After years of signs that the American parties were institutionally weak and vulnerable to takeover, Democratic Party elites coalesced to quickly replace their presidential candidate. But a longer historical sweep suggests it will not be a quick return to parties’ traditional roles. Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld find that Democrats and Republicans have become hollow shells, unrooted in civic organizations, with Republicans captured by extremism and Democrats ineffectual. Their weaknesses, they say, are the source of our political discontent.
Guests: Daniel Schlozman, Johns Hopkins University; Sam Rosenfeld, Colgate University
Study: The Hollow Parties
Transcript
Matt Grossmann: Are American parties reviving or hollow? This week on The Science of Politics. For the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossman. After years of complaints and signs that the American parties were institutionally weak and vulnerable to takeover, Democratic Party elites recently coalesced to quickly replace their presidential candidate. But a longer historical sweep suggests it might not be a quick return to the party’s traditional roles. This week I talk to Daniel Schlozman of Johns Hopkins University and Sam Rosenfeld of Colgate University about their new Princeton book, The Hollow Parties. They find that Democrats and Republicans have become hollow shells, unrooted in civic organizations, with Republicans captured by extremism and Democrats ineffectual in building on social movements. Their weaknesses lead to our political discontent. We talk about their argument in the context of this year’s dramatic presidential campaign. I think you’ll enjoy our conversation.
Daniel, start us off with the major findings from your new book, The Hollow Parties.
Daniel Schlozman: Findings is a funny word for a book that is a lot more about trying to offer a perspective on American parties and where they’ve been over a very big stretch of time than doing a study and writing up what we found in the study. And so The Hollow Parties is a book that begins in a sense with our present condition and goes very, very far back. And what it observes about present-day party politics is that parties are, as the title says, hollow. And what we mean by hollow, things that are hollow are strung on the outside and weak underneath and that contemporary parties have this distinctive capacity of activity and incapacity. They’re doing all sorts of things. Partisanship dominates voters’ electoral considerations, and yet the parties seem incapable of exercising their fundamental tasks to establish order over politics and organize conflict. And that hollowness then manifests itself differently in the two parties.
In a Democratic Party that under lots and lots of circumstances seems incapable of getting its house in order, incapable of arranging a coherent project for power and a Republican Party that is weak in its defenses against extremism and that has not established a cordon sanitaire against the far right. And so then having posed this puzzle, the book then asks how did the parties get that way and wants to look very far back at that. And in a sense, why do we look so far back? Why does the book begin with the rise of mass politics in the early 19th century? Because to understand party politics is to understand the system we have. And we’re recording this between the two national conventions, the apex of where American parties decide their nominees, that in so many ways American party politics traces back to patterns established in its very, very early days and that in turn, to anticipate a question you have later, the pattern that books trying to diagnose contemporary parties often have of asking how politics changed since a given period does not really get at.
Assume some kind of normalcy in long run patterns of change and so we didn’t want to say everything in American politics was decent and normal until party form in the 1960s, big changes in the 1970s. Instead, we want to show at each step where does historical change come from? And then for those who want to imagine a better party system, don’t say we have all the answers, but we do think that lessons very far back can be gleaned and that there are glimmers of possibility in different historical experiences going all the way back to the founding.
Matt Grossmann: So Sam, within weeks of publication, the Democratic Party decided to harden up and take down its presidential nominee and quickly coalesce around an alternative. Does that mean that it wasn’t as hollow as you thought or that it has shown some potential to take on what you’re suggesting?
Sam Rosenfeld: Well, I think you answered in the … It’s no coincidence the book comes out and then within a few weeks you see a decisive party action, so they read it. No. Telescoping into those three weeks, what we saw was a kind of halting, fitful, certainly anguished … In the grand sweep of time, it’s a short amount of time, but in those three weeks you saw a process of the effort to compel Joe Biden to resign, consisting of attempts at coordination, but not within any kind of organized process, but among a certain set of eminent high status democratic officials, Nancy Pelosi I think by most reporting, most efficaciously and importantly to pull that off. But with lots of Democrats kind of caught in individualized prisoner’s dilemmas where stepping out to challenge the president would incur a lot of potential blowback on them individually. What we saw I think was ultimately because it worked, we can see that as a crash course effort of a party that had few formal capacities to bring this about managing to act like a party, to try and coordinate as best they could to bring about an outcome that would serve collectively the party’s interests.
