America’s founders deeply mistrusted political parties. James Madison decried “the mischief of faction” while George Washington, in his farewell address, warned that “the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension” might lead to despotism. But the disunity that Washington warned that parties would bring has always been present in America, and still is. What political parties can do at their best is to make disunity manageable by facilitating compromise and preventing political conflict from turning into violence.
Sam Rosenfeld (an associate professor of political science at Colgate University) and Daniel Schlozman (an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University) have together written the new book The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics. It is, essentially, a historical narrative of American politics as told through its parties, using the techniques of social science. Schlozman and Rosenfeld argue that American parties historically had been highly successful at organizing political choices and political conflict, and providing a way of organizing collective action toward collective goals.
But in recent decades, they assert, both the Republican and Democratic parties have become hollow: unable to organize themselves internally (in terms of making party decisions) or externally (in terms of shaping conflict in the broader political arena). They have lost critical core functions — including voter mobilization, fundraising, ideological advocacy, and agenda setting — to para-party organizations that Schlozman and Rosenfeld term “the party blob.” So even as political polarization has in many ways reinforced Americans’ partisan identities and strengthened party leaders’ command over rank-and-file legislators, the parties have become less and less capable of fulfilling their proper functions.
In this podcast discussion, Schlozman and Rosenfeld discuss how the hollowing-out of the Republican Party has made it vulnerable to Donald Trump’s hostile populist takeover; the stronger party establishment of decades past did a better job of erecting guardrails against right-wing extremism and would have prevented the party’s nomination from going to a personalist leader like Trump. A similar process of hollowing-out in the Democratic Party has rendered it largely ineffectual in important ways; it has become what Schlozman describes as “a party that has been less than the sum of its parts and that has been unable to figure out its post-New Deal purpose.” But the two authors describe ways that party politics have strengthened the American experiment in the past and hold out hope for party renewal in the future.
Transcript
Sam Rosenfeld: The blobs act in ways that actually stoke incapacity more than they are a modern, efficient way of getting a lot done. And they end up, we argue, exerting a drag on people’s positive trust and loyalty to the parties — because most of the time, people aren’t actually interacting with the parties.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice for the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. And I’m delighted to be joined today by Daniel Schlozman, who’s an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and Sam Rosenfeld, who’s an associate professor of political science at Colgate University. And they are the co-authors of an important new book from Princeton University Press, which is entitled The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics. Welcome, Daniel and Sam!
Sam Rosenfeld: Happy to be here.
Daniel Schlozman: Thanks a lot.
Geoff Kabaservice: People who follow the Niskanen Center very, very closely may note that this is one of the few times (or maybe even the very first time) when my podcast features an author or authors who have recently appeared on Niskanen’s other podcast, The Science of Politics with Matt Grossman. Matt almost invariably interviews the authors of recent books or articles from the political science field, and I’m more likely to talk with authors of recent histories, particularly political histories. But one of the especially interesting and unique aspects of your book, Danny and Sam, is that it’s equally appropriate for both podcasts because you are methodological eclecticists; you’re using the techniques of social science to tell a historical narrative of American politics as told through its parties. Does that strike you as an accurate 30,000-foot characterization of your approach?
Daniel Schlozman: Seems about right. And you might even put it the other way around: that we are using social science methodology to tell a historical story, or historical methods to tell a social science story. And the idea is it’s working in both directions and from all sides of looking glass.
Sam Rosenfeld: And it does reflect in part a disciplinary background. I actually have a Ph.D. in history, and I found myself drifting into a different discipline professionally. But we definitely bring those kinds of perspectives to bear.
Geoff Kabaservice: You also wrote that your book has a lot to do with the American Political Development (or APD) approach. For listeners who may not be familiar with that, how would you describe that?
Sam Rosenfeld: I’ll try. I feel like this famously eludes clear and crisp definition. But within the American politics subfield of political science, it is one that does history, that is historically minded. Sometimes they’re referred to as historical institutionalists in American politics, sometimes referred to as APD scholars. An APD approach takes time itself as a variable. Particular institutions, particular rules, particular forces: their existence over time and their intersections with one another over time and across development meaningfully changes the impact of what they’re doing. So APD scholars pay a lot of attention to the interactions of different institutions developing along their own dynamics, and then they come into intersection. Danny, you help me out here.
Daniel Schlozman: That APD is on the one hand the attempt by scholars of American politics to think about big change over time, and in particular to be concerned with what Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek (two real founding fathers of the field in the 1970s and ‘80s) termed political development as durable change in governing authority. And it’s also in a lot of ways the redoubt for political science that asks as many questions as it answers, that is more likely to use qualitative and quantitative methodology, that is looking to the past not for sources of data about a given problem but for explanations of how we reach the present.
And so in that sense, political development looks different from the present-focused, methodologically tight political science that is the dominant part of the discipline. But it also looks different from history both in being more concerned with politics qua politics in general and in terms of thinking more structurally and conceptually about historical change than a lot of historians are comfortable with.
Geoff Kabaservice: I think I got most of that. But then again, I also remember when someone tried to explain Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time to me, and the explanation made sense at the time but I couldn’t reproduce it. However, I think this is something we’re going to come back to. And this eclectic methodological approach that you use is part of what makes the book so absorbing. And there are so many things that you raised in it that I’m sure we’re only going to get to a fraction of them. Nonetheless, this is one of those great books that also has its thesis in its title. So what do you mean when you say that today’s Republican and Democratic parties are hollow?
