, of course, are influenced by that. But there are a lot of close-run things in politics and war and elsewhere, and individual choices make a big difference.

TR’s world of contingency

The basic context for early 20th century American politics was that Democrats and Republicans were locked in an intensely polarized, intensely competitive electoral environment in which the discourse was mostly focused on tariffs (Republicans were for it) and monetary issues (Democrats were for more inflationary policy), plus the legacy of the Civil War (Southerners were all Democrats, Republicans vaguely supported voting rights and enthusiastically supported generous pensions to war veterans and their widows).

But a rising Progressive Movement challenged that political establishment, pushing for reforms to the boss-dominated system and for tackling the major problems of industrial capitalism in a real way. And the movement cut across the two parties rather than being located within either of them. William McKinley, who was elected president in 1896, was a conventional conservative Republican, and so was his vice president, Garret Hobart. But Hobart died in 1899, and at the time, there was no provision for filling a VP vacancy, so they needed to fill the role at the 1900 GOP Convention. Teddy Roosevelt was then governor of New York. He got that job by credibly threatening to run third party, which convinced the state party boss, Thomas Platt, that accepting him as the GOP gubernatorial nominee in 1898 would be the lesser evil. But once Roosevelt was in office, he proved more effective than Platt had realized, so Platt came up with the idea of convincing the convention to promote Roosevelt to VP, thus saddling him with a prestigious but powerless office. But when McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist (something that happened to many heads of state and government between 1900 and 1914), a guy who was considered too progressive to tolerate as governor became president.

Roosevelt is interesting, because even though he’s on Mount Rushmore, the legislative achievements of his presidency weren’t particularly vast.

Theodore Roosevelt standing on a podium pointing into the crowd during a campaign rally speech. Ca. 1900s. Bettmann via Getty Images.

He did sign some big bills, but mostly he was super popular. He lived an accomplished and varied life before going into politics, which people generally liked. He was also an aggressive and savvy user of the mass media. He strong-armed his own party’s bosses in ways that people respected, stood for popular reformist causes, and demonstrated some efficacy in getting things done. He crushed his 1904 re-election bid and would have easily won again in 1908, if he’d chosen to run. And if he’d done that, everyone would explain that all the incentives and structural factors made that choice inevitable. But instead, he decided the best way to secure his legacy would be to follow the George Washington precedent and hand things off to a fellow progressive Republican.

Taft was not as politically adept as TR and couldn’t really get bills passed in the House, which was dominated by a conservative Republican speaker. Roosevelt, for perhaps self-interested reasons, chose to interpret this as Taft betraying the Republican cause, so he challenged him for the 1912 nomination. This time, he wasn’t able to get over on the party bosses, but did run third party as a Bull Moose, and for the only time in American history, the “third party” finished in second place. Woodrow Wilson, who won, was also a progressive, and a few years later, the United States entered World War I, which created the circumstances for a lot more government intervention into society and the economy.

A century of realignment

The 1912 election was quite dramatic. But there genuinely wasn’t such a clear ideological contrast between Taft, Roosevelt, and Wilson, all of whom were more-or-less progressive figures. In the short term, the big difference was that Wilson was also a huge racist who did things like segregate the Postal Service. But in the longer run, the interaction between progressive instincts and wartime exigency led to the beginnings of partisan realignment. Wilson Democrats ended up running an activist regime thanks to the war, and then the subsequent Harding and Coolidge administrations were much more conservative as part of the backlash. Herbert Hoover, who won election in 1928, was actually a somewhat progressive Republican, but he was totally outmatched by the Great Depression.

Then came FDR, and between the New Deal and World War II, he firmly established the contemporary government, with Democrats acting as the party of state activism. And while FDR did basically nothing for Civil Rights, his poor relief brought African-American voters into the Democratic Party coalition and laid the groundwork for the racial realignment of the 1960s.

But it’s easy to imagine this playing out differently in a lot of ways.

Most straightforwardly, it seems at least plausible that World War I could have broken out midway through Teddy Roosevelt's fourth term after he ran and won in 1908 and again in 1912. That probably leads to an earlier American entrance into the war (TR was much more hawkish than Wilson), which in turn means no Russian Revolution because Russia's military situation in 1917 would have been much less desperate. In that scenario, Democrats probably go conservative in the interwar years, while we get a New Deal led by progressive Republicans, and racial realignment never happens. I think you get a similar result even if Roosevelt doesn't run in 1908, if Republicans are more worried about a TR third party bid in 1912 and nominate him.

Alternatively, maybe Roosevelt runs and wins in 1908, but doesn’t run in 1912. With no party split, maybe his designated successor wins here. But with the GOP more firmly identified with progressivism, it’s also possible that you get a conservative Democrat as nominee rather than Wilson, and maybe that guy wins. The whole ideological alignment of the parties in the twentieth century could have gone the other way.

A world of responsibility

I’ve had Teddy and the 1908 election on my mind, of course, because of the pressure on Joe Biden to step aside for the 2024 election. Ben wrote about foreign leaders who’ve stepped aside in lieu of re-election, but the Roosevelt case is particularly interesting because there wasn’t some incredible political rationale for him to stand down. He was young. He was popular. He just had some vague sense that standing aside was the right move for his historical reputation — a judgment he’d reversed by 1912, and which almost certainly left his legacy in worse shape than if he’d just run in 1908.

My whole adult political life, it seems to me, has been dominated by these moments of agency and contingency.

Structural features contributed to America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, but it was fundamentally a choice that George W. Bush made when he could have chosen otherwise. Most Democrats in safe seats voted no on the use of force authorizing resolution, but Hillary Clinton thought voting yes would advance her presidential ambitious. Despite that error, she was an overwhelming front-runner in 2007, and Barack Obama’s decision to tempt her wrath by getting in the race was not a no-brainer at the time. The vast majority of observers thought Trump wouldn’t run in 2016, and when he announced, it was widely believed he was setting himself up for humiliation. These kinds of individual choices have been fateful, as have the whole series of decisions around the 2024 Democratic Party nomination. Some of that is Biden’s personal decision-making, but some of it is that people like Kamala Harris and Gretchen Whitmer and Pete Buttigieg could have made bold moves for power but chose not to.

Bad decisions are unfortunate, and we’ve certainly had plenty of them. But what I have been most struck by in conversations with members of Congress over the past five years is a persistent — and I think wrong — belief that they have no agency, and that we are all passively pushed along by events at all times. Those who think this way are constantly frustrated with their jobs and constantly complaining. But even though this kind of denial of agency leads to misery, I do think a lot of people enjoy the flight from moral responsibility. If you convince yourself that what you do doesn’t matter, you’ll feel terrible all the time, but you can at least blow off the critics by telling them there’s nothing you could have done.