And that ultimately succeeding because it was ultimately Joe Biden’s decision and they put him in a position to feel compelled to make that decision. Telescoping out I think more broadly, the story of how the Democratic Party drifted into Joe Biden being the party’s nominee in 2024, I think speaks a lot more evidence of hollowness and incapacity to make concerted decisions. It’s a long story of presidential incumbents having a lot of sway over their parties. Across American history that’s been true, but it’s been much more true over the course of the last century than it was certainly in the 19th century. And it was that broader story that brought us to a point in the last three weeks where it is true that I think Joe Biden’s performance at the debate evident and biologically determined vulnerability as a candidate this year did set out the limits of how much presidents and presidential incumbents can dominate parties even in a hollow age. And for that I think Democrats have a reason to be grateful, but it was not an easy process by any means for them to do it.
Matt Grossmann: But Daniel, this is two nominations in a row where the Democratic Party, although acting at the very last minute, did seem to be able to come together among its various factions and nominate a candidate via exactly the mechanisms that we’ve talked about being lost by coordinating through endorsements and through getting people to step aside. Doesn’t that suggest it’s a little stronger than we thought?
Daniel Schlozman: Not really. I think that the slapdash, 72 hour between South Carolina and Super Tuesday process in 2020 and then the behind the scenes, but for Nancy Pelosi would it have happened … And obviously leaving aside the questions about Joe Biden’s own capacity that are important to the actual 2024 story and not really something that we know about and can say much about as parties people. The behind the scenes mostly Nancy Pelosi story of 2024 show the carried slapdash as much in public can’t really coordinate the qualities as they do genuine careful, planful consideration of what’s the best ticket for our party’s collective interests. That lowering and lowering and lowering the bar toward coordination … And political scientists like us are very pro party. I think we share the same pro party orientation as lots and lots of other political scientists. And when we get asked, as you’ve been asked and any working political scientist listening to this will laugh and smile that they’ve been asked, the don’t we need a third party? Isn’t that the solution?
We give the same bog-standard no, we don’t answer as everybody else. Where we differ is not seeing any sign of coordination no matter how limited as evidence that the parties are strong, evidence that the parties are playing their role, evidence that actually parties are more vital than we thought. And in a variety of ways, and this is where history matters, that to see parties over time fulfilling their historical roles, coordinating in ways often at conventions and often pretty ruthlessly to achieve great historical projects is to put the coordination of ’20 and 2024 into some perspective where the glass looks a lot more empty than it does full. And so in a lot of ways our disagreement is less about the empirics of what happened than it is the interpretation of how much those empirics say that we see real true party vitality.
Matt Grossmann: So Sam, as Daniel said, the book goes back through all of American history. What does it add in terms of examples, historical comparisons, development processes that people like me who never go before 1945 miss in how the American parties, especially the Democratic Party has developed?
Sam Rosenfeld: Well, yeah, just as a kind of general matter, we ended up partly by just our own instincts and biases into this big historic sweep and historic arc, but in part kind of piece by piece theoretically. Because to think that this concept of hollowness matters is to think that parties consist of different components, goals, elements, dispositions toward party politics at specific times. That they’re not one thing that exists transexorically. And to kind of elucidate what that looks like and how it might add up to hollowness in our contemporary period led us to go back and see how at different points of time you get different combinations of those very elements all across history. And from that, we then identified recurring patterns. Continuities and traditions of approaches to party politics. Six of them in fact that we call party strands that recur across American history.
And in that sense, I do think as Danny has alluded to, it is useful to think not only of what’s happening over the last few decades in both parties, but also what the potential for improving our state, reforming the parties or reviving and renewing them to see lessons from the past, see elements from the past. It’s useful in part to think of the contemporary parties as not just coalitions of different factions or interests, but also coalitions or combinations of different approaches to party politics. So the contemporary Democratic Party contains within it a heavy dose of the policy reform strand that we say reached its apogee in the American north in the middle of the 20th century in the post-war era. A strand that is issue-oriented, oriented around programs and policy. It combines these days with a revived left faction. A radical strand that seeks to use the party form to achieve more transformational goals and you see that in past formations like the original Republican Party of the 1850s, the People’s Party of the late 19th century, the Socialist party of the early 20th century.