Sam Rosenfeld: Hollowness to us entails a kind of incapacity to organize collective action on the part of these parties, either internally in terms of making party decisions — over nomination, over agenda-setting — or externally in terms of shaping conflict in the broader political arena. Part of how we arrived at this imagery of hollowness and this idea is wrestling with the paradox of polarization making parties ever more central presences in American politics and shaping people’s partisan behavior in some respects like organizing behavior in Congress. Party leaders are stronger than they’ve been in a long time, and that’s a consequence of polarization. And yet at the same time, we see a lot of underlying incapacity.
Also drawing from that, a kind of problem with mistrust and illegitimacy not only among the broader American electorate but even the most engaged actors in American politics tend to mistrust or delegitimize what it is the actual formal party actors might say at any given point. So it’s this kind of “strong on the outside/underlying weaknesses on the inside” that is what we mean by hollowness. And then it manifests in very different ways in the Democratic Party versus the Republican Party.
Geoff Kabaservice: Can you tell me more about those different manifestations, Daniel?
Daniel Schlozman: On the Democratic side, what we see is ineffectuality: a party that is unable to put together all the pieces of its very, very big coalition in a common project — all the pieces ideologically but also all the pieces organizationally of a party that is dominated by outside groups rather than formal parties themselves, the Democratic National Committee and its affiliates all the way on down. I was in Chicago last week for the Democratic National Convention, and it’s much more than just the programming that the DNC organizes. It is everything from Axios (which has got a nice spot by the Chicago River where I had a lovely lunch), the unions put on a good show and a party, various trade associations, and then the big, big, big donors whose tickets get parceled out so that the donors can be in the suites and watch the action from there. And so all these different actors are the party, and yet they are incapable of coming together in common purpose. (And we can talk about whether or not they did that this summer.) But there are all these different forces, and what that’s meant in political policy terms is a party that has been less than the sum of its parts and that has been unable to figure out its post-New Deal purpose. And that’s hollowness in the sense that parts of the party are very strong, and yet what is this party all about is still underdefined.
On the Republican side, hollowness looks very different and that is extremism — you’ve obviously thought a lot about this as well — and an inability to police guardrails against the forces of right-wing extremism in general and the personalism of Donald Trump that is his distinctive contribution in particular. And the party has become not much more than the vehicle for Trumpism, to the extent that Republican state parties are, instead of worrying about the politics in their states, passing resolutions about false-flag operations and witch hunts against Donald John Trump and on and on.
Geoff Kabaservice: You write that the parties have lost a lot of their core functions to para-party organizations or what you call “the party blob.” Can you explain more about that evocative term?
Sam Rosenfeld: Part of this is political scientists who tend to take a maybe slightly more optimistic view of how modern parties look. They have noticed that you have formal party organizations — the national committees, state party committees, local-level/county-level party organizations, the campaign committees in Congress, et cetera — and they do things. And they’re still around and doing more than ever when it comes to fundraising, especially. They’re real organizations.
But encroaching on every aspect of what you think a political party does — from the actual electoral functions of mobilizing voters, of advertising and running campaigns, to ideological and programmatic functions of getting ideas out there, setting agendas for power and then advocating on behalf of particular issues — informal organizations swamp the formal organizations. They raise more money. More people who are involved in national politics in the United States are involved in outside organizations than in formal parties.
And a lot of political scientists have noticed this. And they think of modern parties as consisting of networks, of these different nodes, all with the same goal in mind and associated with one side or the other. And in a polarized era, ever more numerous interest groups (interests that in other times might have been bipartisan in their activity) have come to be sorted to one team or the other. But network theorists of the party activity think of all this as these modern entities where everybody’s basically doing their specialized part on behalf of a particular goal.
What we emphasize is in fact what you get on these what we call “blobs” of organizations is as much disorder — conflict, cross purposes, principal-agent problems — where in fact winning elections to achieve a particular set of agenda items isn’t the top goal for a lot of these. You think of for-profit media entities that are a huge part especially of the Republican blob in the modern era.
The blobs act in ways that actually stoke incapacity more than they are a modern, efficient way of getting a lot done. And they end up, we argue, exerting a drag on people’s positive trust and loyalty to the parties — because most of the time people aren’t actually interacting with the parties themselves. They’re interacting with or engaging with all sorts of different kinds of actors — super PACs, think tanks, advocacy groups, media organizations — that are associated with one side or the other but not actually accountable to anybody on behalf of that.
Geoff Kabaservice: I think your explanation of the blob is very satisfying to people who work directly in politics right now, in that it helps us make sense of some of the contradictions. For example, the Democratic Party in Biden’s first two years was able to pass a number of acts of significant legislation, but they couldn’t actually make any progress on their number one priority, which was electoral reform in the form of HR1 and attempted reforms to the Voting Rights Act. On the other hand, the Republican Party has had enormous electoral success (outside of what one might expect from the somewhat deranged nature of many of its candidates) and yet it couldn’t even pass a party platform at its last convention. Let me raise this question for you… Many of America’s Framers were famously unfond of political parties, and a lot of people today aren’t particularly happy with our parties or the system of what’s been called the party duopoly. Why in your view do parties matter?
Daniel Schlozman: Political scientists are famously (or famously among ourselves) more pro-party than the vast, vast majority of Americans who view parties in low repute. What do parties do? Parties organize conflict. Parties make it clear what political systems are fighting around. They make it easier for voters to make their choices when they are at the ballot box. Parties make it easier for politicians to rise up in the ranks.
But parties — and this is where learning the history of parties gives a certain appreciation — parties also are ways that politics can be done collectively together rather than every individual for him- or herself. So Martin Van Buren, an important figure in the rise of mass parties in the generation after the Framers, sees them as protections against his fear and the fear of the founding generation — and that is demagogy. Because when ambitious politicians, rather than having to go it themselves, are constrained by the fetters of party, then their ability to run riot is limited because there is a collective leadership and a collective goal rather than the individual. And that is the timeless claim for party: not simply as a way to make politics efficient and organized, but to prevent the very thing that the Framers wanted most to prevent and that is still very much a fear of in a populist age — what happens when a free people are given all their freedom and things can go south.
