Why Are Political Parties So Much Weaker Than They Once Were?
In 2016 and 2020, the runner-up for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bernie Sanders, was not a Democrat. In 2024, despite the president’s weakness in the polls, no viable Democratic alternative emerged. In 2016, the Republican Party nominated a man who had flitted between party registrations, flirted with running on a Reform Party ticket, and had a libertine history and liberal positions on entitlements and trade unimaginable for a GOP nominee as recently as 2012. In 2020, the GOP didn’t bother to write a party platform, and this year, the party of Abraham Lincoln will nominate a candidate who led an insurrection against the federal government.
For an era characterized by intense partisanship, political parties are noticeably weak. Politics is often described as trench warfare between two evenly matched armies, red and blue, with victory decided by handfuls of voters in half a dozen swing states. Yet, as Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld argue in The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics, “for all that activity, political parties neither set the terms for nor control the passions of our unruly politics.” They are “seemingly everywhere and nowhere, overbearing and enfeebled, all at once.” When parties don’t do their job of ordering political conflict, the political system and, ultimately, our democracy suffer. The hollowness of our parties matters, say Schlozman and Rosenfeld, because parties matter.
By making this argument, Schlozman and Rosenfeld reveal their biases as political scientists (which may be the only sub-faction that cares about parties). In this engaging although, at times, dense book, Schlozman and Rosenfeld (they teach at Johns Hopkins and Colgate universities, respectively) hope to change that by taking readers on a journey of party degeneration from Martin Van Buren (“the Little Magician” who built the first American mass political party) to Ray Bliss, the Ohio operative, who rebuilt the Republican Party after Barry Goldwater’s landslide loss in 1964, Al From who founded the centrist Democratic Leadership Council in the 1980s, the Tea Party, and Donald Trump.
Refreshingly, the two scholars are upfront about their other biases: “We are partisans of parties,” and “We are proud and loyal, albeit often-disillusioned, capital-D Democrats. Our politics are broadly left-liberal.” But this disclaimer, however welcome, signals a flaw in their analysis, a nostalgia for a postwar political era that would take a high priest—not a tenured professor—to resurrect. This, in turn, makes their prescriptions for party renewal more prayer than proposal.
Parties, as we are taught in Poli Sci 101, link the governed with the government, “schooling citizens in the unending give-and-take of political engagement.” Parties bring competing blocs of voters together, ordering political conflict and repelling those that seek to undermine democracy and cohesion. Aware that this book may have readers outside the academy, the authors put the hard-core political science in an appendix and instead serve up a fast-paced, party-centered history of America, which includes Jacksonian Democrats, the cause-driven Whigs, Lincoln’s “Free labor” Republicans,” the Gilded Age’s Second Party system, and the New Deal Democrats, which, despite its problems, exemplifies for the authors politics at its best.
Simplistically, on one side stood the Democrats, who represent the working class and are committed to using federal power to improve its condition. On the other were the Republicans representing “capital”—businesses large and small—who initially battled the New Deal and then, by the 1950s, reconciled themselves to it. Both sides found common ground when possible. As the political scientist Samuel Lubell put it, Democrats, as the majority, set the terms of political debate and were the “sun.” In contrast, minority Republicans were the “moon” reflecting and, at times, refracting its radiance.
A vast amount of literature on “party decline” chronicles how everything changed in the 1960s and 1970s. It’s at this point that there is a rise of “purposive” activists—those who pursue non-material goals such as a cleaner environment, civil rights, more religion in public life, or an end to legal abortion. How the two parties reacted to their activists, according to Schlozman and Rosenfeld, led to their decline and decrepitude. Democrats were “rendered listless by conflicting actors” and the lack of a “collective project.” Their hollowness, write Schlozman and Rosenfeld, manifests as “ineffectuality.” Republicans, in contrast, stoke conflict along these lines; they have no “guardrails;” and, over the decades, are “pulled to radicalism by committed actors.” making their hollowness one of “extremism.”
On both sides, activists centered their work on extra-party organizations—think of People for the American Way or Young Americans for Freedom. With changes in campaign finance and the media drawn to activists instead of operatives, a “party blob” emerged—the constellation of interest groups, donors, and advocacy organizations that put their issues ahead of the party’s interests and success.
Schlozman and Rosenfeld are particularly agitated by how “modern conservatism hollowed out the American party system,” with the “lodestar of the New Right politics remain[ing] the take-no-prisoners-exploitation of grievance and status resentment.” In almost conspiratorial tones, they highlight the John Birch Society, racists, and evangelical Christians who brawled their way into Republican politics. To them, the rise of Trump and MAGA populism is a natural—and horrifying—endpoint of this evolution.
This is where the authors’ stated biases cloud their analysis. A more generous reading of the 1964 to 1992 period could have told the story of a resurgent GOP from the nadir of the Lyndon Johnson landslide—how a party not just rebuilt itself institutionally but also developed a conservative philosophy, political strategy, and widening coalition to go with it.
