**Author:** [[3. Resources/Authors/Daniel Schlozman, Sam Rosenfeld|Daniel Schlozman, Sam Rosenfeld]] # Book Overview ![[The Hollow Parties Visual]] ## About the Author Daniel Schlozman is a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University whose work focuses on American political parties, interest groups, and political development. Sam Rosenfeld is a political scientist at Colgate University who studies American party politics, polarization, and the institutional development of the party system. Together they bring a rare combination -- deep archival research spanning two centuries of American party history with the analytical framework of American Political Development (APD) scholarship. Both are self-described left-liberal Democrats, a fact they disclose openly and which informs their normative commitment to vigorous, civically rooted party politics. ## Central Thesis American political parties are hollow. They maintain hard outer shells -- marked by intense interparty electoral conflict and visible activity -- but their cores are disordered, lacking the capacity for concerted action or positive loyalties. The parties are organizationally top-heavy and poorly rooted in communities, dominated by satellite groups (the "party blob") that command little popular accountability, and unable to bring political elites and the mass public together in common purpose. This hollowness isn't accidental. It emerged from the political-economic upheavals of the 1970s, driven primarily by the rise of what Schlozman and Rosenfeld call the "Long New Right," which treated parties as instruments to be used or discarded in pursuit of power. The two parties now manifest hollowness asymmetrically: Democratic ineffectuality on one hand, Republican extremism on the other. The book builds this argument through a sweeping historical narrative that traces American party politics from the Founding through the present, identifying six recurring "party strands" -- accommodationist, anti-party, pro-capital, policy-reform, radical, and populist -- that recombine across different eras. There's no golden age to recover, but there are historical fragments of more vital party politics that point toward what un-hollow parties might look like. ## Why This Book Matters At a moment when commentary about American political dysfunction tends toward vague gestures at "polarization" or "division," Schlozman and Rosenfeld offer something more precise. Parties occupy a paradoxical status in most accounts of American politics -- seemingly everywhere and nowhere, overbearing and enfeebled at the same time. This book untangles that paradox by giving it a name (hollowness) and a history. The concept of the "party blob" -- the disorderly swarm of PACs, dark-money groups, media figures, think tanks, consultants, and megadonors that surround each party -- captures something that existing frameworks like "party networks" fail to explain. For anyone trying to understand why American politics feels simultaneously hyperpartisan and incapable of purposeful collective action, this book provides the analytical architecture. --- # Chapter Summaries ## Chapter 1: The Problem of Hollow Parties The book opens with two vignettes four decades apart: RNC chair Richard Richards sitting alone at a 1981 breakfast after New Right groups snubbed him, and the Iowa Democratic Party's catastrophic 2020 caucus app failure. Both illustrate the same condition -- parties that can't control the forces around them. The chapter defines hollowness through three dimensions: parties are unrooted in communities as a civic presence, organizationally tilted toward national entities at the expense of state and local ones, and lacking in legitimacy among both the mass public and engaged political actors. The authors introduce the "party blob" concept, lay out their six-strand framework for understanding recurring approaches to party politics across American history, and locate the genesis of hollowness in the political-economic upheavals of the 1970s. They emphasize the decisive role of the Long New Right in breaking American party politics, and stress that hollowness and polarization are linked but distinct processes. ## Chapter 2: The Affirmation of Party in Antebellum America Traces the rise of mass party politics from the anti-party Constitution through the Second Party System's collapse over slavery. The Jacksonians, led by Martin Van Buren, created the world's first mass political party -- locally rooted, participatory, and affirmatively pro-party -- crystallizing the accommodationist strand. Their project paired democratic egalitarianism for white men with systematic racial exclusion, violent expropriation of Native peoples, and suppression of abolitionist speech. The Whigs formed in opposition, melding moral reformism with deep ambivalence toward party itself, embodying the tension between anti-party virtue and popular politics. When expansionism forced the slavery question beyond what cross-sectional coalitions could