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The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics
A major history of America's political parties from the country’s Founding to our embittered present
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 readers from the rise of mass party politics in the Jacksonian era through the years of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Today’s parties, at once 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, deeming it a mere instrument for power.
Party hollowness lies at the heart of our democratic discontents. With historical sweep and political acuity, The Hollow Parties offers powerful answers to pressing questions about how the nation’s parties became so dysfunctional—and how they might yet realize their promise.
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 readers from the rise of mass party politics in the Jacksonian era through the years of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Today’s parties, at once 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, deeming it a mere instrument for power.
Party hollowness lies at the heart of our democratic discontents. With historical sweep and political acuity, The Hollow Parties offers powerful answers to pressing questions about how the nation’s parties became so dysfunctional—and how they might yet realize their promise.
448 pages, Hardcover
Published May 7, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
April 23, 2024
Schlozman and Rosenfeld are party men: they love the idea of political parties as big, active, energized organizations with a real, physical presence in people's lives and neighborhoods, and they see the collapse of that kind of party as a major cause of our current political dysfunctions. But this is not a book of pure nostalgia, and while it might be fun to caricature them as neo-bossists (Danny used to chair the Cambridge Democratic Committee!) they harbor no illusions about the myriad failures of the Tammany Hall/Daley machine style of politics, or about the plausibility of reviving it.
They have to thread a very fine needle here, and I think they do it: for party, but not for unaccountable bosses; for loyalty and membership privileges, but for open participation and against exclusion; for compromise and bartering, but for a real policy program as well.
The bulk of the book is a history, spanning back to the Federalist/Democratic-Republican battles of Washington's first term up to Kevin McCarthy's ejection from the speakership. Because the span of time is so long, the narrative can feel a bit winding, but you get the lessons they want you to get. Movements characterized by a high-minded rejection of party organization (the Whigs at their worst, Mugwumps, Progressives, modern No Labels centrists) never work because they cannot find a firm social basis for their politics. Movements with high minded ideals (like the Free Labor Republicans or New Dealers) can succeed if they can simultaneously build a coalition based at least somewhat in key members' group self-interest. This isn't as hopeful a conclusion as you might think. The Lincoln that promised free land stolen from Indians for white laborers was necessary for the Lincoln that ended slavery to take power. The New Deal's ugly alliances with Southern white supremacists were an essential part of the bargain.
The book sans endnotes comes in under 300 pages, and there's lots more that could be said on these themes. While citing a lot of legal scholarship from the likes of Pildes, Persily, and Issacharoff, Schlozman and Rosenfeld demure from offering actual legal reform suggestions. Some of that reflects an understandable resistance to making suggestions with no prospect of passage, and a focus on things actual party actors can do right now. But I was still curious. Should we just repeal McCain-Feingold and FECA to encourage donors to give directly to parties, rather than outside super-PACs unburdened by contribution limits? Should we place limits on how much parties can spend on contractors, to encourage Nevada-style integrated parties where everyone just works for the Democrats? Should we repeal the charitable deduction, or at least have the IRS bar it for any even slightly political activities, to prevent the emergence of paraparty blobs? These strike me as important follow-up questions.
I'd also be interested in a more comparative perspective. Abroad there are a wide array of approaches to structuring and funding parties that might be able to inform revitalization efforts in the US. Germany has managed to maintain strong, stable parties with robust infrastructure around them in a system of (mostly) financially unregulated but publicly subsidized parties. France and Canada place much stronger limits on spending but also direct more subsidies toward parties. Germany seems like a better model for the US given First Amendment jurisprudence of the last decade and a half, but in any case there's lots to add here.
But the main point is that this is a delightful, necessary, learned book from two incredibly thoughtful people.
They have to thread a very fine needle here, and I think they do it: for party, but not for unaccountable bosses; for loyalty and membership privileges, but for open participation and against exclusion; for compromise and bartering, but for a real policy program as well.
