What the Whigs can teach us

Boston Globe

21-05-2025

Today the Whigs are regarded as a fusty barnacle on American history, a long-ago movement banished to historical oblivion. But the historian Allen Guelzo has
The party took its name from the British Whigs, themselves formed to provide a legislative counterpoint to powerful executive rule, in their case the monarchy. For nearly two centuries, the Whigs — the term is derived from the Scottish Gaelic name for a horse thief — sought a series of substantial transformations in the political culture of Britain. They sought to empower the middle class, abolish slavery, and reform the country's political system, then an untidy and undemocratic amalgam of legislative districts known as 'rotten boroughs' that were the power centers of land owners and other aristocrats.
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The American Whigs were motivated by the muscular presidency of Andrew Jackson, so lionized by President Donald Trump that he placed a portrait of the seventh president in the Oval Office in both his terms. The Whigs' gloom over Jackson's overreach — they regarded his 1829-1837 White House tenure as years of executive tyranny — prompted them to seek a new path to restore an old balance.
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Why the need for a new Whig party?
Though only four months old, Trump's second administration is marked by unprecedented attempts to exert executive power and a flurry of executive orders that bypass Capitol Hill. Only a handful of measures have been approved by Congress, which has ceded not only the initiative in American politics but also many of its roles.
Though Congress has Constitutional responsibilities in trade — and two once-powerful subcommittees specifically devoted to the issue — Trump has unilaterally imposed tariffs on friends, trading partners, and military and commercial foes alike. Though independent agencies created by Congress are historically, and legally, regarded as impervious to presidential interference, Trump has attacked them, removed their directors, and curtailed their remits. And earlier this month, the head of the executive branch summarily removed the leader of an institution called the Library of
Congress
.
President Donald Trump arrived to deliver an address to a joint session of Congress on March 4.
KENNY HOLSTON/NYT
This has occurred while Congress slept. The Democrats might have mounted an aggressive opposition to Trump had they not been in the minority in both chambers and struggling to reshape their tactics and their message.
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'The American system has shared powers as much as a separation of powers,' Andrew Ballard, a Florida State University political scientist, said in an interview. 'But Congress has done just about nothing. Congress has to have incentive to share power or wrestle back some of its policy-making role from the executive. Right now they don't and seem happy with the outcomes. They haven't yet seen that the administration has crossed some line they cannot countenance.'
Indeed, the eclipse of Congress has been one of the distinctive qualities of the era. 'The lack of major legislation is not because Mr. Trump failed but because he has not even bothered to try,' the conservative
Wall Street Journal
noted in a recent editorial. 'Even though his own Republican Party controls both houses of Congress, the president has all but disregarded Capitol Hill so far.…Executive orders feed his appetite for instant action, while enacting legislation can involve arduous and time-consuming negotiations.'
The 19th-century Whigs present an appealing prototype for moderate Democrats seeking a way out of their paralysis and for Republicans impatient with, or horrified by, the Trump ascendancy.
They grew out of a debate that, Michael F. Holt wrote in his 1999 'Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party,' was 'about the proper character of a republican society, that is, about what social and economic arrangements would best sustain citizens' virtue, their commitment to the public good or commonweal.' These are precisely the questions in the air today. Americans sharing those concerns gathered under the Whig banner 'focused on its everlasting basic principle: opposition to executive usurpation in general' — another analog to today.
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Sean Wilentz's characterization of the Whigs in his 2016 'The Politicians and the Egalitarians' demonstrates the breadth of the 19th-century party and leads us to wonder if a 21st-century version, shorn of some of the original party's constituencies, might be appropriate for our own time. The Whigs, he wrote, were 'a national coalition dominated by pro-business conservatives, humanitarian reformers, Christian evangelicals, supporters of federally backed economic developments and moderate Southern planters.'
No historical comparison works completely, or even neatly. Susan Hanssen of the University of Dallas has noted that Trump has some Whig characteristics, particularly his embrace of tariffs.
The Whigs didn't endure as a powerful entity. Weakened by sectional divisions growing out of fevered debate over slavery, they collapsed soon after their 1852 presidential nominee, Winfield Scott, was soundly defeated by Franklin Pierce. In their death were the political nutrients that helped nourish the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln.
Debates about the limits of presidential power have been a hardy American perennial. The Whig philosophy was perhaps best expressed by William Henry Harrison, the party's first president, who, in a reference to Jackson and President Martin Van Buren, said that considering one person 'the source from which all the measures of government should emanate is degrading to the republic.' The new Whigs could steal that quote as the founding statement of their own party.
This column first appeared in
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David Shribman is a nationally syndicated columnist. He can be reached at