The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics: 202 (Princeton Studies in American Politics)

A major history from the Founding to our embittered present that “explains the void” (Politico) at the center of America’s political partiesFeatured on The Ezra Klein Show and The Weekly Show with Jon StewartAmerica’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 fr