The bulk of the book is a history, spanning back to the Federalist/Democratic-Republican battles of Washington's first term up to Kevin McCarthy's ejection from the speakership. Because the span of time is so long, the narrative can feel a bit winding, but you get the lessons they want you to get. Movements characterized by a high-minded rejection of party organization (the Whigs at their worst, Mugwumps, Progressives, modern No Labels centrists) never work because they cannot find a firm social basis for their politics. Movements with high minded ideals (like the Free Labor Republicans or New Dealers) can succeed if they can simultaneously build a coalition based at least somewhat in key members' group self-interest. This isn't as hopeful a conclusion as you might think. The Lincoln that promised free land stolen from Indians for white laborers was necessary for the Lincoln that ended slavery to take power. The New Deal's ugly alliances with Southern white supremacists were an essential part of the bargain.
The book sans endnotes comes in under 300 pages, and there's lots more that could be said on these themes. While citing a lot of legal scholarship from the likes of Pildes, Persily, and Issacharoff, Schlozman and Rosenfeld demure from offering actual legal reform suggestions. Some of that reflects an understandable resistance to making suggestions with no prospect of passage, and a focus on things actual party actors can do right now. But I was still curious. Should we just repeal McCain-Feingold and FECA to encourage donors to give directly to parties, rather than outside super-PACs unburdened by contribution limits? Should we place limits on how much parties can spend on contractors, to encourage Nevada-style integrated parties where everyone just works for the Democrats? Should we repeal the charitable deduction, or at least have the IRS bar it for any even slightly political activities, to prevent the emergence of paraparty blobs? These strike me as important follow-up questions.
I'd also be interested in a more comparative perspective. Abroad there are a wide array of approaches to structuring and funding parties that might be able to inform revitalization efforts in the US. Germany has managed to maintain strong, stable parties with robust infrastructure around them in a system of (mostly) financially unregulated but publicly subsidized parties. France and Canada place much stronger limits on spending but also direct more subsidies toward parties. Germany seems like a better model for the US given First Amendment jurisprudence of the last decade and a half, but in any case there's lots to add here.
But the main point is that this is a delightful, necessary, learned book from two incredibly thoughtful people.
April 9, 2025
Great thesis that is hobbled by a lot of alright political history not always convincingly relevant or tightly linked to it.
October 30, 2025
There is a lot of criticism I don’t agree with in these rating, and since I’m rating #104, I’m giving this a 5 even though it’s more like a 4.5 overall (you should read this!!). I found the entire book super engaging and was really interested in all portions, I agree with others that it can be dense and isn’t very well adapted for an audience of amateur politically-interested people, but just because you don’t understand 100% of an author’s references doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot to learn! I want to return to this in a few years when I understand some of the verbiage and references better but I walked away with a much better understanding of how Americas political parties were formed. Understandably, I think some of the criticism of this book comes from the fact it is an open critique on both political parties and many figureheads of both parties (always bound to ruffle feathers) AND they are distinctly pro-party so you must be sympathetic to that view. It is less of a philosophical look at the party system than a post mortem analysis of how things developed, which all in all I believe is done in a very bipartisan way. My only major critique is that the section on Trump loses some of the objective feel (in the audiobook they even imitate his voice which detracts from the seriousness of their analysis). I think the section at the end about how they believe each party can best reform was a great inclusion. All in all for the politically minded American- this is a great read!
October 28, 2024
This deserves a higher rating than what it has on here. Schlozman and Rosenfeld (SR) do two things in this book. The first is historical: they trace the history of American political parties from the founding era, with a special focus on the last 50 years. They explore tensions and trade-offs in the ways that parties are organized and how they change. Some are more focused on purity and ideological causes, whereas others are "accommodationist" entities that try to build as large a tent as possible. The first real American party was the Democratic Party, which was highly active at local levels and which openly championed the rights of the white common man. Parties in the 19th century in general were strong institutions with their own interests that mobilized large sections of the population to vote and participate in politics. They used largesse, corruption, intimidation, and other means to control territory, win votes, and exercise power. The Progressive movement, in a classic Whiggish tradition, challenged this model in favor of a mix of plebiscitary reforms (direct election of Senators, referenda, Australian ballots) that weakened the power of parties but also more emphasis on elite, expert rule. A second major wave of reform intensified hollowness in the late 20th century with the rise of the consultant class, the Democratic Party's embrace of democratic primaries, the New Right's instrumentalization of the GOP for conservative ends, and other changes.