Geoff Kabaservice: And I think you’ve also written that what we’re seeing in the Republican Party today is less the danger of parties than the dangers that occur when parties fail.
Daniel Schlozman: Exactly. The Republican Party as personality cult is these old, old fears of the demagogue come to life. And over the last eight years, the party’s restraints on Trump have been lightened and lightened. He has in turn felt himself in a whole lot of ways emboldened by lots and lots of actors around the American political system (including some in the Supreme Court) to act in ways that in 2016 he was not. And that is very much a story about the restraints not just of the system as a whole but of the fetters of party that would stop any individual.
Sam Rosenfeld: The story of a party whose incapacity was manifest in allowing a wolf into the barn in 2016 is the proximate and contemporary four-alarm-fire-emergency illustration of the broader story the political scientists try to tell readers and students. Parties — by organizing peaceful self-government, peaceful transitions of power, making it work — are what in fact make democratic self-government work. By making it work, you inculcate norms of democratic self-government. And when those organizations that are so essential to making the system work break down and start to be less and less efficacious in doing that work, you invite actors and forces with no such commitments into the breach. And that’s what we’ve been seeing in the last eight years.
Geoff Kabaservice: And as various people have pointed out (including yourselves), Donald Trump would not have been the Republican nominee in past eras when the gatekeepers were preventing such a figure from becoming the party’s nominee.
Daniel Schlozman: Very much so. The pre-reform era was one in which party elites (as their friends and detractors will call them) — leading figures in state parties, governors and senators dominating big state delegations at national conventions — would choose someone whom they deemed as both electable and broadly acceptable. And Donald Trump would not have been that person. In our view, it is a mistake to look simply at the party reform on the democratic side as how we get to Trump. But is very true that a Trump figure at an earlier stage in American political history would have been very hard to imagine emerging from the nomination process of a major party.
Geoff Kabaservice: So as part of your project to understand why the parties became hollow, you cast your analysis back to the relatively early days of the Republic in the antebellum period and then move forward. And you discern, across this span of history, six political approaches that you call “party strands” which come up again and again in the course of America’s political history. And you label these the accommodationist strand, the antiparty strand, the pro-capital strand, the policy reform strand, the radical strand, and the populist strand. I think people looking at today’s politics probably would have no problem understanding the basic concepts of the pro-capital, radical, and populist strands, but the others call out for some explanations. So what, for example, is the accommodationist strand?
Sam Rosenfeld: Well, I’ll throw in two strands here. Since we were just talking about the Founders and their skepticism of parties, the antiparty strand is a deeply embedded set of views that are really tied up in the civic republican thought of the Founding Era and that have absolutely continued to resonate and be a really important intellectual resource in American politics ever since, into the twenty-first century. The antiparty strand is a belief in a common good and the need to cultivate virtuous leaders that will achieve this common good for everybody, and a belief that partial visions (and formations on behalf of partial visions for public policy that are represented by parties) are in and of themselves symptomatic of something wrong and corrupt or dangerous to the Republic.
And it’s the accommodationist disposition that we think of as the antithesis to that, the answer to that. That is what emerges, historically speaking, out of the emergence of popular partisan disagreement and conflict in the Founding and early decades of the nineteenth century. And that really gets articulated in national form by Martin van Buren and the Jacksonian, mass-democratic model as it emerges by the 1830s, and the accommodationist strand has been a recurring theme and tradition of politics ever since. It is embodied in its purest form in the urban machines of the nineteenth century. It is quintessentially locally rooted, pragmatic. It is the politics of give-and-take, of pragmatic relationships, of coalition-building — as opposed to a high-minded politics of ideology or vision or public policy even — as what’s guiding and motivating people’s actions.
But what’s powerful about this (as articulated by Van Buren in the first place) is that that mode of politics — by mobilizing and inculcating the engagement of ordinary people, by sustaining and building coalitions across very different communities and very different people, and making a kind of politics of give-and-take move forward in a stable way — it’s what allows for popular politics and popular conflict and disagreement to sustain itself in a peaceful and functional way.
And casting forward to the era of hollowness (which we think is the story from the 1970s onward), one of the major stories of an era in which the parties have become much more ideologically polarized (but also brittle and inefficacious in a lot of ways) is the relative decline, the abeyance of accommodationist-style politics on the left and the right.
Geoff Kabaservice: And just to dot this i, what is the policy reform strand?
Daniel Schlozman: Briefly then to go through the other strands… The policy reform strand is the instantiation of American liberalism in which strong parties exist not just to stay in power and grease the wheels (as in accommodationism) but to get policy done, and get policy done in coalition with allied interest groups. So this is not (like radicalism to its left) the politics of using party for absolutely sweeping social change or the politics at the center (simply give-and-take) but trying to use strong, determined, issue-oriented parties in service of substantive policy ends. And the idea, if the policy reform strand is all working, is that good, strong parties will produce better policies because all of the actors are working together than if the interest groups and whatnot were just negotiating on their own. And so it is an argument for a very strong, very particular kind of party in which issues more than just staying in power comes first.
Sam Rosenfeld: James Q. Wilson, the eminent social scientist, who wrote a book about the amateur Democrats — the club Democrats, reformist liberals in the early post-war decades — he distinguished between the amateur Democrats and the regulars, which we would think of as the new policy-reform strand Democrats squaring off against the accommodationist party regulars. So the regulars think of issues — policy — as just the byproduct of electoral struggle, the cart before the horse.