contain, the Second Party System collapsed, setting the stage for the Republicans. ## Chapter 3: The Republican Party and the Civil War The free labor Republicans pursued a transformative party project without peer in American history. From their founding in 1854 through Reconstruction, they fought the Civil War, freed enslaved people, and remade the Constitution. Lincoln's statesmanship rested on solid party foundations -- he balanced factions, used patronage strategically, and positioned himself at the broad center of his party. But Reconstruction exposed the limits of a localistic, patronage-oriented party system that couldn't build a national state capable of transforming the defeated South. By 1877, the great project had receded. The party fell back to accommodationism and became a vehicle for industrial capital, retaining only a distant echo of free labor's grand promise. ## Chapter 4: The Politics of Industrialism and the Progressive Transformation of Party Covers the widest range of party visions in American history. Gilded Age parties practiced transactional accommodationism on a grand scale, mediating the exchange between business and political outcomes. Mugwumps offered pure anti-partyism with no institutional solutions. Labor radicals, Populists, and Socialists all mounted challenges but couldn't overcome the barriers of race, section, and the two-party system. The Progressives proved most durably influential by attacking parties themselves -- introducing direct primaries, the Australian ballot, and other procedural reforms that stripped away party control over elections. But their procedural focus didn't solve the underlying questions of political economy. The old party forms proved resilient even as parties lost ground to voters below, bureaucracies and presidents above, and new advocacy groups on all sides. ## Chapters 5-6: The New Deal Order and the Long New Right Chapter 5 examines three visions that emerged from the New Deal era: midcentury pragmatists who held fast to machine-style accommodationism, programmatic liberals who championed issue-oriented party politics, and the McGovern-Fraser reformers who envisioned activist-driven parties but turned procedural reform into an end in itself. Chapter 6 traces the Long New Right from the 1950s through the 1990s -- the book's most urgent historical argument. Conservatives exploited grievance and mobilized status resentments to break free from old party constraints. Their commitment to conflict and ruthless instrumentalism toward institutions shattered what had previously restrained political action. At the GOP's core was a "plutocratic-populist bargain": electoral politics of resentment serving a regressive policy agenda. ## Chapter 7: Democrats Since Reagan Traces the Democrats since 1981 through the twin themes of polarization and neoliberalism. Even as ideological sorting removed old-line conservatives, an increasingly middle-class party struggled to bring its diverse constituencies together or connect political strategy with public policy. The party's project remained continually out of reach. ## Chapter 8: Republicans from Gingrich to Trump Portrays a party confident in using state power to reward friends and punish enemies but not to solve public problems. Against portrayals that emphasize the GOP's alleged brutal effectiveness, the authors show a party beset by forces it can't control and dangerously incapable of policing itself or governing. ## Chapter 9: Conclusion Offers recommendations for party renewal grounded in a case study of the Nevada Democratic Party's "Reid Machine" and the Culinary Workers Union. The authors seek vigorous, participatory parties with broad legitimacy and deep commitment to enacting democratic visions. --- # Key Themes and Highlights ## The Party Blob The book's most distinctive contribution. The "party blob" names the disorderly assortment of actors surrounding each party -- single-issue groups, media figures, think tanks, PACs, Super PACs, dark-money outfits, megadonors, and consultancies -- none of them accountable to the electorate. The defining feature is precisely this amorphousness, which contradicts scholarly depictions of "party networks" coordinating toward shared goals. The blobs now overshadow the formal parties, leaving core party tasks paradoxically underserved. ## Six Party Strands Rather than treating American party politics as a single evolving tradition, the book identifies six recurring ideal types: accommodationist (coalition-building and dealmaking), anti-party (suspicion of partisan organization), pro-capital (business logic applied to politics), policy-reform (parties as problem-solvers), radical (parties as levers for egalitarian transformation), and populist (us-versus-them division of the polity). These strands recombine across different eras, and their current hollow manifestations each reflect the decay of more robust party-supporting tendencies. ## Asymmetric Hollowness The two parties are hollow in different ways. Democrats suffer