The hollow parties : the many pasts and disordered present of American party politics - Schlozman, Daniel; Rosenfeld, Sam (Political scientist) (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2024)
"In today's hyper-partisan America, the party divide seems to loom over every facet of life, political or not. Yet central as they are, parties have proved unable to meet their core tasks: building resonant programs, organizing actors into ordered conflict, policing boundaries, and linking the governed with the government. To understand how we came to the dysfunctional system we see today, we look back at how the parties formed and when and why they started to fail. In this major new book in American political development, the authors offer a full historical account of modern party politics, beginning with the rise of mass parties in the Jacksonian era through the post-Obama Democrats and the post-Trump Republicans. They show dynamic changes in parties over time, identifying six recurrent approaches that parties have taken-accommodationist, anti-party, pro-capital, policy-reform, radical, and populist-and focus on how successive actors melded inherited forms together with novel approaches to construct new projects for power. They date the emergence of our hollow-party era to the demise of the "New Deal order" by the late 1970s. While acknowledging changes in both parties, the authors emphasize the decisive role of the right in bringing it about. With deep historical grounding and extensive original research, the authors argue that it was the Republican Party that broke American politics"--
"A major history of America' political parties from the country's Founding to our embittered presentAmerica's political parties are hollow shells of what they could be, locked in a polarized struggle for power and unrooted as civic organizations. The Hollow Parties takes readers from the rise of mass party politics in the Jacksonian era through the years of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Today's parties, at once overbearing and ineffectual, have emerged from the interplay of multiple party traditions that reach back to the Founding.Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld paint unforgettable portraits of figures such as Martin Van Buren, whose pioneering Democrats invented the machinery of the mass political party, and Abraham Lincoln and other heroic Republicans of that party's first generation who stood up to the Slave Power. And they show how today's fractious party politics arose from the ashes of the New Deal order in the 1970s. Activists in the wake of the 1968 Democratic National Convention transformed presidential nominations but failed to lay the foundations for robust movement-driven parties. Instead, modern American conservatism hollowed out the party system, deeming it a mere instrument for power.Party hollowness lies at the heart of our democratic discontents. With historical sweep and political acuity, The Hollow Parties offers powerful answers to pressing questions about how the nation's parties became so dysfunctional-and how they might yet realize their promise"--
The problem of hollow parties -- The affirmation of party in antebellum America -- Free Labor Republicanism as a party project -- The politics of industrialism and the progressive transformation of party -- Visions of party from the New Deal to McGovern-Fraser -- The long New Right and the world it made -- The politics of listlessness : the Democrats since 1981 -- Politics without guardrails : the Republicans since 1994 -- Towards party renewal -- Appendix 1: Facets of party -- Appendix 2: Political parties, American political development, political history.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Keywords: Democratic Party (U.S.); Republican Party (U.S. : 1854- ); Political parties -- United States -- History; Right and left (Political science) -- United States; Political culture -- United States; POLITICAL SCIENCE / American Government / General; POLITICAL SCIENCE / History & Theory