Overview

America's political parties are hollow shells of what they could be, locked in a polarized struggle for power and unrooted as civic organizations. The Hollow Parties takes listeners from the rise of mass party politics in the Jacksonian era through the years of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Today's parties, overbearing and ineffectual, have emerged from the interplay of multiple party traditions that reach back to the Founding. Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld paint unforgettable portraits of figures such as Martin Van Buren, whose pioneering Democrats invented the machinery of the mass political party, and Abraham Lincoln and other heroic Republicans of that party's first generation who stood up to the Slave Power. And they show how today's fractious party politics arose from the ashes of the New Deal order in the 1970s. Activists in the wake of the 1968 Democratic National Convention transformed presidential nominations but failed to lay the foundations for robust, movement-driven parties. Instead, modern American conservatism hollowed out the party system. Party hollowness lies at the heart of our democratic discontents. With historical sweep and political acuity, The Hollow Parties offers answers to pressing questions about how the nation's parties became so dysfunctional--and how they might yet realize their promise.

Full Product Details

9798874778767

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Daniel Schlozman is a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University. His book, When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History, was published in 2015 by Princeton University Press. The book emphasizes the crucial role in American party development of alliance between political parties and social movements. He coauthored The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics with Sam Rosenfeld, which will be published by Princeton University Press in spring 2024. He is currently working on a book about the relationship between financialization and center-left parties in the United States and the United Kingdom since the 1970s. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland (buy seafood at Faidley's) and Chilmark, Massachusetts (buy seafood at Larsen's). Sam Rosenfeld is an associate professor of political science at Colgate University, specializing in party politics and American political development. His research interests include the history of political parties, the intersection of social movements and formal politics, and the politics of social and economic policymaking. His first book, The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era (University of Chicago Press, 2018), offers an intellectual and institutional history of party polarization in the postwar United States. His second book, coauthored with Daniel Schlozman of Johns Hopkins University, is titled The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics. Forthcoming in May 2024 from Princeton University Press, The Hollow Parties tracks party development in the United States since the Founding to account for our contemporary political discontents. His writing has also appeared in the American Prospect, Boston Review, Democracy, n+1, the New Republic, the New York Times, Politico, the Washington Post, and Vox. Tom Beyer is a character actor who has appeared in over 100 TV shows, films, and commercials; has performed in innumerable plays and musicals; and has narrated many audiobooks. Grown in New York, fermented in Seattle, and aged in Los Angeles, his passions include Shakespeare, reading, intense physical exercise, and animal rescue. He has won awards for his stage work as both an actor and a director, and has adapted classical literature for the theater. He believes strongly in civic engagement, and volunteers for multiple organizations.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available