August 20, 2024
By Joseph Postell
America’s political parties present a host of paradoxes. Recent events illustrate these paradoxes vividly. In the months leading up to this week’s national convention, Democratic leaders successfully pressured the incumbent president, who won over 87% of the votes in the party’s primaries and caucuses, to step aside. Those leaders essentially told their voters who the new nominee was going to be. To this point the voters seem not only to have accepted direction from the party leaders, but have done so unhesitatingly and enthusiastically. Meanwhile in Congress, bipartisan legislation is exceedingly rare, and party line votes are the norm. It’s easy to think that parties these days are very strong.
On the other hand, parties seem quite weak. Party leaders struggle to unite their members behind a common agenda, other than the defeat of the opposing party. Republicans had a trifecta after 2016 and couldn’t figure out how to repeal Obamacare. Democrats’ own trifecta proved insufficient to “Build Back Better.” There are more independents than registered voters of either party. And although split ticket voting is in decline, polling this cycle suggests there will be significant deviation between presidential and senate races in a host of states including Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Montana. Divided government is a regular phenomenon. The parties seem weak.
Navigating these paradoxes requires careful and thoughtful scholarship. Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld promise this with their new book, The Hollow Parties. By and large, the attempt succeeds, but Schlozman and Rosenfeld’s account of the reasons for our parties’ hollowness is unconvincing.
The authors published a chapter-length version of their argument several years ago in a collection of essays. That chapter was so compelling that I have assigned it in every course on political parties I have taught over the past several years. Thus, I was enthusiastic to read and review the book-length version. And through the first two-thirds of The Hollow Parties, I found myself in heated agreement.
Then I reached the final third, which was far more disappointing. The final chapters are not bad enough to condemn the entire book, which is an important contribution. But it mars an otherwise exceptional work of scholarship.
The authors are right about their core thesis: today’s parties are not strong nor weak, but hollow. In other words, they are “Organizationally top-heavy and poorly rooted.” Party organizations are almost nonexistent at the local and state levels. Therefore, parties are not consistently in touch with the people they claim to represent. They parachute into these communities during election season and skip town as the votes are tallied. They are “dominated by satellite groups”—think tanks, interest groups, lobbyists, and the like—that the authors denote party “blobs.” This creates a type of party system where voters are highly partisan, but have little affection for, or connection with, the parties they typically vote for.
The best way to see the problem is to examine America’s parties historically. In the first several chapters, the authors “turn to history as a way to illuminate Americans’ contemporary political predicament.” They describe how parties grew to prominence in the first few decades of American history, how Martin Van Buren and others served as architects of two great parties, and how those parties served as civic educators and institutions throughout the 19th Century.
This history is not entirely novel, and builds on previous scholarship from James Ceaser, Sidney Milkis, and others. But it is utterly compelling. I’ve been teaching this history to undergraduate and graduate students since 2011 and I still found new and fascinating insights on dozens of pages. The first five chapters constitute the best existing short and accessible history of America’s parties up to the 1970s.
While the core thesis of Hollow Parties is rather clear, the authors’ thesis on how we arrived at hollow parties is murkier. And it’s on this question that the book derails. At different points the book endorses three separate accounts of what hollowed out the parties: reforms during the Progressive Era, reforms stemming from the McGovern-Fraser Commission of the early ‘70s, and the “Long New Right’s” plot to take over the Republican Party.
Early on, they suggest that the Progressive Era was a critical turning point. It was during this period that civil service replaced patronage, the secret “Australian Ballot” replaced publicly distributed party-printed ballots, and direct primaries began to displace smoke-filled rooms.
In their words, “Progressives like [Robert] La Follette toppled the parties from their pedestal as icons and guarantors of democratic life.” Once the progressives broke through the old system, they argue, “there was no turning back, no putting the genie back in the bottle. No longer would mass partisan mobilization rooted in local communities dominate the nation’s civic life. No longer would parties control the machinery of electoral politics or serve as the essential intermediaries between office holders and citizens. No longer would doctrines of party restrain the ambitions of leaders or the reach of the state.” In short, the progressives broke down the party machines that mobilized voters, mediated between citizens and office holders, and restrained candidate-centered politics and ambition.