Daniel Schlozman: And so last week in Chicago, there were moments that felt very much policy reform in the sense of going to the labor caucus to see various politicians talk about how they were to appeal to the issues of a major player in the party. And there were moments that felt much more like everybody sizing one another up in pure politics, just trying to win — more like a kind of modern accommodationism, which is the ancient political convention.
Geoff Kabaservice: I used to, in my graduate school days, take a bus every week to a distant part of New Haven to see Richard C. Lee — Dick Lee, the former mayor of New Haven, who was one of the principal subjects of Robert Dahl’s 1961 political science classic Who Governs? And Dick Lee was very much a part (and maybe even the embodiment) of that accommodationist strain. He was actually all in favor of the old precinct captain who would hand out the Thanksgiving turkeys and try to solve the problems of the locality. And he actually was also a tie to the kind of era that most people associate with the nineteenth century but which continued on into the mid-twentieth century: of civic organizations and political rallies that included people in uniform carrying torchlights in procession and all the rest of it.
At the same time, when you talk about accommodationism, it sounds a lot to me like the era I wrote about in Rule and Ruin, where both parties still had ideologically diverse coalitions and cross-cutting affiliations. There were moderate and even liberal Republicans, and there were conservative (indeed segregationist) Democrats.
And yet, I’m not sure that this is actually a strand that comes across all that well in your book as a whole. And in fact, Daniel, to go into one of your deep cuts, I came across a piece you wrote in Dissent in 2020 which was a review of Ezra Klein’s book Why We’re Polarized. And Klein also is of this view that the U.S. political system has functioned best when it has relied on mixed parties. And you wrote, “He doesn’t say exactly when, but it feels, again, like a nod to the heterogeneous party coalitions at midcentury. Others of us, however, look fondly on 1867 and 1935, which tell a very different story: that the path to a multiracial, egalitarian democracy comes from powerful majorities backed by sustained popular agitation.”
Daniel Schlozman: Good question. On the one hand, if you really, really want to change politics in a very, very big way, the way you do it is: sustain popular majorities with deep agitation. On the other hand, if what you want is to have everybody living together in ways that do not upset anybody’s apple cart or go too far (as revolutions can), what you want is accommodationism. And I think probably more than when I was writing that review in that heady moment, I have an appreciation of lots of different strands of American politics, and in particular accommodationism.
There are many, many ways to do politics right. And what we hope readers get from this book (and reviewers too, if they’re going to have readers read the book) is less that we have a very particular take, and especially a take of just where we are on the ideological spectrum — because people have their own politics and we’re not going to change their worldviews in the course of this book, nor should we; we are not consultants to tell you who to vote for in a primary or whatever. But wherever you are, there are ways to do politics better: to be more pro-party, to think in longer-term ways, to build smarter coalitions. And there are ways to do politics dumber.
And the idea of all this big jumble of examples piling up in the book is that readers can see themselves — or their own political dilemmas wherever they are, wherever they work — in new ways, and that they can take something from that. One very important piece of that is thinking in accommodationist terms. And I will say that an appreciation for what accommodationists could do is something that I have now probably more than when Sam and I got started in this book in 2016. But do you want to talk for yourself, Sam?
Sam Rosenfeld: Absolutely. I’m curious to hear more from you, Geoff. You seem be indicating that you came across our treatment of accommodationists as a tradition as being skeptical or critical. But relative to where I was writing my first book called The Polarizers, which had a “two cheers for polarization” gloss to it — I was a very policy-reform-minded young man when I wrote that — I too have come away with much more of an appreciation for accommodationism. I think it’s a pipe dream to figure out how to reverse-engineer national coalitions that are more programmatically cohesive and less crosscut than they were at mid-century. But one of the ways in which I’ve come to have more of an appreciation for accommodationism — and it’s partly by reading sociologists and political scientists who’ve talked about this recently — is that nationalization itself has been a force for polarization in a way that I think is unhealthy for politics. Part of what we’re trying to do is revive parties as civic organizations, which is part and parcel of trying to revive civic life — which is a tall order.
Daniel Schlozman: Civic life is locally rooted, and people are participating in their communities and thinking, “How do we solve the problems of my community?” — which are not going to be the same, whatever the community is.
Sam Rosenfeld: Right, and part of the attention that a lot of people have made to local politics that has real vitality to it is that it brings people together in face-to-face interaction, talking about issues that are of importance to local communities. And that just makes it less abstract. It makes your interactions with others less spun up on national culture-war battles. And there is something really valuable and important to that that is lost in an era that is ever more nationalized in its partisan loyalties and political perspective.
Geoff Kabaservice: These were themes that came up when I talked to Seth Kaplan, for example, with his book on Fragile Neighborhoods, and also with Jim Fallows, who travels around the country looking for examples of local revitalization. I’m happy to share my views with you, but I’d actually like to take half a step back from politics and ask if you can both tell me something about yourselves. Daniel, can you tell me anything, for starters, about where you grew up, your education, what made you decide to become a political scientist?
Daniel Schlozman: That’s unfortunately very easy: this is the family business. My mother was a political scientist at Boston College. I grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts. I crossed the river at eighteen to go to school. While I was there, I had a busman’s holiday — sort of a Plan B if I didn’t get an academic job — of being the chair of the Cambridge Ward 8 Democratic Committee, which is where I learned a certain amount of political infighting as things were hot and heavy that summer with Democrats’ rules. I thought to myself, “I didn’t learn party rules at Harvard. I learned party rules from watching the late John Dugan” — who was this vast Irishman who had a patronage job with the state and was the parliamentarian of the Massachusetts Chapter of the American Association of Parliamentarians — “battling on party rules at Democratic State Committee meetings. That’s where I learned parties.”