What does a "hollow party" mean? It's a few things: 1. A party with little power as an institution, which is largely a vehicle for other groups' interests, and which is unable to self-regulate 2. A party with little presence in society, or which is highly concentrated in DC and other power centers but has little effect . 3. A party without a unifying ideology or vision that transcends any individual or constituency.
S and R show that both parties have become hollow, but in different ways. The Democratic Party has lost much of its presence at local levels, and it has become a party of the educated middle classes and urban elite (not entirely, but there has been a shift). There are lots of issue groups that affect it, and factions competing for control of it, but relatively few people (like Reid or a Pelosi) systematically acting to corral its factions and advocate the party's interests. The GOP, on the other hand, has become hollowed out by radicalism and a new cult of personality among Trump. Those like Ryan, Boehner, or McCarthy who have tried to put party over ideology or THE leader have suffered rebellion and isolation.
The second big point of this book is normative: the massive dysfunction and increasing radicalization of our politics is intimately related to hollow parties. S and R's big philosophical point is that while Americans have a negative view of parties, they are actually crucial to the maintenance of a democracy. They are essentially inevitable in a free society, as Madison argued in the Federalist (although he was referring to factions, and he saw them as a bad thing). They connect ordinary people to the political system, provide a sense of agency and responsiveness, and create guardrails against extremists. In short, they act as institutions, mediating relations between the voting public and the halls of power.
This requires a certain amount of trust in relatively autonomous and powerful political actors who can take action in the name of the best interests of the party; in short, parties don't seem to work when they are run as pure democracies. That's close to what we have now in the post-McGovern Fraser reform period in which popular primaries determine . That system, S and R contend, has shifted things too much toward party voters, often permitting more extreme candidates to succeed. Consequently, the S and R contend that there needs to be more efforts to strengthen parties as mediating institutions that have both grassroots presences and the ability to push back against popular will (by, for example, renewing the strength of superdelegates in primaries).
I thought all of this was excellent and very interesting. I also recommend Rosenfeld's book on "The Polarizers," which is an outstanding historical account of the roots of contemporary polarization. My main beef with this book is that I think it exaggerated the centrality of extremists in the GOP and conservative movement in earlier periods of US history. Rather than re-litigating that historiographical debate here, I'll just post an article I wrote on this matter earlier this year:
https://www.persuasion.community/p/ye...
What does a "hollow party" mean? It's a few things: 1. A party with little power as an institution, which is largely a vehicle for other groups' interests, and which is unable to self-regulate 2. A party with little presence in society, or which is highly concentrated in DC and other power centers but has little effect . 3. A party without a unifying ideology or vision that transcends any individual or constituency.
S and R show that both parties have become hollow, but in different ways. The Democratic Party has lost much of its presence at local levels, and it has become a party of the educated middle classes and urban elite (not entirely, but there has been a shift). There are lots of issue groups that affect it, and factions competing for control of it, but relatively few people (like Reid or a Pelosi) systematically acting to corral its factions and advocate the party's interests. The GOP, on the other hand, has become hollowed out by radicalism and a new cult of personality among Trump. Those like Ryan, Boehner, or McCarthy who have tried to put party over ideology or THE leader have suffered rebellion and isolation.
The second big point of this book is normative: the massive dysfunction and increasing radicalization of our politics is intimately related to hollow parties. S and R's big philosophical point is that while Americans have a negative view of parties, they are actually crucial to the maintenance of a democracy. They are essentially inevitable in a free society, as Madison argued in the Federalist (although he was referring to factions, and he saw them as a bad thing). They connect ordinary people to the political system, provide a sense of agency and responsiveness, and create guardrails against extremists. In short, they act as institutions, mediating relations between the voting public and the halls of power.
This requires a certain amount of trust in relatively autonomous and powerful political actors who can take action in the name of the best interests of the party; in short, parties don't seem to work when they are run as pure democracies. That's close to what we have now in the post-McGovern Fraser reform period in which popular primaries determine . That system, S and R contend, has shifted things too much toward party voters, often permitting more extreme candidates to succeed. Consequently, the S and R contend that there needs to be more efforts to strengthen parties as mediating institutions that have both grassroots presences and the ability to push back against popular will (by, for example, renewing the strength of superdelegates in primaries).