And then the important one, the accommodationist strand. The oldest and original strand of strong party building in American history that is the politics of give and take, of coalition building, of relatively non-programmatic or ideologically oriented approach to politics that reaches its apotheosis in 19th century urban party machines. But that kind of tendency is also a part of … And one that’s in more remission than we probably would like to see in the Democratic Party. And conversely, the Republican Party combines as it has for a long time, a pro-capital strand with a populist strand of politics. And how those interact and how much accommodationism informs how party coalition building is done at a given point has a lot to do with how dangerous or safe that Republican Party is for democracy.
Matt Grossmann: So Daniel, how about evaluating that Republican Party in its own terms by its own goals? I mean it seems like it’s obviously been an electorally successful party. It’s in control of lots of governments and it has in comparative terms been able to integrate elements of the right that are usually in third parties elsewhere without really moving on economics. So it represents the right and does so maybe more successfully than parties in other democracies. Isn’t that success?
Daniel Schlozman:
What is success for a party is not something that we want to define. Looking at parties over time as functions of historical projects and asking how they’re wielding state power and in whose interest does open up possibilities that does this party win elections and the more it wins elections, the more successful it is, which is obviously to a electorally oriented partisan, the first measure of success. It is also in a sense as understanding parties as instruments of democracy or not, not a very interesting way to think about them. And so yes, has the Republican Party won a bunch of elections over the past few decades? Yes. Moving on to more fertile ground on the right, which is how we see that party and a sense that in many ways its electoral success has come about at the same time as it has become a quite dangerous organization for democracy in many ways.
And this is broadly speaking, we are in the “continuity” rather than “disjuncture” theory of 2016 and Donald Trump, is the inner penetration of the mainstream and the extreme right going back to the early post-war period and the rise of the right and the 1970s being in our view and the ways that the right takes advantage of the end of the New Deal order and the advocacy exposure in that decade, a really critical period. And so it is non-party actors outside the formal party on the right who do so much to liberate the Republican Party, take away the Republican Party from the fetters of party in the sense of being back to the etymology partial seeing their own visions as necessarily limited, especially in recent years, even respecting the rules of the game.
And that is as a small D democratic party, rather less than successful. And this is the party that in 2020 does not issue a platform and just says that it pledges fealty to Donald Trump full stop. To see that as success as a party is really, really, really limited. And then there’s another puzzle which is somewhat less the puzzle of our book directly, which is why is it that that party’s been so successful? And in a lot of ways some of the things that are to a political scientist most dangerous in the interpenetration of the mainstream and extreme right turn out to be less electorally damaging than a lot of the most policy unpopular stuff in the high Paul Ryan period of let’s cut Social Security.
Matt Grossmann: Sam, you tell closer to the conventional story of party change that you’ve been involved in creating in the more recent period, but I was interested in how we have internal reforms in the Democratic Party that end up changing institutions and a conservative movement led campaign on the right both being part of our contemporary polarized parties. And it struck me that it happened very differently in the two parties and yet it happened the same. They copied one another to some extent. Why do we get that pattern?
Sam Rosenfeld: Yeah. As you allude to, we do think that the two stories that are kind of simultaneous, they’re occurring during a period of major political economic transformation coming out of the 1960s and a period of major political economic transformation in the 1970s. They are meaningfully different. There was certainly a strong dose of the anti-party strand that informed a lot of the activism culminating in the McGovern-Fraser reforms to party nominations on the democratic side that then kind of bled into the Republican side as well. But there was also, countering that, a real vision of building a different kind of strong permeable movement dominated party form coming out of those reforms. Whereas on the right, the emergence of outside conservative movement organizations seizing the commanding heights of the Republican Party by the 1970s, there’s a much more deeply mercenary approach to parties as institutions and building up any kind of strong party form.
But in terms of copy and emulation, on the one hand you get the story the Republicans of they go along in some cases, in the course of the 1970s and ’80s through the imposition of the primary system by democratic state legislators, but also in other cases through the kind of passive acceptance of this new institutional form for presidential nominations, given that this would be a system that itself is perfectly conducive to their kind of activism by movements and outside groups. In 1976, you see the fruits of that as soon as 1976 with Reagan’s very potent challenge to Gerald Ford.