So that was my youth in party politics. And I was writing this dissertation about political parties and social movements that became a book called When Movements Anchor Parties. So I’ve been studying parties for a while. I haven’t done party politics since I left Cambridge, now more than a dozen years ago, but that was what has given me a certain taste for how this game works. My co-author will now talk about a little bit about what he’s been up to.
Sam Rosenfeld: Sure. I too was a faculty brat, I guess is the term. My whole family are all sociologists: my mother, father, and my older brother. I was the black sheep by majoring in history and then getting a Ph.D. in history, I suppose, but it’s still the family business. Before going to grad school, I was… I’ve never been a ward heeler. I’ve never been an actual… Everything I say is “Do as I say, not as I do” when it comes to being involved in local politics. But I was a journalist out of college. I went to D.C. and worked at the American Prospect magazine. I was an editor and writer there with young Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias and others, and we blogged. This was the mid-oughts, the era of George W. Bush and the Iraq War and a lot of intra-Democratic battles about how to think about partisanship, how to think about being an opposition party.
And from there, from slinging takes in punditry, I decided to go into grad school. But I didn’t move far afield from thinking about partisanship and polarization and ideology, how those things interact in recent American history. And so I went into grad school and wrote a dissertation that turned into the book, The Polarizers, about ideas of parties and ideology in academia, in practical politics from the mid-century through the end of the century, and how that interacted with actual changes in the party coalitions that led to polarization.
Geoff Kabaservice: And when did you two meet and how did the genesis for this book come about?
Daniel Schlozman: We met in 2008. A mutual friend was in town for my fifth college reunion; I was still in Cambridge. I had skipped most of the college reunion for the day to go to the Massachusetts Democratic State Convention in Worcester and then met up with Sam in the evening. And he figured that anybody who was that interested in doing politics to have skipped out on their reunion might be interesting. And I thought he was a nice guy, and so we became friends then.
And then in spring 2016, I was asked to write a paper for a conference from the Social Science Research Council, which had a program at the time called “The Anxieties of Democracy.” And so we wrote a paper together that was a genesis of the book and was delivered at a conference. I can remember exactly where and when it was. It was at Princeton, and the person sitting next to me pokes me and points to his phone — and that’s when I learned about the Comey letter. And so at this crucible, we said, “Okay, let’s do something.” I was going up to Cornell to be on a pre-election panel. Sam was going home in the car ride. We decided, “Oh, we’ll write a book together.” The plan was that it was going to be short, punchy, to the point, and come out soon — and ha ha, it took seven and a half years, and was rather more than short. And here we are.
Geoff Kabaservice: And what was the division of labor, so to speak, on this book?
Sam Rosenfeld: Oh, that’s interesting. It emerged organically. To get real nuts-and bolts-y, Danny is always the one driving the wagon: setting times for us to Zoom, thinking of agendas for us to discuss. When we talk, I take notes on what we’re saying. Sometimes what we’re saying actually does end up showing up in prose eventually. And I share my notes and stuff. And then when it came to the actual writing, at different times one of us was drafting a whole first draft of a chapter, or we would just break up a projected chapter into sections and each of us would take the first crack.
Daniel Schlozman: We were both doing bits of the nineteenth century, the Democrats and the Republicans. We very intentionally didn’t devolve vast fields to the other, so that we were more or less in command of what was happening. And at some point, there was more just, “Oh, this needs to be done. You do it,” and at some points, there was more intentional, “This makes sense.” And then we would just edit one another absolutely ruthlessly and mercilessly until there was a common voice and all of our horrible respective tics were gone from the writing, we hoped.
Sam Rosenfeld: And it is striking… There are times when people have asked who wrote, at the level of a paragraph or something, some prose, and I have no idea. Sometimes I can remember, but usually I can’t. All the editing and the drafting meant that it turned into a Schlozenfeld stew.
Geoff Kabaservice: So speaking of editing, the pivotal chapter of your book for me is “The Long New Right.” And it’s pivotal because I’ve been thinking about it since I saw an early draft copy of it in 2019; I guess you had delivered it as a conference paper the year before. There was a passage that was in that original paper which didn’t, I think, make it into the book. You wrote that “In positing continuity in a strand of right-wing engagement with party politics across a half century — a strand that eventually came to dominate Republicanism itself — we seek neither to flatten partisan and ideological developments nor to render right-of-center politics a monolith. Disagreement both substantive and strategic abounded among self-identified conservatives throughout these years. Moderates drawing on potent traditions of their own waged factional battles with the right that provided much of the internal drama and dynamism of Republican Party politics.”
And that was largely what I was writing about in my own research. And it was good for me to see in that draft copy that you knew about this history, but you were going to focus on something else. So tell me then, what is “the Long New Right” and why do you like this term?
Daniel Schlozman: So the Long New Right… “Long” is definitely a coinage from historians, from political scientists, to say that a phrase or moment associated with a particular time period extends beyond it: the Long Civil Rights Movement, the Long Nineteenth Century. So we are elongating in the same way the New Right. What then is the New Right? The New Right was a set of actors in the 1970s from the right who pushed single-issue groups and the weaponization of resentment to the exclusion of big-tent coalition-building inside the formal Republican Party. These were people like Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie — and Phyllis Schlafly in a somewhat different way.
And what we see in their project — in the 1970s most pivotally but extending, starting in the post-war period all the way through with echoes down to the present — is this same mercenary, grievance-based approach to politics. Which is why although some of the personalism we’ve been talking a bit about is new, we see much more continuity than change in the Trump moment.