GOP leaders recognized that cultural-national cleavages could build a majority. An autoworker in Michigan may like the Democrats on economics, but on defense, feminism, and race, he preferred the Republicans. Schlozman and Rosenfeld see this as unseemly, but it does not diminish that cultural issues are real. One person’s politics of resentment is another’s sticking-up-for-me. Four years after suffering a resounding defeat in the 1964 presidential election, the GOP ushered in a quarter-century of presidential electoral dominance. Schlozman and Rosenfeld may not think highly of this conservative Republican Party. Neither do I. Still, it does not take away from the fact that there was a vision, an agenda, and a majority coalition that enthusiastically supported it.
At the same time, that hypothetical autoworker by the turn of the 21st century may not have liked how the Democratic Party shifted on economics—embracing free trade and deficit reduction in the 1990s. Schlozman and Rosenfeld see this as a betrayal of what the Democratic Party should stand for, a betrayal motivated by the deep-pocketed donors of the “party blob.” Putting aside the policy merits of these stances, in a world where the number of educated, professional-class voters is growing and are repelled by the GOP’s turn to the right on cultural-national issues, those voters were also for the taking. Again, the authors may not like that Democrats gained in affluent suburbs while losing voters in working-class cities and towns, but the party behaved rationally.
Schlozman and Rosenfeld are delighted that Joe Biden’s policies are to the left of his two Democratic predecessors, but they lament the party’s “combination of activity and incapacity that characterizes hollowness hindered their ability to solve coordination problems, set an agenda, and decide whose ox would get gored.” As a result, they sigh, “hopes to…build a latter-day [Franklin] Rooseveltian majority remained unfulfilled in the Biden years.”
Part of this was due to the makeup of the Democrats’ “party blob,” which embraced “radical chic advocacy rather than nuts-and-bolts activism” and was unwilling or unable to win working-class support.
The Democratic solution, they say, is to invest continually in “grassroots outreach” rooted in the concerns of working people. To illustrate this, they spend a chapter detailing the rise of the “Reid machine” in Nevada—an effort by the late Senator Harry Reid to work alongside the culinary and hospitality unions in booming Las Vegas to flip this once-reliably Republican state.
While there is much to commend Reid, pinning a party’s hopes on the revival of American labor seems nostalgic at best and suicidal at worst. Despite high-profile organizing wins over the past few years, union membership is abysmally low—just 10 percent of the workforce, down from a high of one-third in 1950, to say nothing of how the makeup of union membership has changed since the halcyon days of FDR and Harry S Truman.
To be fair, the authors note that the “obstacles are daunting” when it comes to rebuilding a Democratic grassroots—but that’s an understatement. Party membership historically has been a thin commitment. There are no dues or membership forms. Becoming a Democrat or a Republican entails self-identifying on a voter registration form, and in some states, not even that.
Moreover, as detailed in study after study, civic life is on life support. Americans aren’t just “bowling alone;” they aren’t even making it to the alley. In 2021, for example, church membership dipped below 50 percent for the first time, a 20-point drop from the turn of this century. Zero in on participation in political life, and the numbers are more depressing. According to the seminal American National Election Studies at the University of Michigan, in 2020, just 3.1 percent of Americans said they worked for a party or candidate, 5.5 percent attended a “political meeting,” and 17.2 percent reported wearing a political button or putting a sticker on their car. Moreover, these numbers have not significantly deviated over the past 50 years. Despite what you may read in your Twitter feed, most Americans are tuned out of politics.
On the other side of the aisle, Schlozman and Rosenfeld want a Republican Party that is “safe for democracy,” respecting democratic processes and norms. They, too, want a GOP rooted in local communities (but in other parts of their book, they were alarmed when the Republicans did just that through evangelical churches and gun clubs). They seek a revival of the “practical center-right accommodationism” of Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney, rooted in the Rotary Clubs and country clubs of middle America that made peace with whatever the Democrats offered.
I, too, would love to return to that politics. But reviving a 60-year-old strain of Republicanism is as likely as bringing back the Edsel and rotary phone. American politics is not going to be saved by going back to the future.
Yes, as Schlozman and Rosenfeld note, some institutional changes are needed to bolster parties as gatekeepers—including more closed primaries and more elected officials’ participation in the presidential nominating process (aka the unfairly reviled superdelegates). And resounding Democratic victories that defeat Trump in November and MAGA candidates in years to come would help bring American politics—and democracy—back from the brink.
But that would require Democrats to win back working-class or non-college-educated voters not to FDR levels but to Barack Obama-era levels. Relying on labor unions to reconstitute the Democratic grassroots and change the party, however, is wishful thinking.
Instead, Democrats need to wrestle with Trumpism, not as a fluke or the result of a conspiracy, domestic or foreign, but as an appeal to working-class voters on issues about which they care deeply, such as trade, high prices, immigration, and crime. Schlozman and Rosenfeld are correct: the party needs to fill its hollow core with working-class voters, not just the highly educated. But that won’t happen until Democrats meet those voters where they are, respect their concerns, and speak to their needs.
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