Political parties in the United States were again real businesses. They were the car that enticed people to speak out against policies divergences and establish governing interests. The moonlight parades that the first Republican Party held throughout the nation in 1860 are as old as those that were. Otherwise, the parties then largely function as empty legal vehicles that let politicians move money around and get poll access. In their new publication,  , The Hollow Parties, Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld try to analyze how this happened and figure out what can be done to produce political parties, if not excellent again, just significant afterwards.
The guide serves as both a history of American political events and a defense of the claim that their decline has caused the United States, especially the Republican Party, incalculable harm. It laments that both parties have fallen into disarray, which is described as a “distinctive combination of exercise and incompetence manifesting themselves across many dimensions.” They just serve as “mere philosophical markers of identity” rather than “real social actors with specific claims and commitments.”
Although both Schlozman and Rosenfeld profess to be self-professed “left liberals,” which is a statistical certainty given that they are tenured social science professors at prominent universities, they provide an intriguing and nuanced analysis of how the GOP has evolved over the past few years into Donald Trump’s party. For them, the way to Trump’s resurgence of the Republican Party began in the 1970s with the increase of the New Right, which carefully resented the Republican National Committee‘s features and made the gathering a merely a tool for protesters. The authors trace their success to the late 1960s, when past RNC Chairman Ray Bliss organized Richard Nixon and defeated Democratic majority in both chambers of Congress with methods he learned from his local Ohio. This contrasts with the Right’s distributed politicians of the moment, when well-funded outside companies increasingly assume the party’s responsibilities and become well-funded companies like Turning Point USA and Club for Growth extremely assume the roles that were once tasked with group leaders.
The tendency is by no means limited to Democrats. Democrats have experienced a similar crisis as a result of the rise in the influence of” the groups,” a number of single-issue advocacy groups that have focused on the needs of the white college-educated liberals who have come to be a significant part of the Democratic base. The effect, Schlozman and Rosenfeld argue, is that ,” the politics of job and income has continued to get short shrift equivalent to the cultural and political- reform efforts that get donors ‘ imaginations”.
Naturally, the question is: Why should anyone be concerned? After all, whether Turning Point USA or the RNC handle voter registration seems trivial for the small minority of political obsessives and Washington insiders who are familiar with the operation and enjoy reading the Politico Playbook over their morning coffee. There is a clear distinction between an America with strong political parties and one without them, though. In part, it is that party organizations have some level of democratic accountability. The primary voter and a member of the regular party are almost entirely disconnected from the national party by the current system. 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. Potholes were fixed, as well as aspiring city workers received jobs, loyal voters received Thanksgiving turkeys, and bosses Tweed or Mayor Daley had to make sure that. An old-fashioned machine was corrupt, but it lacked the support of more than just the largesse of donors. A local precinct chair has a difficult but manageable time influencing the national party, but he has no influence over an organization outside of his or her control.  ,
Schlozman and Rosenfeld show no nostalgia for the political machine era, but they do see some promising signs emerging from the horizon. They praise the Nevada Democratic Party in particular for developing into a formidable political force that combined full-time professional members with the organizing abilities of the Las Vegas Culinary Workers Union. Even in this situation, there is a tip of caution between 2021 and 2023, when the Reid Machine’s far-left allyies briefly took control of the Nevada Democratic Party and set up an operation in exile. After all, any level of democratic accountability inherently causes a certain degree of messiness.  ,
But that messiness also builds a community. Political parties play significant roles at the local and state levels, and revitalizing those positions leads to more logical political thinking. Instead of the activists who sit in front of cable news constantly and use small-dollar donations as an emotional outlet as opposed to a rational investment, they empower those who are concerned about recruiting state legislative candidates and staging soup dinners. The operative class that makes money off of big donors motivated by ideological whims or self-interest and the operative class are diminished by the winning political parties. If the parties were revived, average people in both parties would have more influence over those who want to have concrete political objectives in their city and state. Even the authors of The Hollow Parties  would argue that strong political parties could magically treat all of the problems that American democracy faces in the 2020s. Their book does offer a convincing and in-depth counterargument that stronger parties would result in a stronger political system, even when the myth that there are two overly powerful political parties is too widely held.
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Ben Jacobs is a political reporter in Washington, D. C.