Sam Rosenfeld: There’s both a continuity not in a pristine, coherent ideological substance, but substantively a preoccupation with mobilizing resentments, grievance politics, pugilism, apocalypticism, that informs the political appeal. And then also continuity in these actors’ disposition towards organizations and institutions: a mercenary instrumental approach to organizational forms, most importantly to political parties. There is no commitment and loyalty (in a van Buren sense) to parties as in-and-of-themselves important, small-d democratic institutions in the Long New Right’s approach to parties. They are simply the vessel. As William Rusher (National Review’s publisher) once said, “The GOP is the bottle and conservatism is the wine.”
It’s that kind of approach to organizations writ large (and political institutions as well) that defines the Long New Right’s approach to the political party — and part of why we think it’s so significant for the problems and incapacities of political parties in the era in which they had achieved a breakthrough to the commanding heights of the Republican Party by the 1970s.
Geoff Kabaservice: And I thought it was an important insight on your part that what defines the Long New Right is not so much ideological commitments as a commitment to conflict as an end in itself. “Owning the libs” is not some modern incarnation of this particular conservative movement. It has been a constant, as has been the disregarding of norms and even the legitimacy of the Democratic Party.
Sam Rosenfeld: And that’s where the early postwar period is important in this. And even William F. Buckley, who gets celebrated as the man who’s making modern conservatism cohesive and coherent in a popular sense… He’s both tied up in his early advocacy in defending Joe McCarthy, writing a book about it, tied up in battles over McCarthy; and he then articulates in Up from Liberalism his case for fusion in terms of, “Well, what is it that all these different strands of actors have in common? It’s an opposition to liberalism. That’s the glue that’s going to keep all of it together.” Even in its highfalutin form, it’s framed in terms of owning libs.
Geoff Kabaservice: You say that you actually take a leaf from the Long New Right’s own self-chroniclers and tell a generational story — and you have a three-act play, so to speak. What are these three generations?
Daniel Schlozman: The first act… This is the way of conservative presentations of their own histories, as with Lee Edwards, who was at Heritage for a long time, who was the house historian of movement conservatism. The first generation are the figures in the postwar years who, from relatively limited beginnings, create the modern conservative movement: single-issue groups, McCarthyism, virulent anticommunism, and then coming together in the Goldwater campaign of 1964. And they are very, very… New Deal liberalism is hegemonic. They are trying to figure out, not entirely successfully, how to break its reign. And they are often unhappy at one another, obsessed with purity, and haven’t really thought in organizational terms about how to do politics.
The second generation are the tacticians, and this is the core of the New Right. This is Weyrich and Viguerie and their discovery in the 1970s (realization is probably the better word) that as American politics does now seem more fluid — as what historians call the New Deal order is cracking up with stagflation, with civil rights, after Vietnam — that American politics is fluid and that they can try to build a new conservative majority that will supplant the New Deal. And the way to do that is not through the Republican Party, which is as Terry Dolan (one of the leading figures in the New Right) says, “a place where rich people go to pick their noses.” It is through single-issue groups that will come together in coalitions to pass very conservative priorities. And Viguerie, who’s a direct mail entrepreneur, has the idea to use his direct mail list to feed the one single-issue group to the next to the next. So they’re the ruthless tacticians.
Then the next generation are the enfants terribles who sort of come of age in the 1980s. And for them, for all these folks, they’re very pugilistic. They like conflict. For the third generation, media and a very in-your-face, public, on-screen version of conservatism is especially important. This is Laura Ingraham coming out of the Dartmouth Review, the young Ann Coulter, the young Dinesh D’Souza is very important in this group. And they see a transgressiveness — some of which they’ve learned from the style though not the substance of the New Left — as their addition to the right-wing repertoire. And so those are the three generations of the Long New Right through the 1980s. And then all those characters from the 1980s rise in the ranks and become key figures down to the Trump years.
Geoff Kabaservice: Let me offer a somewhat inchoate critique of this portraiture-painting, which has to do with the dimension of time that you raised when we were talking about American Political Development. William F. Buckley Jr. in 1955 is a self-styled revolutionary. He is tied into some of the worst impulses and aspects of American political life, whether that be his support for Jim Crow in the South, his defense of McCarthy, all the rest of it; you can go down the list. But William F. Buckley Jr. by 1968, let’s say, is no longer that same person. He has changed. He has come to believe that even if he didn’t distance himself as much from the John Birch Society as various historians and political scientists (such as yourselves) would have liked, nevertheless he recognizes that kookiness is a problem for the Republican Party as it’s trying to win popular majorities.
He has learned something from the Goldwater campaign, which had long-term developments that were positive for the conservative movement, but ultimately ushered in a second New Deal and changed the context of American political life as well as delivering huge majorities to the Democrats. And in fact it is Buckley’s perceived desire to govern responsibly that makes him an establishment figure to that second generation. And when they are rebelling, they’re rebelling against the first generation of the New Right. And you see this dynamic happen again and again. John Boehner enters Congress as a bomb-thrower and eventually becomes someone I would regard as a responsible political leader.
There is this issue too that the 1960s (particularly the late ‘60s) is not the 1950s. And the conservative critique that Democrats are bad on crime actually finds a lot of traction with American voters when it does seem to them that liberals don’t have an answer to what they see in their own neighborhoods as a real development and a lack of order more generally.
So there’s a conception of the Long New Right which in a sense sees it as this unchanging grievance-based critique of the left. And yet if you go back and look at the history more granularly, there actually is quite a lot of discontinuity among the generations, for example.
Sam Rosenfeld: Well, I would say, before your point on crime, that the revolution eating its children is absolutely a part of the Long New Right’s repertoire, a pathology that goes back to the 1950s.
Daniel Schlozman: That seems to me like a continuity, which is that every generation is playing the same game of, “They have betrayed us. We are going to be the purest. We are not going to sell out.” And from our point of view, that that is as much its own continuity: the way that these patterns both linguistic and substantive of “uneasy lies the head that wears the crown” persist.