Alternatively, as the authors’ acknowledge, many view the 1968 Democratic Convention, whose dysfunction led to the McGovern-Fraser Commission that provided the blueprint for a primary-centric nominating system, as a key event that weakened parties. Schlozman and Rosenfeld argue that McGovern-Fraser’s reforms were insufficient to produce hollow parties. Their position seems to be that moderate, pragmatic Republicans could have constrained the conservative elements that arose in their own party. Had they done so, the authors contend, McGovern-Fraser could have left us with “a pragmatic and civically rooted politics of the center-right and…an organizationally dense politics of the center-left.”
They argue instead that the GOP ceded its authority to the “Long New Right,” which radicalized the Republican Party and hollowed out the party system. This Long New Right embodied “the central historical dynamic at work: of party capture from without and subsequent hollowing from within.” The authors never adequately explain why the trajectory of the Republican Party, captured by ideological and activist forces on the Right who “deemed parties mere expediencies,” isn’t simply a mirror of the trajectory of the Democratic Party, which was captured by ideological and activist forces on the Left who thought of their party the same way.
Instead of addressing this question, a bizarre chapter on modern conservatism and Republicanism draws speculative connections from Joseph McCarthy to the John Birch Society to Jesse Helms to the Council for National Policy (CNP) to (you guessed it) Donald Trump and January 6. They even toss in the Oklahoma City bombing as a “darker version” of the New Right’s legacy. The chapter is, sadly, a bit unhinged and—ironically—conspiratorial in tone. The authors acknowledge that they intend to “increase the wattage, so to speak, of our coverage here,” as if they know this chapter is not like the others.
The chapter reveals biases that distort the authors’ treatment of Republicans and conservatives. At one point, attempting (I think) to illustrate the CNP’s connection to big donors as part of a vast right-wing conspiracy, the authors reveal that the organization’s 1993 program was attended by “the head of a waste disposal firm…a McDonald’s franchisee from Arizona, a homebuilder,” and other well-heeled backers. Gasp! A McDonald’s franchisee and a homebuilder attended a meeting! This only looks sinister if you’ve already decided that there’s a problem.
Let me make one thing very clear: I have written, publicly and repeatedly, that both conservatism and the country as a whole would be strengthened by returning to stronger and less hollow parties. I write from within a tradition that the authors explicitly endorse: conservatives who think “politics has its own logic that dictates compromise.” In other words, I am highly sympathetic to many of their conclusions. But their account for how and why the parties got here rings…well, hollow. We get a disappointing and oversimplistic account, filled with obscure facts and events, to prove how the Long New Right is the great and sole cause of the hollow parties.
Sadly, this is typical fare from academic treatments of the Right. According to such accounts, when left-wing activist groups succeed in moving the Democratic Party to the left, drawing defined ideological distinctions and weakening moderates and conservatives in the party, it’s a thoughtful “belief in the centrality of programmatic motivations for party activism.” When the “Long New Right” decides it is “more concerned with achieving certain objectives than in working within the system,” that’s part of its “trademark boundlessness.” When the Right weakens moderates and liberals in the Republican Party, mirroring the actions of their left-wing counterparts a decade earlier, it’s the “gonzo politics” of “resentment.” Internship programs, this supposedly objective scholarship tells us, are “designed to groom the next generation of conservative shock troops.” Yet they say nothing of whole academic disciplines that openly promote left-wing activism. Schlozman and Rosenfeld grant that “Polarization remade the Democratic Party,” but they contend that polarization is “asymmetric”—right-wing Republicans are worse than left-wing Democrats.