Over time, the growth of both parties’ outside networks, what we call the party blobs, these vast array of outside entities of different kinds swarming around the two parties, that growth is incentivized in both parties by the same campaign finance system that the parties are living under after Buckley-Vileo, as well as cycles of competitive emulation that is itself a sort of dynamic of polarization. That you get on the right in the 1970s a set of institutions that are kind of self-consciously built in emulation of counterpart liberal groups, advocacy groups, think tanks, electoral outfits. There’s another cycle of emulation on the left in the early 2000s that again is very self-consciously a story of emulation. So once the conditions are set for the growth of ideologically driven outside party elements, polarization compels each side to be emulating the other.
Matt Grossmann: Daniel, you said you’re granting electoral success and moving on from that, but it seems like the parties are doing a lot more than that in their hollow mode. They’re still winning most primaries, especially at sub-presidential levels. They’re still obviously raising a lot of money. They’re producing party line voting in legislatures and congress that are approaching parliamentary type levels. They’re reaching national consensus to a degree that they hadn’t in the past. That’s a lot of check marks on what parties should be, isn’t it?
Daniel Schlozman: That’s the activity side and not the incapacity side. That is not the where did on the Republican side Donald Trump come from. And on the democratic side, the why is it that everybody seems … In fact, I was saying two answers ago, if the evidence for coordination is all this last minute scrambling stuff, can’t we do better than that. And it is putting more emphasis on the places where parties are both relatively stronger, especially inside legislative institutions, and saying less about the other things that have happened. This is the growth of what we call the party blob outside the formal parties.
That yes party committees are spending more, but their spending is dwarfed by power party institutions outside of formal democratic control. The conventions, the apex of national politics, are becoming weaker. And everything is party-like, but to claim that that is party or that parties are in turn expressing control over their own destiny is something rather different. And I think the Trump era Republican Party is only the most vivid … Trump-ified party is only the most vivid example of that. And that in turn, as we’ve been getting at, the Obama-Biden-Harris swarm on the democratic side is less an organized party politics than we have seen at lots of other points in American history, even if it is not as factionally riven or deeply divided a party as some people might imagine.
Matt Grossmann: Sam, as you’ve researched, some people wanted this system. Have they gotten what they wanted? Especially on the Republican side, seems like we assume maybe not, but the new right always included some cultural reactionaries and as you’ve illustrated, Trump was not always the turn that people think he was. So given the results, have they lost?
Sam Rosenfeld: Have the polarizers lost? Is that what you’re asking?
Matt Grossmann: Yeah. I mean it’s one thing to say we don’t think that the movements for change or we don’t support the movements for change, but I think it would be stronger to say they didn’t get even what they wanted.
Sam Rosenfeld: Yeah. Well, know E.E. Schattschneider didn’t get what he wanted. In terms of the kind of political scientists and thinkers mainly on the New Deal liberal side that wanted more what they called responsible, policy-oriented, programmatically distinct parties that offered voters choices, polarization has given them the choices and the decline of Tweedledee and Tweedledum. It’s not given them the robust organizational capacity that I think they expected out of that. When it comes to the actual issue-driven activists who did a lot of work to sort the system ideologically, we are, as Danny said, more continuityists than disjunctivists when it comes to thinking about Trump and the broader right. What he is distinctively new about in conservative politics is precisely some of the most dangerous elements as it relates to democracy itself. I mean the kind of strongman component of his domination of the party, his open thwarting of democratic norms and the rule of law is … It is a testament to how weakened that party has become, how much Trump has not suffered for that in his takeover of the party.
When it comes to programmatic questions, I do think generally speaking, the coalition of the populist strand and the pro-capital strand, that pluto-populist marriage in the Republican Party has remained strong over the course of the first Trump presidency. When it came to actual policy, what you got out of that presidency generally speaking was a giant corporate tax cut, very nearly rollback of the Medicaid expansion of the Affordable Care Act. All things in keeping with what the polarizers would’ve wanted. But I do think there’s enough of a question of … I don’t think the question is fully answered, how much of there a shoe that might drop on policy grounds with a second round of a Trump presidency that will be less dependent on an existing and now totally enfeebled and extinct wing of the party. When it comes to core economic issues of taxes and labor, those remain kind of untouchable.
The claim of populism and being a party of the working man is quite hollow when it comes to that. Not to double use our term there. But obviously immigration, trade, these are major issues with huge economic implications and you’ve seen major shifts. So if I were to interrogate my own evolution from the first book in which it was all about if the parties stand for programmatically distinct and cohesive things, there you go. The story is polarization. Trump helps signify the degree to which having parties that are really organizationally enfeebled lends itself to both a set of changes that are different from the dimension of just what the policies people stand for, but also some room for potentially a rapid transformation of what those programs and agendas might look like.
Matt Grossmann: Danny, you all have sort of a political economy take on the Democratic Party’s failure, but I wanted to ask you about it in comparative perspective a little bit because obviously lots of center-left parties haven’t been doing as well as the Democrats and the Democrats have managed to take in what would’ve been green and liberal parties elsewhere and what would’ve been more left-wing parties elsewhere. And you tell the story of the turn in the 1990s, but there’s been a lot of change since then. The Democratic Party agenda has managed to be enlarged to incorporate new cultural concerns and some of the economic policy proposals of the left. Isn’t it the world’s most successful center-left party?
Daniel Schlozman:
All right. We’re going to take the comparative side and then the democratic side, which are the two things you rolled together separately there. So comparatively, and this does get to the other success question you were asking, which is the United States is really, really unusual for having this pure duopoly and the pure duopoly that hasn’t broken. And therefore a lot of the same things that we see in US politics are manifested themselves in other rich democracies except inside the two parties rather than through party fragmentation. And so the decline of party organizations, the reorientation of center-left parties from traditionally working class constituencies to more culturally liberal constituencies, the interpenetration of mainstream and extreme right. Those are all familiar pieces of rich party politics. This is in brief the world of Peter Mayer ruling the void except in the US what we see is those happening inside the still pure duopoly.
And so both the Democratic and Republican parties at some level can claim quote success that they have kept duopolies and for all sorts of reasons. Starting with the Electoral College, we have not seen real party fragmentation or much more in the way of actual third-party activity than we’ve seen at lots of points in American history. Even as these same forces are oiling the parties, one of them now transitioned to where the Democrats going in a broad way. Yeah, it’s the same trends you see elsewhere. The Democrats have patched together, albeit not as successfully as one might have imagined them being able to do against a rather ragtag and often disorganized set of opponents, a transformed coalition. And there are in our view two different forces inside the transformation of the Democratic Party over the last four years that are usually examined separately and that it’s very helpful to examine together.
And the first is the ongoing … Very familiar to political science, the ongoing forces of sorting and polarization in which erstwhile liberal Republicans and erstwhile conservative Democrats realign to their ideological homes and so you do not have the kind of overlap in voting in Congress at all and in the mass public nearly, nearly to the same extent as you had 50 years ago. And that’s an ongoing process that goes on and on and on and on. The other one is the story of what, for lack of a better term, we’ll call neoliberalism. And that is the extent to which the influence of markets and making markets after 1980 and in a very special and not quite the same as neoliberal way, the Democratic Leadership Council as a party faction determined to root out Democrats’ support for radicalism of the ’60s and deep lines with labor unions in the 1980s and ’90s pushes the party toward the center. And that is a rise and fall story.
So in the 1980s and ’90s you have polarization and neoliberalism pushing in opposite directions. Since roughly 2000 we can date the immediate aftermath of the Iraq war in the mid 2000s when Democrats are trying to organize against Bush is kind of turning point there. Polarization has continued to work its inexorable logic even if Sam was just saying it in a somewhat different way than we might’ve expected at some point, even as the DLC goes into retreat and the neoliberal turn goes in opposite directions. And so as they’ve been moving together, you’ve got a party that is both uniformly more liberal and with a much stronger left flank than anything we might’ve seen 20 years ago. And so to see them together I think paints a much clearer portrait than just looking at polarization alone and you look at your DW nominate scores and you say, well, where did welfare reform come from?
Where did the positioning the Clinton administration come from? And it doesn’t give you a very good answer. And if you’re just looking at neoliberalism, then the ongoing shape of the party, you don’t really understand. And in particular what’s happened in the last decade, you really don’t an explanation for and seeing them together. And this is in some ways one of the advantages of a kind of book that is looking at slightly wider perspective than a lot of political science. Being able to connect big trends together does give you, we hope a better sense of where the Democrats have gone over four years.
Matt Grossmann: So there’s a long political science tradition of bemoaning the decline of civic organizations. You all aren’t quite in the pro-funny hat group coalition. I don’t know. But it does seem like there’s this longing for a system where the parties are more grounded in some type of organized mass involvement. Why is that and is that not just bemoaning inevitable historical change?
Sam Rosenfeld: Well, it might be the latter. Obviously, parties as civic organizations, our historical sweep can provide lots of examples and a textured sense of what it looked like when parties were robust and locally rooted civic organizations. Not just in the kind of heyday of the 19th century, but well into the 20th century in various places. But obviously, and we say in the book, the decline of parties of civic organizations is part and parcel of a broader story of civic decline in the US and reversing those trends is a tall order and I’m not sure if the last chapter of our book provides all the answers to it. But in terms of why we think it’s important, there is both a story here where it’s important … I think it makes parties more effective as parties to be locally rooted and civically vital in addition to it doing something important for democracy itself. Locally rooted, vibrant parties, you would expect them to have organizations that are on the ground and a part of communities. You expect them to provide a better sense of where people, where voters are in electoral terms, in terms of public opinion.
And so having a real presence in people’s communities should make for party organizations with better horse sense about what should be done, what should be said, what kinds of appeals to make and where. What you have these days is a vast, highly nationalized advocacy world that is attempting to, in very disorganized fashion set agendas for policymakers. And then it’s like individual elected officials, the people who actually do need to run for election that are often the one voicing caution or concern about what’s coming out of the advocacy world. Having formal party organizations that have as their goal winning elections, having them rooted in communities would be helpful for that.
Matt Grossmann: So you all cite this decline in people’s opinions of the parties and even their own party as evidence in the rise of negative partisanship. And you said that Schattschneider didn’t get his way, but he did in one sense, which is that the voters recognized the differences between the parties. We had a lot of people who were regularly voting for the party that they disagreed with on most things and we don’t have that as much anymore. We have a whole lot more people that recognize more differences between the parties and are voting along with their opinion. So if they like one better than the other, even if they’re not super fond of either, doesn’t that constitute progress?
Daniel Schlozman: These questions have I think a certain feel, which is you’re asking from the soup of mid-century politics, our clearer alternatives now with these two parties that dominate the political landscape and have clear identities, isn’t that actually pretty good? And the answer that we keep giving is some version of yes, we have these two clear alternatives, but there are ways that there’s a real downside to the kind of politics that they are practicing, not disputing the fact of what is to be said in their favor, and that we can imagine a world in which we have parties that are offering clear alternatives that are also better civically-rooted and democratic alternatives and that you can get those alternatives without erasing the things that aren’t just Tweedledee and Tweedledum since the 1950s.
Matt Grossmann: Danny, what about from the perspective of the interest groups affiliated with the parties? We recently saw the Republican convention discussion of the Teamsters president deciding to speak at the convention. There obviously have been people bemoaning that labor does not have a firmer position within the Democratic Party, but on the other hand, black voters have long complained that they’re too captured by the Democratic Party. So to what extent do interest groups need a firm organizational position within the parties rather than a credible threat to try to get support from each?
Daniel Schlozman: And this is a question back to my first book When Movements Anchor Parties, which was about the ways that groups can benefit from their place in the party coalition and develop longterm relationships over time that work to the benefit of both groups rather than just threatening at every point to leave and especially when that involves not particular benefits that they can dangle in front of both groups, but durable ideological transformation, the argument that book holds, and in turn that the Teamsters who have always been the most conservative union, endorsed Nixon, endorsed Reagan, white male, well-earning, not that well-educated membership that leans right, their behavior in no way contradicts the basic story about the bulk American labor. That I would say more generally that my journey from that book to this one is a journey from thinking about parties only in their intersection with social movements to thinking about all the different ways that actors can do party politics and having an appreciation for the wide variety of those, including the accommodation of strand and the virtues of … Not that it was always right and certainly the racism is there in many cases, but the practical day-to-day virtues of the political machine as parties work to solve people’s day-to-day problems.
And that from radicals inserting big ideas through policy, through accommodationism, a kind of practical view on the center that there are lots and lots of ways to do party politics and that in turn, this is a book to try to raise everyone’s sights and have everyone thinking about their places of which labor, inter-scoop social movements, the sort of stock-in-trade that I was talking about in the first book are an important part, but not the only part.
Matt Grossmann: Sam, I first heard this argument from you all a couple of weeks before the 2016 election, and I know you have been working both in social science but also talking to real-world practitioners. What is the capacity for change? Has it gotten any more likely in the last eight years?
Sam Rosenfeld: Yeah. One thing we say in the book, to get back to the comparative point, I do think there is more potential for renewal in the United States precisely because all political actors in the US are trapped in the two parties. There is no serious meaningful prospect for exit for institutional reasons that you see in a lot of multi-party systems facing some of the same pressures elsewhere and that means there’s always the potential to do something different with the two parties that people are stuck in. What we’ve encountered talking to practitioners to a certain extent is a real recognition that parties could be more effective organizations and it would be better for them to have stronger formal capacities, which says to us that our sense that there is in fact an electoral incentive for building up parties’ formal capacities because we think that it would make them become more effective electoral vehicles is something that you can convince people of.
One problem is convincing the very people and entities ensconced in the party blobs that spend all their time growing the party blobs to rethink their own place in this ecosystem and to think possibly that there are benefits to backing out of the process of just throwing more and more money into para-party organizations and to start thinking in terms of are there lanes to stay in and more reasons to think it would be in the collective best interests of your side to be building up a formal party. So that is both a dilemma but not something kind of insurmountable I think as we’re trying to get this argument out to people who form donor networks and are inclined to help build political institutions. As we said before, the broader story of the decline of face-to-face civic organizing in America is a huge one.
Parties are caught up in it and we think in bad ways and we point to some places where you can see counter examples, but it’s a much taller order to reverse that historical process. And we even acknowledge when it comes to the right, when it comes to the Republican Party in the 21st century, it’s even a taller order. One that will really I think require major political economic transformations to not only produce a civically robust and revitalized Republican Party, but one that is safe for democracy rather than a threat to it. You can identify in some very dangerous anti-democratic MAGA factions the potential for a lot of robust civic engagement and development, but that is not the kind of small D democratic political party we’re interested in seeing grow and develop. So it’s all a tall order.
Matt Grossmann: Danny, you highlight two distinct problems for the two parties, ineffectuality versus extremism, and talk about different potential solutions. Do they see it the same way you do and is there more hope for one than the other?
Daniel Schlozman: We have not done a survey of our conclusions with a representative sample from each party and in turn their views of what they think are going to be influenced by where we’re coming from. So with those caveats said, I think we’ve been … And are most Republicans going to share our indictment of the Republican Party? No. Have we been pleased with broadly, not just never Trump but genuinely conservatives who are never going to vote with us in a list of how they see the country’s problems, pleased that they see things in our broader diagnosis. Party blob, mainstream and extreme right. They see pieces of our diagnosis that ring true, even if they’re going to say that from a different point in the ideological spectrum, it’s not the same. But I think that that’s been gratifying that … Michael Hartman, that’s something called the Giving Review is a big in conservative philanthropy circles, wrote a much, much more praiseworthy take on the book than we had any reason to expect.
Sam Rosenfeld: And careful. He really read it.
Daniel Schlozman: Yeah. Yeah, no, it was everything an author wanted. And that’s not to say Republicans writ broad agree with us. It’s to say that we have tried our damnedest not only to get the facts right, but to see the world in ways that are not just going to get us on Rachel Maddow but will give some light as well as heat. And in turn, on the Democratic side, I think that there are people who basically think that if you have this take on the Republicans that is so negative, why is it that you’re not just cheerleaders and why are you so grumpy and why won’t you get with the program and even sort of stop kvetching. And I think that our aspirations for both parties and our, we hope deep, genuine affection for and belief in political parties as instruments of democracy will then give us the credence to make our claims and to be taken seriously with them and to have people recognize that there are pieces of our analysis that will ring true even if they’re not going to buy it on both sides in every way.
And in turn, if everyone bought everything, then in a sense we wouldn’t have said anything that was in any way worth saying because then it would’ve all been obvious. And so we’ve tried to be helpful and reasonable to have people meet us where they live, but in turn recognize that not everyone’s going to buy everything. And that’s as it should be, because if everyone bought everything then what would we have to say?
Matt Grossmann: Sam, anything you want to tout about what you’re working on now or anything we didn’t get to?
Sam Rosenfeld: What am I working on now? I’ve been off campus for a year or so. I’m working on getting my head screwed on straight and belatedly ordering books for class. I will say down the line, it’s still just a twinkle in my eye, but I’ve long thought that in keeping in reflection of the institutional history of our formal parties in the US, the archival record of the National Party Committees spanning their whole existence is incredibly fragmented. It is scattered across individual chairmen’s personal manuscript collections in all sorts of states. A bunch of it’s in different presidential libraries and national archives. Some of it’s in party commissions, etc. It’s all in very kind of unprocessed form. And I think it would be useful for scholars of all different kinds to get as much of that in one place digitized as possible. So that’s something I anticipate sinking my teeth into in the near future.
Daniel Schlozman: And I have some notion that between a literature in American political development that doesn’t pay much political attention to political economy and a burgeoning literature in history of capitalism, that totally ignores politics, that there’s something interesting to say, but what exactly that something is is, again, twinkle in eye.
Matt Grossmann: Okay, I’ll ask one more question. Doesn’t your history suggest that the parties listening to outsiders and reforming themselves along the lines of what academics and activists think they should be like is actually the source of failure, not success?
Sam Rosenfeld: Danny can weigh in as he sees fit. I feel like we share an affinity, broadly speaking, with the thrust of a lot of what the so-called new political realists or political scientists and law professors and journalists, people like Ray LaRajah and Jonathan Rausch and Nate Persily, have talked about in criticizing the kind of reformist tradition and particularly criticizing the anti-party tendencies of reformers and we agree with them. I think we have a little bit more in that sense. We resist nostalgia. We see no golden age of party politics in any period precisely because we think of parties in lots of different dimensions and in their historical circumstances we see huge problems all throughout American history. We see that reformers up to and including McGovern-Fraser reformers had completely legitimate reasons in spades for their criticisms of existing systems. So it’s a little bit more of a tragic sense of what the consequences of certain kinds of reform tendencies ended up producing.
But more broadly speaking, as Danny’s alluded to, if there’s one thing I came away from this whole project with a newfound appreciation for is precisely the significance and the virtues of accommodationist politics, which is kind of the antithesis of reform politics. That is an important, vital part of democratic party politics. Small D democratic party politics. And the degree to which accommodationism has gone into abeyance in the last few decades in both parties in different ways is one that I think helps account for a lot of what we find really problematic in contemporary politics and is precisely the kind of stuff that isn’t … It’s not things that new procedural reforms are going to fix. Quite the contrary.
Daniel Schlozman: On the one hand to the new political realists, we want to raise their sights that their celebration of bygone corruption is not a great way to take the public that is already party skeptical and make them happier. But to say that George Norcross is the dream of what everybody should be hoping for in a political party, that’s just blatant corruption and we are … White-collar crime bad.
Sam Rosenfeld: We’re not saying any new political realist is celebrating George Norcross, but just making the argument.
Daniel Schlozman: Take the argument to the extreme and where you end up is a pro Norcross place that we want to say, hold on, wait a second. Let’s not let your train run all the way down those tracks and to see that there’s more to the virtues of party than would lead you to do Norcrossdom. But on the other hand, maybe we’re trying to give ourselves some undue credit here, it is also a claim to reformers of whom there are many, and various Plebiscitarian, voters should decide everything, the role of parties is to be cheerleaders for their candidates not to get out of the way, above all, when my preferred candidate doesn’t win, is to see their virtues as parties and that every bit as much as we are telling hardcore realists to raise their sights, we are also telling anti-party folks, but even reformers who are always suspicious of inside deals and whatnot, that in fact parties do have the virtues.
And that is not to say that there’s some magic mean. The whole point of multiple traditions is that these will always be with us, but that there are ways to be productive and to be pro-party and to act in ways that are going to help the longterm cause of democracy, wherever your politics are, and that it is in a sense to see those multiple kinds of possibilities rather than a single magic dial that is parties should be exactly this strong and then we’ll get exactly our substantive positions that we concluded from the book was how we could be useful in the cause of democracy.
Matt Grossmann: There’s a lot more to learn. The Science of Politics is available bi-weekly from the Niskanen Center, and I’m your host, Matt Grossman. If you like this discussion, here are the episodes you should check out next, all linked on our website. How to build institutions, not political hobbies. Congressional primaries, how the parties fight insurgents. How campaign money changes elections before and after Citizens United. Are the Democratic or Republican parties becoming more similar or different, and how parties recruit and limit candidates. Thanks to Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld for joining me. Please check out The Hollow Parties and then listen in next time.