Sam Rosenfeld: And to put a button on that, they might think of it as purism, but because there’s no cohesive ideology that stretches across this period, it’s not actual purity. But it is this tendency, the RINO dynamic that we’re seeing now. If anything, it accelerates and compounds the difficulties of these actors in power attempting to govern. That has become more and more impossible to do by the twenty-first century precisely because the actors, by the time you get to the third generation, push into media as the main name of the game; those are big important parts of the modern right-wing and Republican blob that motivates exactly this kind of “revolution eating its children” all the time. But you see that tendency recurring all the way back to the 1950s even as the issues and the context change.
Daniel Schlozman: And I think that it is certainly the case that as the Republicans become more a post-policy party, it becomes harder and harder for anybody to make the critique of liberalism that in the 1960s and the 1970s conservatives make very effectively, or Pat Buchanan in 1980. Interestingly, when the Republican National Committee (of all things) had an actual policy journal for a while, “of a sudden the Republicans have become the party of ideas.” And there really has been a discontinuity as these media-centric, grievance-focused forces have become everybody; the space for that has diminished to zero or something close.
Sam Rosenfeld: Geoff, tell me if this speaks to your inchoate critique. We do not mean by extending this concept to the Long New Right that stretches across multiple decades, we do not mean to imply that this is one project for power, for governance, that it is a long conspiracy that goes all the way back and is the same and one can make the same kind of critiques of what they’re saying substantively. It’s precisely that there is no cohesive ideological project. It is a recurring pattern of approaches and discourse in politics that finds very different issues and very different contexts across these periods. But it’s precisely the kind of… It’s what generates the chaos and incapacity of contemporary Trump-era Republican politics more than it does make an argument that we’re seeing the culmination of a cohesive project.
Daniel Schlozman: This is a book that is in a lot of ways about the effects of causes rather than the causes of effects. “How did we reach our present discontent?” is our question much more than “Exactly at what point could it have gone a different way and what were the balance of forces in each instant?” And precisely because what we want to do is to get at how the Republican Party became what it was, we do talk a little bit about where the moderates were, talk in the conclusion about who Ray Bliss was. Perhaps we do give short shrift to forces that are very important to understanding the politics of the 1950s, the 1960s, and are still… Look at the Republican Party in the 1980s, after the most decisive moments have happened, and there’s still a decent slug of Republican moderates around in Congress, even if they’re less going anywhere.
This is not a straightforward history of “Who is on top in parties at what time?” It is, “What are these different projects for power looking at?” And that means, in a sense, looking where the most interesting things are to be found from our vantage point. And that has pluses and minuses. An approach that’s much more, “Let’s go election by election and see who was on top and who wasn’t” has in turn advantages and disadvantages over the slightly more eclectic approach we’ve taken.
Geoff Kabaservice: I think our analyses overlap in the sense that we both agree that we ended up with Trump, and that this reflects a failure of guardrails both within the Republican Party and within the conservative movement. And it’s a question of who you choose to foreground. Ronald Reagan is not a prominent figure in your book, for example. But the anecdote with which you start the book is from Reagan’s time as president, and it’s when Richard Richards, who was chair of the Republican National Committee, decided that he didn’t want to have these para-party conservative blob organizations playing such a dominant role in Republican politics. And yet he ultimately decided he would make his peace with them. And that’s something that Ronald Reagan might not even have been aware of, and yet it is part of his legacy when you look at the long view.
Daniel Schlozman: One of the reasons I insisted that that be the opening anecdote… We called them “loose cannonballs on the deck of a ship.” And it does speak to… Times change. It just wouldn’t have occurred to the DNC chair in 2024 to think about all the groups out there in the progressive blob and think, “Oh, such a problem. They’re such loose cannonballs.” But there they were, and they ended up winning.
Geoff Kabaservice: Again, to go back to that review you wrote of Ezra Klein’s book, Daniel, in your more combative 2020 incarnation… Ezra and I had a disagreement, maybe around the time that he was writing the book that became Why We’re Polarized. And our debate was about the merits of political history versus political science. He thought at the time that political history was really of limited value because none of the actors in politics are honest, even with themselves, about their actual motivations. Politicians behave in ways that you wouldn’t predict on the basis of their stated principles and preferences, and voters cast their ballots in ways that are often completely contradictory with their stated preferences.
And when you reviewed Ezra’s book, Daniel, you argued that this emphasis on psychology skips over political economy. It gives a pass, in effect, to the ruling classes. And you pointed particularly to the fact that the GOP’s pro-capital strand ultimately decided that it could make common cause with Trump’s rather noxious strand of populism. And that’s a political story, not a psychological one. Is that something that you still emphasize in the current book?
Daniel Schlozman: We’ve talked to Ezra too. We should get everybody in on this conversation. This is methodologically an attempt to think about contemporary politics with a lot of lenses: political science and history coming together, informed by some sociology and some economics thrown around, and not a lot of psychology. And how we got here was the interaction of elite actors making their choices and powerful social forces. Readers can decide for themselves if there’s big psychology missing. But this is an attempt to try to answer the question — if not quite why we are polarized, at least why our parties reached their present discontents, which is a not unrelated question, sans psychology.
Very smart people are psychologists, but I’ve never taken a psychology course in my life; I don’t think Sam has. And what happens when you don’t ask psychological questions? We think you can explain a huge amount and that in turn historical explanations and the ways to think about them, what we were just doing about, “Who’s powerful? When? What are the key moments? What’s possible at any given point? How can actors exploit the opportunities that are made available with them?” Those are the stock in trade of good historical political thinking that Sam and I batted around, the sources we’ve relied on batted around, we just batted around — that will illuminate big political questions. And in a sense, the intersection of social science and history in this book is an attempt to try to revive both a conversation across social science and history and then to say, having revived that conversation, that together they can say lots of things.
