The Hollow Parties

The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics

By: Daniel Schlozman, Sam Rosenfeld

Narrated by: Tom Beyer

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.

©2024 Princeton University Press (P)2024 Tantor

Too arcane

The Republican party has allowed itself to be dominated by minority special interest factions, while the Democrats have created a system unable to elect people at the grass roots level. These authors say they know how this happened, how the party system as changed throughout history, but they have made understanding their insights difficult due to their choice of words. A nickel's worth of ideas are explained using a twenty five dollar vocabulary often obscuring the ideas.

The narration...

Okay content, but the narration is brutal. Whoever told the narrator to use a bad French accent for Tocqueville should be fired. The non-accented narration is little better, unfortunately. The central theme of the book is that parties are too weak and that prevents effective politics. I can see that view (certain candidates would have been prevented if the Republican party was stronger), but it seems too rosy on the possibility that parties won't be captured by their elites, be they party bosses or powerful donors. Grass is always greener, I suppose.

Brilliant history and analysis of US political parties

As someone who led a state party for six years, I found this fascinating -- and can vouch for much of the authors' argument. A critical and often almost totally overlooked engine of American politics.