I thought all of this was excellent and very interesting. I also recommend Rosenfeld's book on "The Polarizers," which is an outstanding historical account of the roots of contemporary polarization. My main beef with this book is that I think it exaggerated the centrality of extremists in the GOP and conservative movement in earlier periods of US history. Rather than re-litigating that historiographical debate here, I'll just post an article I wrote on this matter earlier this year:
https://www.persuasion.community/p/ye...
November 22, 2024
Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld's "The Hollow Parties" offers a sharp, well-structured history of the US party system as well as reflections on why the parties themselves have become weaker and what can be done to fix that.
They trace the weakening of today's parties since 1970s to neoliberalism (and its restructuring of the domestic and global economy, and its narrowing of the range of policy options) and party polarization (both the ideological sorting and the asymmetric rightward turn of the Republicans), as well as to the rise of various consultants, media outlets and operatives, PACs/IE PACs, etc.
They identify six strands that have been mainstays of the US party system albeit in different forms: an accommodationist strand (the dealmakers and transactionalists), the anti-party strand (often an elite centrism), the pro-capital strand (doing the bidding of big business and sometimes "little big business"), a policy-reform strand (the incrementalist liberalism), a radical strand (those who go further than incrementalism), and a populist strand (which can fall on either side of the spectrum, but which they carefully and astutely contrast with radicalism). The history is thorough and engaging, and if at times it can feel overly long, it is likely also not long enough.
They diagnose the contemporary problems of the two major parties well, pointing out that the Democratic Party suffers from a “listlessness” resulting from a lack of common purpose among the various factions within, and the Republican Party suffers from a lack of guardrails amidst an increasingly counter-majoritarian streak.
Parties today are rarely seen or experienced as the membership organizations they were at some points in US history and which they can more closely adhere to in Europe. For the most part, the only benefit of being a member of a party is being able to run on a ballot line and to vote in a primary or caucus if said primary or caucus is closed. Although we have a strong and enduring duopoly, the benefits that the parties offer as *parties* can seem quite limited.
They are critical of the array of non-party institutions that exist in the left-of-center civic space, but those exist because of the party’s failure to do the work of long-term organizing--they are not the cause of that failure. Moreover, although their prescriptions on how to strengthen the party are worthwhile (particularly by emphasizing on the importance of investing in year-round organizing), I was left wondering what they, on a substantive level, believe a party should represent. To what extent should a party even adhere to its own platform, and whose voices should be heard in creating that platform? If the Democratic Party has lost a sense of common purpose, then how is common purpose, rather than just party infrastructure, rebuilt? This question seems especially salient in that a contrast between the two parties is that the Democratic Party is more interested in the work of passing new things, whereas, for Republicans, rolling things back is a main agenda point. The work of destruction is easier than the work of creation,
I would have loved to see the book explore more the way that expansions of the franchise had an impact (or not!) on the party system. They talk about the removal of white male property requirements and Jacksonian democracy and somewhat the changes in the electorate that came with abolition, but I would have wanted to see more attention to the latter as well as to the entry into the electorate of women and voters under 21 -- as well as the full enfranchisement of Black voters in the 1960s. Similarly, I would have welcomed more attention to the *why* behind the asymmetry behind the two parties when it comes to the work of "defunding the opposition." This has been a Republican strategy at least since the 1980s, and Democrats interested in enriching the security forces (Think: big city mayors and the police, but also national Democrats with the border patrol and military) and Wall Street financiers who reliably oppose them lack coherency.
They trace the weakening of today's parties since 1970s to neoliberalism (and its restructuring of the domestic and global economy, and its narrowing of the range of policy options) and party polarization (both the ideological sorting and the asymmetric rightward turn of the Republicans), as well as to the rise of various consultants, media outlets and operatives, PACs/IE PACs, etc.
