Know Your Enemy: What Happened to America’s Political Parties?

Know Your Enemy: What Happened to America’s Political Parties?

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.

Know Your Enemy is a podcast about the American right co-hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Read more about it here. You can subscribe to, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher, and receive bonus content by supporting the podcast on Patreon.

Why are American political parties so ineffectual? Why do they simultaneously seem so frantically active and so constitutionally incapable of achieving specific goals? Why have the Democrats tended to seem listless, uncertain of their ideological identity, while the Republicans are increasingly dominated by a radical fringe more interested in becoming famous than in governing?

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. They argue that much of the discord, dysfunction, and democratic deficit that characterize contemporary politics can be attributed to the “hollowing out” of American political parties—a process that 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. 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”) that are both unaccountable and parasitic on the party’s aims; and they lack 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?

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Further Reading:

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)