from ineffectuality -- an increasingly middle-class party that can't bring diverse constituencies together or connect strategy to policy. Republicans suffer from extremism -- a party captured by the Long New Right's instrumentalism, now dangerously incapable of policing its own boundaries against extremism. The asymmetry matters: "since the seventies, a hollowed-out Democratic Party has been rendered listless by conflicting actors and a hollowed-out Republican Party pulled to radicalism by committed actors." ## The 1970s as Critical Juncture The book dates party hollowness to the collapse of the New Deal order. Two processes worked in tandem: neoliberalism dismantled the postwar political economy, while party polarization sorted Democrats and Republicans into ideological teams. The McGovern-Fraser reforms weakened party organizations, but the decisive break came from the Long New Right, which rejected the paradigm that treated party forms as important and party contestation as a special category of conflict. ## Parties as Stewards of Democracy Throughout, the book insists that parties matter not just instrumentally but for democratic legitimacy itself. When vigorous and civically rooted parties link citizens to government while schooling them in the give-and-take of political engagement, they give legitimacy to democratic rule. When they falter, so does the political system. Hollow parties don't merely enfeeble governance -- they endanger democracy. --- # Analytical Reading ## Main Arguments 1. Contemporary American parties are "hollow" -- combining high levels of activity with fundamental incapacities in organizing democracy. 2. The "party blob" of paraparty organizations has overshadowed formal parties, leaving core party tasks underserved. 3. Hollowness emerged from the political-economic upheavals of the 1970s, not primarily from the 1960s-era reforms. 4. The Long New Right was the decisive force in breaking American party politics, treating parties as pure instruments for power. 5. Six recurring "party strands" -- accommodationist, anti-party, pro-capital, policy-reform, radical, populist -- recombine across American history. 6. The two parties manifest hollowness asymmetrically: Democratic ineffectuality versus Republican extremism. 7. No golden age of parties exists to recover, but historical fragments offer models of more vital organized politics. 8. Parties are essential democratic institutions whose health directly affects the health of the political system. 9. Different class power arrangements in a post-New Deal world would have led to different, less hollow manifestations of party politics. ## Methodology This is a work of American Political Development (APD), combining close archival engagement with the words and actions of political figures across two centuries, analysis of secondary historical literature, and original conceptual framework-building. The authors work at the intersection of political science, political history, and the study of American political development. Their approach rejects stylized theories of party in favor of understanding parties as party actors have seen them, attending to the back-and-forth between social forces and political change. The six-strand framework provides conceptual scaffolding for a sweeping narrative that stretches from the Founding through the Trump era. ## Strengths The concept of party hollowness names something real that existing frameworks miss. "Polarization" alone can't explain why parties that fight intensely in elections can't govern purposefully. The "party blob" concept is immediately recognizable and analytically productive. The historical sweep is genuinely illuminating -- placing contemporary dysfunction in a tradition stretching back to Van Buren and the Jacksonians reframes debates that too often treat the present as unprecedented. The six-strand framework avoids the trap of identifying one "true" tradition of American party politics. And the authors' honesty about their own partisan commitments strengthens rather than weakens the work. ## Limitations The book's length and scope can overwhelm. The six-strand framework, while useful, sometimes feels like an analytical overlay imposed on history rather than emerging from it. The historical chapters, though individually strong, cover ground familiar to readers of prior scholarship on each period. The contemporary chapters (7 and 8), which address the most urgent questions, arrive late and compress complex developments. The prescriptive conclusion -- looking to the Nevada Reid Machine as a model -- feels underdeveloped relative to the diagnosis. And the book's normative commitment to strong parties may underplay the legitimate reasons Americans distrust party organizations. --- # Personal Reflection ## Key Takeaways The most valuable idea is the distinction between activity and incapacity. American parties do plenty -- they raise money, run campaigns, produce media, organize rallies. But all that activity masks a deeper inability to