Political parties in the United States were once real organizations. They were the vehicle that funneled people into political engagement and served as the forum to iron out policy disagreements and set governing priorities. Those days are as obsolete as the torchlight parades that the early Republican Party held throughout the country to rally support for Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Instead, the parties now exist mostly as mere legal vehicles that allow politicians to move money around and obtain ballot access. In their new book, The Hollow Parties, Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld try to diagnose how this happened and figure out what can be done to make political parties, if not great again, simply meaningful again.
The book serves as both a history of American political parties and an argument that their deterioration has done untold damage to the U.S., particularly that of the Republican Party. It mourns that both parties have become hollow, which is defined as “distinctive combination of activity and incapacity manifesting themselves across multiple dimensions.” Instead of being “real political actors with particular claims and commitments,” they simply function as “mere abstract markers of identity.”
Although both Schlozman and Rosenfeld are self-professed “left liberals” (as tenured professors of political science at prestigious universities, this is close to a statistical certainty), they offer an interesting and nuanced perspective on how the GOP has become the party of Donald Trump in recent years. For them, the path to Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party began in the 1970s with the rise of the New Right, which systematically usurped the functions of the Republican National Committee and left the national party a mere vessel for activists. The authors look back to the late 1960s as a model for the Republican Party, when former RNC Chairman Ray Bliss used the techniques he mastered organizing the stolid conservative burghers of his native Ohio to help elect Richard Nixon and whittle away at Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress. This contrasts with the decentralized politics of the Right at present, where outside organizations increasingly take over the functions of the party and well-funded outside groups like Turning Point USA and Club for Growth increasingly take on the roles once reserved for party leaders.
The trend is by no means limited to Republicans. Democrats have drifted into a similar crisis with the rise in influence of “the groups,” the array of single-issue advocacy organizations that have emphasized the priorities of the white college-educated liberals who have become a vital part of the Democratic base. The result, Schlozman and Rosenfeld argue, is that “the politics of work and wages has continued to get short shrift relative to the cultural and political-reform initiatives that capture donors’ imaginations.”
The question of course is why anyone should care. After all, whether voter registration is handled by Turning Point USA or the RNC seems to be a trivia item for the small minority of political obsessives and Washington insiders who know operatives by name and read Politico Playbook over their morning coffee. But there is a real difference between an America with strong political parties and one without them. In part, it is that party organizations have some level of democratic accountability. The current system almost entirely severs the connection the ordinary party member (and primary voter) has with the national party. After all, someone did elect Lara Trump, unlike Charlie Kirk. Even in the heyday of political bosses, there was at least a veneer of democratic legitimacy. Boss Tweed or Mayor Daley had to make sure that aspiring city workers got jobs, loyal voters got Thanksgiving turkeys, and potholes were fixed. As corrupt as an old-fashioned machine was, it depended on more than the largesse of donors. A local precinct chair has a hard but not impossible time influencing the national party but has no say with an outside group at all.
Schlozman and Rosenfeld show no nostalgia for the machine era of politics, but they do see sprigs of promise on the horizon. In particular, they laud the Nevada Democratic Party, which, under the leadership of the late Harry Reid, became a formidable political machine that combined full-time professional operatives with the organizing powers of the Culinary Workers Union in Las Vegas. Yet even here, there is a note of caution over the two years between 2021-2023 when far-left acolytes of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) briefly took over the Nevada Democratic Party and the Reid Machine had to set up an operation in exile. After all, any level of democratic accountability inherently leads to a certain amount of messiness.
But that messiness also builds a community. Political parties serve important roles at local and state levels, and revitalizing those functions leads to better, more rational politics. They empower the activists who are concerned about recruiting state legislative candidates and putting on soup suppers rather than those who sit in front of cable news incessantly and use small-dollar donations as an emotional outlet rather than a rational investment. Thriving political parties diminish the role of big donors motivated by ideological whim or self-interest and the operative class that profits off of them. Rejuvenating the parties would give more influence to average people in both parties who want to achieve concrete political goals in their city and their state. Not even the authors of The Hollow Parties would make the case that robust political parties would magically cure all of the ailments plaguing American democracy in the 2020s. But in a moment when the misconception that there are two overly powerful political parties is too broadly held, their book does provide a convincing and detailed counterargument that stronger parties would lead to a stronger political system.
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Ben Jacobs is a political reporter in Washington, D.C.
