In The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics (Princeton University Press, 2024), Political Scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld have combined conventional wisdom and superb scholarship (complete with 99 pages of densely packed endnotes) to produce the latest in a long list of analyses of American political parties.
Why do political parties matter? "When vigorous and civically minded parties link the governed with their government while schooling citizens in the unending give-and-take of political engagement, they gave legitimacy to democratic rule. They bring blocs of voters together under a common banner, negotiating priorities among competing interests to construct agendas that resonate in the electorate. They render politics into ordered conflict, playing by the electoral rules of the game and gatekeeping against forces that might undermine such shared commitments." Hollowness, on the other hand, is reflected in parties "unrooted in communities and unfelt in ordinary people's day-to-day lives," leaving "paradoxically underserved" a political party's "core tasks," i.e., "to corral allies and build electoral coalitions sufficient to take control of government and implement an agenda."
In part, this is a quite comprehensive history of how American political parties have developed and functioned. This history "reveals no golden age but rather disparate fragments of a more vital organized politics to take to heart." The Framers famously opposed parties and imagined the president as a kind of an above-politics "Patriot King." In what is called the First Party System, coalitions formed of Federalists and Democratic-Republicans competed "without a clear sense of political limits." Nonetheless, the first "peaceful transition of party regimes" after the election of 1800 "marked milestone in democratic political development."
The Second Party System, which replaced the elite politics of the founding era, corresponded to the rise of participatory politics in the 1820s. The "most lasting organizational contribution of the Second Party System" was the replacement of legislative caucuses by delegate conventions "as the core mechanism of party decision-making and candidate selection." The image of the Democratic Party ("the Democracy") as the common man's party comes from the Jacksonian era. The Democrats' "Whig opponents more naturally countenanced a range of statuses and ranks populating a mutualistic political community." On the other hand, the Democrats "rejection of political hierarchy," combined with their rejection of any multiracial democracy, required "an equally committed exclusion of racial minorities forth community altogether." Long-term the Second Party System was a casualty of the conflict caused by slavery. Still, the "early mass parties, for all their flaws, bequeathed a genuinely popular and participatory politics. The torchlight parade would soon fade away. Its unmet promise still haunts American politics."
The authors analyze the development of the anti-slavery Republican Party as "indisputably great in the Tocquevillian sense," in that it "contested for and seized the reigns of power and redeemed the promise of the American republic." Democrats, in contrast, "opposed every Republican move toward civil and political rights, from he Emancipation proclamation down through the Fifteenth Amendment." Famously, the Democrats' coalition included most Catholic immigrants, "especially Irish Catholics suspicious of Republican moralism and fearful of labor market competition from African Americans." Post Civil-War Democrats "opposed prohibition of alcohol and the amendments to northern state constitutions targeting Catholic schools." The so-called "System of 1896" was more sectional than class-based. Due to the "Solid South," Progressives in the two parties never united.
The familiar story of the post-Civil War party system continues through the New Deal and the realignment and resorting of parties after the collapse of the New Deal coalition. "Party sorting after the 1970s took place on less civically rooted ground, carried out by outside actors and groups rather than by the parties themselves. The result would be a party system at once ideologically defined, president-centered, and hollow."
An almost universally blamed culprit for the hollowing out of political parties was the McGovern-Fraser reforms that followed the disastrous Democratic convention of 1968. That critique is familiar to everyone who has paid attention to the pathos of political parties. A particular contribution of this analysis is the attention the authors pay to the new political world created by what they call "the Long New Right." Ultimately, moreover, the reforms, the authors argue, proved "inadequate to the larger task of generating a party project that might counter powerful headwinds from the Right." They highlight "the take-no-prisoners exploitation of grievance and status resentments," evident in Republican politics as far back as 1968 (with earlier antecedents as, for example, 1950s McCarthyism).
After the George Wallace phenomenon off the 1960s, Pat Buchanan "melded the right-wing Catholic and the neo-Confederate traditions in the Long New Right." By 1995, Nixon-era theorist Kevin Phillips, by now "utterly disillusioned," identified the Republican Party as "failing an old but critical test of U.S. politics: the need for a would-be majority to keep firm control of its fringe groups and radicals."
Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, the authors identify a "politics of listlessness." This refers to the fact that "in the face of profound electoral headwinds, the candidate-driven and consultant-shaped party repeatedly failed to subordinate particular interests for common purpose or to build public goods that would benefit the party as a whole. Democrats' commitment to inclusiveness proved its own sort of pathology, more often a thin claim to take all comers than a thick vision of universalism."
Finally, came Trump, "who pushed the GOP toward the personalism that marks right-populism the world over." Trump bared "the plebiscitarian tendencies that denied party leaders' legitimate relent he nomination process." He "instinctively identified and exploited the gap between Republican elites and the Republican voters such elites could not comprehend."
In their conclusion, the authors see the key to long-term party renewal in "a sustained commitment by party actors, on a continual rather than a quadrennial basis, to robust investment in grassroots outreach." As a practical example, they examine Nevada Democratic politics (particularly as influenced by Senator harry Reid). In addition, they "endorse closed primaries, caucus-convention systems with opportunities for deliberation, institutions like superdelegates that privilege party officials and committed activists, and rejuvenation of the national conventions as deciders of platforms and priorities."
This summary skims the surface of a densely argued case for party renewal, the need for which is increasingly evident in the unravelling of our contemporary politics.
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