bring people together in common purpose, police their own boundaries, or connect electoral strategy to governance. Naming this condition "hollowness" gives us a way to talk about what's wrong that goes beyond the usual complaints about polarization. The "party blob" concept is the book's sleeper hit. It explains why so much money and energy flows through American politics without producing coherent outcomes. When PACs, dark-money groups, media personalities, and consultancies all pursue their own incentives inside a party's orbit, the formal party becomes a punching bag rather than a steward of collective action. The historical argument that the Long New Right -- not the 1960s reforms -- broke American party politics is provocative and persuasive. The counterfactual exercise (imagine McGovern-Fraser without the Long New Right) clarifies what made the difference: not procedural reform per se, but a political movement that rejected the very idea that party forms matter and party contestation deserves special respect. ## Questions Raised - If the Long New Right broke party politics, can parties be un-hollowed without first defeating the political forces that hollowed them? - The book emphasizes the 1970s as a critical juncture, but how much did the digital revolution and social media accelerate hollowness in ways the original juncture didn't determine? - How does the concept of hollowness apply to parties in other democracies experiencing similar declines in membership, trust, and organizational rootedness? - Can the formal party ever reassert control over the party blob, or has the financial and technological landscape permanently shifted power outward? - The authors champion civically rooted, participatory parties -- but in a society where civic participation has declined across nearly every institution, is the problem really party-specific? ## Connections to Other Works - [[Why Parties?]] by John Aldrich -- Aldrich's rational-choice framework treats parties as solutions to collective action problems; Schlozman and Rosenfeld push back by insisting that what party actors "want" has varied enormously across history. - [[The Tyranny of the Minority]] by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt -- Covers overlapping terrain on democratic crisis but emphasizes institutional rules rather than party organizational capacity. - [[Let Them Eat Tweets]] by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson -- The "plutocratic-populist bargain" concept resonates directly with the hollow parties thesis about Republican extremism. - [[Bowling Alone]] by Robert Putnam -- Putnam's decline-of-civic-engagement thesis provides the social backdrop for party hollowness, though Schlozman and Rosenfeld focus on specifically political rather than general civic decline. - [[The Politicos]] by Matthew Josephson -- Classic account of Gilded Age party politics that covers similar ground to chapter 4's treatment of accommodationist machines and pro-capital entanglements. --- # Reading Notes - The opening vignettes -- RNC chair Richards eating alone in 1981, the Iowa caucus app meltdown in 2020 -- perfectly capture the book's core argument about parties that can't control the forces around them. - The "party blob" is an ugly phrase for a sharp concept. It captures something that "party network" theories miss: the amorphousness and lack of coordination among the groups orbiting each party. - The six-strand framework is most useful as a way to see how different approaches to party recur across very different eras. The accommodationist strand connecting Van Buren's Democrats to Daley's Chicago machine to contemporary deal-cutters is a genuinely illuminating thread. - The counterfactual -- imagine McGovern-Fraser reforms without the Long New Right -- is the book's sharpest analytical move. It isolates what actually broke party politics from what merely changed its procedures. - Table 1.1, listing collective party actors from Jacksonians to Right Populists with their emblematic figures, is an outstanding reference for placing contemporary movements in historical context. - The treatment of the Jacksonians is admirably unsentimental -- crediting their innovations in mass democratic politics while unflinchingly documenting their racial exclusion, violent expansionism, and suppression of antislavery speech. - Free labor Republicanism gets the most sympathetic treatment of any historical party project. The authors clearly admire a party that used democratic politics as an instrument of human freedom, even while acknowledging the limits that defeated Reconstruction. - The Progressives' legacy is treated as deeply ambivalent: they stripped parties of their democratic functions but didn't replace them with anything capable of organizing democratic life. - The authors' candor about their own politics -- "proud and loyal, albeit often-disillusioned, capital-D Democrats" whose politics are "broadly left-liberal" -- is refreshing and makes their analytical claims easier to evaluate.