They identify six strands that have been mainstays of the US party system albeit in different forms: an accommodationist strand (the dealmakers and transactionalists), the anti-party strand (often an elite centrism), the pro-capital strand (doing the bidding of big business and sometimes "little big business"), a policy-reform strand (the incrementalist liberalism), a radical strand (those who go further than incrementalism), and a populist strand (which can fall on either side of the spectrum, but which they carefully and astutely contrast with radicalism). The history is thorough and engaging, and if at times it can feel overly long, it is likely also not long enough.
They diagnose the contemporary problems of the two major parties well, pointing out that the Democratic Party suffers from a “listlessness” resulting from a lack of common purpose among the various factions within, and the Republican Party suffers from a lack of guardrails amidst an increasingly counter-majoritarian streak.
Parties today are rarely seen or experienced as the membership organizations they were at some points in US history and which they can more closely adhere to in Europe. For the most part, the only benefit of being a member of a party is being able to run on a ballot line and to vote in a primary or caucus if said primary or caucus is closed. Although we have a strong and enduring duopoly, the benefits that the parties offer as *parties* can seem quite limited.
They are critical of the array of non-party institutions that exist in the left-of-center civic space, but those exist because of the party’s failure to do the work of long-term organizing--they are not the cause of that failure. Moreover, although their prescriptions on how to strengthen the party are worthwhile (particularly by emphasizing on the importance of investing in year-round organizing), I was left wondering what they, on a substantive level, believe a party should represent. To what extent should a party even adhere to its own platform, and whose voices should be heard in creating that platform? If the Democratic Party has lost a sense of common purpose, then how is common purpose, rather than just party infrastructure, rebuilt? This question seems especially salient in that a contrast between the two parties is that the Democratic Party is more interested in the work of passing new things, whereas, for Republicans, rolling things back is a main agenda point. The work of destruction is easier than the work of creation,
I would have loved to see the book explore more the way that expansions of the franchise had an impact (or not!) on the party system. They talk about the removal of white male property requirements and Jacksonian democracy and somewhat the changes in the electorate that came with abolition, but I would have wanted to see more attention to the latter as well as to the entry into the electorate of women and voters under 21 -- as well as the full enfranchisement of Black voters in the 1960s. Similarly, I would have welcomed more attention to the *why* behind the asymmetry behind the two parties when it comes to the work of "defunding the opposition." This has been a Republican strategy at least since the 1980s, and Democrats interested in enriching the security forces (Think: big city mayors and the police, but also national Democrats with the border patrol and military) and Wall Street financiers who reliably oppose them lack coherency.
December 27, 2024
Why are today’s major parties so bad at setting the terms of our politics, Schlozman and Rosenfled ask? The answer, they say, is they’ve become hollow shells:
“Hollow parties are parties that, for all their array of activities, demonstrate fundamental incapacities in organizing democracy. This distinctive combination of activity and incapacity manifests itself across multiple dimensions. As a civic presence in an era of nationalized politics, hollow parties are unrooted in communities and unfelt in ordinary people’s day-to-day lives. Organizationally, they tilt toward national entities at the expense of state and local ones. Swarming networks of unattached paraparty groups, without popular accountability, overshadow formal party organizations at all levels….Today’s parties are distinctive for the presence of so many figures entwined with and buzzing around but not organizationally part of formal party organizations themselves.”
Schlozman and Rosenfeld call that that buzzing, disorderly swarm “the party blob,” and they argue that with the rise of the second Gilded Age of today’s hyper-rich along with small-dollar online fundraising, the party blobs now overshadow the formal parties. That description feels 100% right. All that said, Schlozman and Rosenfeld may overstate the blob’s sloppiness. They write, “for many of these paraparty organizations, neither electoral success nor policy achievements serve as the front-and-center goal or metric of success and accountability. That leaves the core tasks of a political party—to corral allies and build electoral coalitions sufficient to take control of government and implement an agenda—paradoxically underserved. With outside groups dominating political life, the formal parties serve as punching bags for ideological activists and candidate operations more than as conscious stewards of a political enterprise.”
This was written back in July but seems just as relevant as 2025 begins and folks wonder--what exactly is the Democratic Party and is anything holding it together?
