Notes

5 W Main: The Hollow Parties. As the U.S. presidential election on November 5 nears, Americans face a choice between two candidates whose paths to the top of their parties seem super-divergent: Donald Trump took over the Republican Party from the outside, serially knocking out established candidates in the 2016 primaries; Kamala Harris rose through the Democratic Party before Joe Biden picked her to be his running mate in 2020 (despite her failure to run a competitive primary campaign herself). The rest is recent history.

These different paths might seem to represent the essence of what separates the two parties’ current identities: the former outsider and disruptor vs. the consummate insider and defender of the establishment.

But as Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld illustrate in their recent book, The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics, the different paths also illustrate a transformation common to both parties.

Schlozman and Rosenfeld show how, over the past half-century, both major parties have lost what previously defined them—their roots in American civic life. Previously, the parties had lively local branches across the whole country, where party members would come together to organize local political initiatives—be it housing policy or reforms to trash collection—but now, they serve that function less and less. Now, the parties themselves don’t mobilize voters or fundraise for political campaigns; that’s mostly left to organizations aligned with the parties but not controlled by them.

This transformation enabled Trump's rise, Schlozman and Rosenfeld write. The Republican Party’s hollowness, as they say, meant its leadership couldn't control its base as it had in the past. And the Democratic Party’s hollowness has left it largely immobilized, splintered by competing internal factions that struggle to come together in the pursuit of common goals—which, paradoxically, has strengthened the party’s leadership at the expense of its rank and file.

This book was published before Harris became the Democratic nominee; but as Schlozman and Rosenfeld have said since, the Democrats’ months of passivity about Biden’s faltering campaign—followed by their suppression of any competition to succeeded him—is only symptomatic of the same hollowness.

—Gustav Jönsson