Their (ironically) asymmetric treatment of the two parties reaches its culmination in a tellingly blind claim near the end: “Fox News, which first aired in 1996, came to hold a place in Republican politics that had no equivalent on the Democratic side.” Seemingly unaware of MSNBC, the authors don’t even attempt to distinguish the two in defense of this claim. Curious, I looked up the launch date of MSNBC—sure enough, 1996, same year as Fox News. My guess is that, to Schlozman and Rosenfeld, Fox News and MSNBC are different, because MSNBC is simply part of a broader constellation of mainstream left-leaning media outlets which includes CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and so forth. But if anything, that suggests that both Republican and Democratic politics are driven by a nationalized and partisan media environment that encourages hollowness, which is precisely what they deny. The authors’ biases don’t allow them to draw that conclusion, so they highlight Fox News without commenting on its competitors.
The claims and arguments about the Long New Right should not have survived peer review in their current form. (But of course, no moderate or conservative would have been solicited to review the book.)
The Long New Right’s assault on the parties has produced, in Schlozman and Rosenfeld’s view, “Democrats without a collective project and Republicans without guardrails.” Democrats can’t seem to figure out what they are for, and Republicans can’t resist extremism and chaos. So they explicitly demand that “the Republican Party as it now stands must be defeated electorally.” It must face “popular repudiation” through “repeated and substantial electoral losses.” This is apparently the only solution to the problem of hollow parties.
Unfortunately, the authors’ treatment of the Right contributes to the unwillingness to compromise that they correctly identify as a problem. Their treatment undermines the case for compromise and accommodation. When they envision a “reformed, post-Long New Right Republicanism,” they essentially want the Republican Party that existed until 2008. It’s worth remembering how the leaders of that Party were treated by their political opponents. If a more accommodationist Republican Party is still going to be engaged on unfair terms, then it’s hard for accommodationists to make the case to their colleagues that it’s a strategy worth pursuing. Likewise, Schlozman and Rosenfeld’s advocating for the annihilation of one of the two parties is unlikely to bring about much compromise.
Rather than pin the cause of hollow parties on the evil Long New Right, I would trace their roots further back to the Progressive Era. In addition to my own writing on this point, there’s a good deal of scholarship that makes the case for this view, and it seems to fit the evidence a lot better than The Hollow Parties’ account. If both parties have followed the same trajectory since the middle of the 20th Century, perhaps we need to look further back to determine what enabled activists on both extremes to capture and hollow out both parties.
Prior to the Progressive Era, parties were able to define their own agendas, their own membership, and their own principles, when they had control over nominations, platforms, ballots, and the machinery of government in the 19th Century. The Progressive Era featured a frontal assault on that system, and this more than anything else laid the groundwork for hollowness. The Hollow Parties rejects this explanation of the decline of the parties as offering an “institutional focus.” Instead they place “emphasis on social changes and developments inside institutions.” But institutions matter. They influence how popular opinion and social movements work their way through our political system.
This misdiagnosis is the most glaring weakness of The Hollow Parties.
In sum, the initial chapters of The Hollow Parties make a compelling historical case for why parties, as institutions, emerged as mechanisms for building electoral coalitions, mediating institutions that connected citizens and government, and managing national conflict. The book then abandons that worthwhile approach, arguing instead that the Long New Right broke the Republican Party, without offering a compelling case for distinguishing the Republicans’ move to the right from the Democrats’ move to the left. Still, this error does not undermine the book’s core argument, since the core thesis does not hinge on whether you agree with their assessment of the Long New Right.
There is a great deal to learn from The Hollow Parties—more than I can cover in a brief review. Not only does it provide an excellent history of America’s parties up to the 1970s, it also offers a compelling framework for reconciling the paradoxes of today’s parties. In the final analysis, Schlozman and Rosenfeld are absolutely right about today’s hollow parties, but they understate the deeper causes that have produced this hollowness. The book’s core thesis is compelling and important enough to justify looking past these errors. Thus, in spite of its deficiencies, it belongs on the shelf of any person seeking to understand how our two parties can be so strong and so weak at the same time.
Joseph Postell is Associate Professor of Politics at Hillsdale College, and the author of Bureaucracy in America: The Administrative State’s Challenge to Constitutional Government.
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