“Hollow parties are parties that, for all their array of activities, demonstrate fundamental incapacities in organizing democracy. This distinctive combination of activity and incapacity manifests itself across multiple dimensions. As a civic presence in an era of nationalized politics, hollow parties are unrooted in communities and unfelt in ordinary people’s day-to-day lives. Organizationally, they tilt toward national entities at the expense of state and local ones. Swarming networks of unattached paraparty groups, without popular accountability, overshadow formal party organizations at all levels….Today’s parties are distinctive for the presence of so many figures entwined with and buzzing around but not organizationally part of formal party organizations themselves.”
Schlozman and Rosenfeld call that that buzzing, disorderly swarm “the party blob,” and they argue that with the rise of the second Gilded Age of today’s hyper-rich along with small-dollar online fundraising, the party blobs now overshadow the formal parties. That description feels 100% right. All that said, Schlozman and Rosenfeld may overstate the blob’s sloppiness. They write, “for many of these paraparty organizations, neither electoral success nor policy achievements serve as the front-and-center goal or metric of success and accountability. That leaves the core tasks of a political party—to corral allies and build electoral coalitions sufficient to take control of government and implement an agenda—paradoxically underserved. With outside groups dominating political life, the formal parties serve as punching bags for ideological activists and candidate operations more than as conscious stewards of a political enterprise.”
This was written back in July but seems just as relevant as 2025 begins and folks wonder--what exactly is the Democratic Party and is anything holding it together?
October 10, 2024
This is primarily a history book of the US in a similar vein to other straightforward history books, but with a particular focus on political parties as their own entities. The authors use this history to then argue for a renewal of political parties as local institutions to encourage civic participation and reduce the amount of charismatic yet corrupt populists who create institutional damage.
The book is mostly history, with only small recommendations at the end of the chapters on how to do better. If they added more editorializing and perhaps bring in international examples their arguments would be stronger. They acknowledge the general mistrust of parties but don't really have an answer for that.
The book is mostly history, with only small recommendations at the end of the chapters on how to do better. If they added more editorializing and perhaps bring in international examples their arguments would be stronger. They acknowledge the general mistrust of parties but don't really have an answer for that.
January 8, 2026
Quite detailed and fascinating to read.
Most of the book focuses on the battles of feuding political parties since the start of the U.S. post-Washington and winds through copious amounts of history regarding the trends and movements, but in a way that if you’re remotely interested in history, will enjoy. There is a lot of emphasis on the changes in the last 50 years, exploring many of the tensions and tradeoffs.
The authors truly advocate for stronger political parties that play a larger role in both the community and the government, while criticizing both parties in a rather bipartisan manner.
Most of the book focuses on the battles of feuding political parties since the start of the U.S. post-Washington and winds through copious amounts of history regarding the trends and movements, but in a way that if you’re remotely interested in history, will enjoy. There is a lot of emphasis on the changes in the last 50 years, exploring many of the tensions and tradeoffs.
The authors truly advocate for stronger political parties that play a larger role in both the community and the government, while criticizing both parties in a rather bipartisan manner.
November 16, 2024
I read this book during the lead up to the 2024 election between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
Reading it at this time seemed very timely. Although the authors come at their analysis from a Democrat point of view, it still provided useful insights.
The authors seem to believe that a return to the 19th century party spoils system would be a good thing. I’m not sure I agree.
However having a party system where people buy into a consistent party ideology would make things more predictable.
Reading it at this time seemed very timely. Although the authors come at their analysis from a Democrat point of view, it still provided useful insights.
The authors seem to believe that a return to the 19th century party spoils system would be a good thing. I’m not sure I agree.
However having a party system where people buy into a consistent party ideology would make things more predictable.
December 21, 2024
Useful, serious, interesting for a certain kind of nerded out poli-sci type.
The book goes all-in on its historical ambitions. But with only a few hundred pages of text, the authors resort to incredibly dense paragraphs that zig and zag all over. At times tough to keep up and keep their overriding project in mind.
The editorializing felt a bit skin deep and the recapitulation of recent events feels a bit been there / done that. Still, it’s a compelling lens and they’re right about the fundamental (I think).
The book goes all-in on its historical ambitions. But with only a few hundred pages of text, the authors resort to incredibly dense paragraphs that zig and zag all over. At times tough to keep up and keep their overriding project in mind.
The editorializing felt a bit skin deep and the recapitulation of recent events feels a bit been there / done that. Still, it’s a compelling lens and they’re right about the fundamental (I think).
April 15, 2025
I thank the authors of this book for writing this, as the subject of their scholarship is interesting and Lord knows they’re two intelligent men doing what I could not. But therein lies the problem- their intelligence. I hope to God neither of these fellas teach for a living as they seem more interested in forging barely coherent paragraphs for the sake of academic vanity than communicating their very interesting analysis. Pound for pound it may be one of the worst written books I’ve ever read.
November 7, 2025
Narrated by Tom Beyer.
Admittedly I struggled to pay the most attention to this audiobook but that's on me for consuming a very theoretical, more academic book through audiobook. I appreciate that Schlozman and Rosenfeld don't just outline what went wrong with our political parties but also attempt to demonstrate a path forward. The view from 2025 looks a little more bleak but I can agree at the very least there needs to be more effort put forth into community building (though maybe the community doesn't need to be structured or built around a political party).
Admittedly I struggled to pay the most attention to this audiobook but that's on me for consuming a very theoretical, more academic book through audiobook. I appreciate that Schlozman and Rosenfeld don't just outline what went wrong with our political parties but also attempt to demonstrate a path forward. The view from 2025 looks a little more bleak but I can agree at the very least there needs to be more effort put forth into community building (though maybe the community doesn't need to be structured or built around a political party).
January 3, 2026
Would probably give this a 4.5 because it took me a sec to get into it, but still highly recommend it. A very interesting dive into the history of American political parties and rebuke of the current state. It was a strong defense of parties as actors to mobilize and organize disparate groups to achieve common goals. It offered mostly-convincing strategies on how to built active parties.
I felt like Matthew McConaughey screaming No! in Interstellar while reading about the collapse of the New Deal Order. We used to be a serious country.
I felt like Matthew McConaughey screaming No! in Interstellar while reading about the collapse of the New Deal Order. We used to be a serious country.
July 14, 2024
Going through American history specifically by looking at political parties was really interesting. I thought the chapters on the right wing were generally sharper and more interesting. While they didn’t necessarily cover new ground, they put the facts together in new and different ways that made me think. In some ways, it was truly frightening, as I came away with a sense that there is no one at the tiller (which, to be fair, is the thesis).
December 16, 2024
The historical section, up until the post war period was good. The deep dive into the capture of the GOP by the neoliberals was on point, but the complete capitulation of the Ds to the neoliberals starting with Clinton was a complete whitewash. They say up front the are all Democrats, but own the failure of the democratic party! It's an issue that cannot be ignored if we want to extract ourselves from the endless crises of capitalism.
April 26, 2025
"The Hollow Parties" is a really informative-- if difficult-- read. The authors provide a comprehensive and convincing framework for understanding the different philosophies of American political parties all the way back to the Jacksonians and Whigs.
The last chapter offers some hope that our parties can get back into the business of enriching our daily and civic lives instead of engaging in fear-based electioneering.
The last chapter offers some hope that our parties can get back into the business of enriching our daily and civic lives instead of engaging in fear-based electioneering.
November 1, 2024
This is well researched and interesting but you probably ought to be really interested in national politics to get a ton out of it. Despite my history pedigree I found the start of the book a trudge and only really focused in on the years I was alive for.
A bit dense for the uniformed I liked it and learned some but probably should’ve read it in print.
A bit dense for the uniformed I liked it and learned some but probably should’ve read it in print.
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July 15, 2024The thesis seems important, but as a non-expert I didn't have enough scaffolding to understand what the argument specifically was or how all the historical facts in the book built up to it. I'd enjoy reading a more popular-audience version.
November 7, 2024
Thoughtful and thorough, with some great insights into why parties function the way they do. The historical detail of the periods covered is really helpful--I especially liked the chapters on the Democrats, from the New Deal to their neoliberal turn in the 90s.
Rather dry in its prose, though.
Rather dry in its prose, though.
May 17, 2025
I really wanted to like this more.
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July 26, 2025DNF at 16% audiobook. Was too dry..my mind kept wandering. I tried.
December 30, 2024
Torturous academic reading, marginal value, hopefully the authors don't run for office.
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