Know Your Enemy - What Happened to America's Political Parties? (w/ Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld)

Matt and Sam interview Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld about their new book, "The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics."

Duration: 1h 11m
Broadcast on: 16 Aug 2024
Audio Format: other

Why are American political parties so ineffectual? Why do they seem, simultaneously, so frantically active and so incapable of achieving specific objectives? Why have the Democrats tended to seem listless, uncertain of their own ideological identity; while the Republicans are increasingly dominated by a radical, lunatic fringe more interested in becoming famous on television, radio, and social media than in governing? Why, in other words, are the political parties seemingly "everywhere and nowhere, overbearing and enfeebled, all at once?"

In their new book, The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics, political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld set out to untangle this paradox. Theyargue that much of the discord, dysfunction, and democratic deficit which characterize contemporary politics can be attributed to the "hollowing out" of American political parties — a process which began, in earnest, in the 1970s, with the neoliberal dismantling of New Deal civil society, the rise of the New Right, and reforms to the party system in the wake of the 1968 conventions. In the wake of these changes, our parties have become unrooted from the communities where their constituents live; they are nationalized instead of locally oriented; they are swarmed by para-party groups and networks (the "party blob") which are both unaccountable and parasitic on the Party's aims; and they are lacking in legitimacy — mistrusted and often treated with contempt, even by their own members.

What has this hollowness wrought in our politics? And can anything be done about it? Sam and Danny are here to explain.

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Sources:

Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld, The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics (2024)

Sam Rosenfeld, The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era (2017)

Daniel Schlozman, When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History (2015)

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All right, welcome listeners to episode 98 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sippen, your podcast co-host, and I'm here as always with my great friend Sam other bell. Hey, Sam. Hi, Matt. Are you as excited for the Democratic National Convention as I am, Sam? My favorite time of the election cycle. All our favorites come out. We get to see Bill Clinton Hillary. I'm ready to do the mock arena. I heard Kathy Hochl's even speaking. Wow. She deserves it. But I do mention the convention because it does connect to this episode, which is about political parties. We did specifically time it to release it between the two conventions, the RNC and the DNC. And we had on two guests who are the co-authors of a new book called The Hollow Parties, the many pasts and disordered present of American party politics. The authors and our guests were Daniel Schlossman and Sam Rosenfeld. Danny is an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and Sam Rosenfeld is an associate professor of political science at Coolgate. Yeah. This was a really interesting conversation, timed well between the two conventions. And it's a really interesting book. It's both a history book and a political science book. And it's really an account of how the parties, the two parties in America, were hollowed out, become these kinds of, in the case of the Democrats, this kind of list list in a factual party, in the case of the Republicans, so powerless to prevent the sort of radical forces within the conservative movement from taking over. So it's two different results of this hollowness that they identify as the sort of signature feature of political parties in the contemporary era. But the cause is this same emptiness and weakness at the center of our party system. Yes, exactly. And one thing that may be worth mentioning here is I really love the way this book takes as it's like one of its premises that political parties are really important for democracy. Right. I basically can't have democracy without political parties in some ways. Yeah. We talk about the history of parties in the United States and then especially starting in the 1970s, their account of how these parties got hollowed out and are the kind of ineffectual behemoths we know today. Yeah. They do lots of stuff, but they don't do the things parties really need to do, according to Danny and Sam. Yeah, it's like this kind of weird confluence of frantic activity without purposeful or coordinated action is another one of the sort of weird contradictions. It's just these big hulking behemoths that are like kind of empty on the inside. All right. Well, let's get some housekeeping items.

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Matt and Sam interview Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld about their new book, "The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics."