The News
Who loves political parties? Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld do. In “The Hollow Parties,” the two academics defend the tradition of official party-building in America, tracing the rise and fall of different factions and crediting partisan organizing with social cohesion. When parties are weak — as many people want them to be now — Americans aren’t very happy with the disorganized politics that floods into the gap. The authors talked with Americana about their research this week, and this is an edited transcript of the conversation.
Q&A
Americana: You write that it’s “better to build robust parties than to leave to hollow shells and unaccountable actors the task of containing the furies of the age.”
Sam Rosenfeld: One answer is that it was a hollow party, the pre-Trump Republican Party, that left the wolf in the barn in 2016. The bigger picture defense of parties is that there is no substitute for them as institutions attempting to mobilize people, to get people into power, and then to organize collectively so that the choices people make at the ballot box are meaningful.
Americana: You write about the celebrations and fraternity of the early parties, and I’ve encountered a lot of that with the MAGA movement — boat parades, flag-waving, caravans. Hasn’t Trump imbued Republicans with the sense of belonging and accomplishment that strong parties should have?
Daniel Schlozman: This is the monkey’s paw of our time. I don’t think that anybody who’s serious about democratic revival can ignore that. Parties ought to be grounded in distinctive civic commitments. Republicans have done a better job, in the Trump Era, in making politics fun for partisans. But they’ve done nothing whatsoever to make those into civic commitments.
Americana: How much is the health of parties limited by campaign finance law and precedent — by decades of decisions that have created super PACs, created nonprofits that can build their own organizations outside parties?
Sam Rosenfeld: Buckley v. Valeo sets in motion this channeling of money and resources outside of the formal parties, which gets accelerated with Citizens United. At the same time, you have the explosion of small dollar donations through the internet — you have a surge of both soft money outside of the parties and hard money for them. It’s an era of abundance for political donations.
Daniel Schlozman: There are a lot of lawyers whose take on the campaign finance guts of the party system is the same as ours. But they can miss the forest for the trees. What are the civic roles of parties? What are the possibilities for projects that inspire meaningful democratic passion? Just fixing the sluicegate so that money goes to the right place seems rather myopic.
Americana: One thing I hear from people who want to blow up the party system is that the next generation wants out of it. Look at how few people under 40 want to identify with either party. You cover all of American history here, so I’m wondering; is that new? Is that a significant trend?
Daniel Schlozman: That people develop their party identification, and it thickens through life, is a standard story. Thirty years ago, you saw Rock the Vote people making essentially the same argument — young people weren’t going to be affiliated with the parties, they’re done with that. And here we are, living with heightened polarization.
Sam Rosenfeld: There’s a rise in non-party identification from the late 1960s, but the standard retort is: Look at actual voting behavior. The vast majority of self-identified independents are reliable partisans. They’re polarized as much as everybody else. But even as they’re motivated by intensely negative feelings about the other side, they don’t have a real sense of legitimacy or commitment or loyalty to their own side.
Americana: You write about the role newspaper editors had in party politics in the 19th century, and I wonder where you see that — the media’s influence on parties — going now. We’ve basically got a mainstream media that bemoans polarization, and ideological media, set against that, that has big influence in what the parties do.
Daniel Schlozman: In the 19th century, the media, the partisan press, is enmeshed in other parts of the political system. They’re taking messages that are given to them by politicians and sending them out. They are more like press secretaries than like what contemporary ideological media think of itself as doing.
Sam Rosenfeld: Right-wing media now is partisan in a way that looks like the 19th century, but it’s motivated by its own incentives that aren’t about building an electoral project for the Republican Party to take power and do specific things with it. At the start of the party system, it would have been inconceivable to see what you’ve seen a fair amount of in the Republican Party recently — politicians deciding that being in elected office is boring, not where the action is, and becoming media celebrities instead.
Americana: One of the Trump campaign’s premises is that, if it wins, he’ll replace thousands of civil servants with partisans; it might be in some peoples’ interest to show their colors in conservative media. If that’s successful, what does it mean for the relevance of parties, which were stronger when there was a “spoils system?”
Daniel Schlozman: Most 19th century patronage jobs, at the customs house or the post office, are less ideologically charged than the EPA of the 2020s. The rolling back of the federal civil service is not about expanding party power; it’s in the service of a kind of presidentialism, saying that the president gets to decide his own people.
I don’t think that’s a great idea. But for liberals who have been clutching on to the idea that the deep state is our friend, I think this book might be a bit of a provocation. If you believe that democratic majorities should govern, and parties should be able to enact their visions, that the decline of that has real deleterious consequences. Look at the rise of the security state during and after the Cold War.
Sam Rosenfeld: We don’t endorse Project 2025, but the answer to it has to be a more robust, small d, Democratic Party politics. There’s something democratically impoverished about seeking redress in the deep state civil service. That’s a fundamental abdication of what a party project ought to be.