Sam Rosenfeld: And not to argue with your paraphrase of something Ezra said that I didn’t hear directly, but his point about politicians lying and that’s why political history is of limited value… Obviously, historians are aware of… That’s the whole stock in trade of the historical method, is to be reading your sources skeptically and with a historical mind.
Daniel Schlozman: Go to archives. Don’t just rely on the memoir.
Sam Rosenfeld: Right, but even with the archives, always think about why these people are saying what they’re saying at any given moment. But also that does speak to the extent to which we are doing more intellectual history than you would see in most traditional, even historically-minded APD political science because we do think actors putting together these different kinds of party formations across American history, those actors are animated in part by ideas about what they’re trying to do by projects for power. That means ideas matter. They are contingent and contextual. And often these are not high… Richard Richards wasn’t an eminent intellectual that we’re excavating. But their ideas are in fact notable and important, and something that we foreground much more than you see in other APD political science.
Daniel Schlozman: Right, and the question in turn of how do historical actors understand the ideas that are motivating them (whether consciously or not) was something we grappled with. And we were surprised that a book all about the nuts and bolts of party politics and ward heelers and precinct captains had us thinking in intellectual history ways, to an extent that we might not have anticipated given the subject matter and seeming practicalness of what we were writing about.
Geoff Kabaservice: I think even the most social science-skeptical political historian has had to familiarize himself or herself with the term “revealed preferences.” As promised, there were awful lot of subjects in your book, brilliant ideas that we didn’t get a chance to cover. But I think I can’t let you go without asking you something about the way forward, which after all is the subject of your last chapter. What can happen that might strengthen the parties and pull them back from their precipices of ineffectuality or extremism, in the two cases?
Sam Rosenfeld: We have some basic rules of the road. We try and avoid being factional in our prescriptions: the idea that some particular faction of one part of the other needs to win and then everything would be great. We both recognized that people disagree and have all sorts of agendas and projects for power. What we want all those different actors, different factions to do is put be their best pro-party selves — “Be best,” as Melania Trump instructed us all. That is to say, if you are a philanthropist wanting to fund advocacy in politics to achieve things you think are important, if you are an actual party actor, a politician, ask yourself: “Are the ways that I’m acting politically and in my activism conducive to renewing and revitalizing parties and their capacity to make concerted decisions for themselves in American politics?” And that’s an especially important message to send to the many well-minded people involved in the party blobs of the twenty-first century.
And then we have our prescriptions for Democrats. We look to the case of Nevada Democrats in the twenty-first century during the long era of the late Harry Reid’s dominance over that party, the so-called Reid Machine. Harry Reid was a nationally prominent political figure who, in contrast to many other counterparts, paid a lot of attention to the strength and the vitality of the formal state party organization in his state. He invested a lot of money and resources into growing the staff, professionalizing the staff, creating a real esprit de corps of Democrats involved in that state, and also maintaining close relations with a distinctly vital, independent, civically rooted, and militant labor organization, the Culinary Workers in Las Vegas, who were a crucial part of Democrats’ rising fortunes in that state over the last several decades. As for the Republicans, Danny, it’s a taller order.
Geoff Kabaservice: Let me actually barge in here for one second. I’ve got another deep cut for you. There’s a New York Times op-ed from January 15th, 2019, co-written by you both, entitled “Why Steve King’s Punishment Took So Long.” And this is about the largely now-forgotten decision by congressional Republican leaders to strip Steve King of his committee assignments for his remarks about white supremacy. But you conclude in your next-to-last paragraph: “While the [Republican] party doesn’t lack for proposals that would update its outdated, plutocrat-friendly agenda — see the books and proposals from Oren Cass, Henry Olsen and figures around the Niskanen Center, to name a few — changing this dynamic will not come easy, certainly not as easy as various Never Trumpers imagine.” So what would you now recommend that organizations like the Niskanen Center do to move forward?
Daniel Schlozman: We think that parties don’t reform when they lose narrow elections. Parties reform when they lose repeatedly, they lose badly, and they realize that their present path will not work and they need something very, very different. And that is the big… And I think that in 2019 it was easier to imagine a kind of, “We just switch the dials a little bit and the Republican Party will return to some version of sanity.” And we’re not going to return to that definition of sanity. By this point, a thoroughly Trumpified party needs to have a very, very fundamental course correction. The way to get a very fundamental course correction is lose, lose badly, lose repeatedly. And at that point…
I think Niskanen itself obviously has got various sides of what you’re trying to do to push policy, to imagine a sane conservatism, to push a substantive agenda, and to do things that are strictly allowable as a 501(c)(3). And so my joking answer to you as well, some of the things you want to do you can’t do under your tax status — which I think we’ll get back to. It might be a good place to close.
The theme that we’ve tried to exploit at various points is for all actors across the spectrum to think of how they can behave in ways that are productive, pro-party, pro-democracy. And the exercise is not “Listen to what Schlozenfeld says you should do” so much as take all the stuff in the book and do an exercise yourself of: How does this apply to your dilemmas and your politics and your goals? — which are not going to be ours. And the goal of the book is for different actors to find different things in it rather than to have the one-take-fits-all, as it were.
Geoff Kabaservice: That’s a good concluding answer. Thank you so much, Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlozman, for joining me here today. And congratulations again for your important, really thought-provoking and deep book The Hollow Parties: Their Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.
Sam Rosenfeld: Thank you. This was great.
Daniel Schlozman: Thanks so much. That was lots of fun.
Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to The Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. And if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingegneri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.