The election results this past November led a lot of people to write benedictions and funeral orations for the Democratic Party. A socialist will say that it was Harris’ decision to not court the left. A moderate will of course say it must have been progressive purity tests. The American Prospect’s Ryan Cooper says the final nail in the coffin was insufficient partisan messaging.
Theories abound. But the working consensus, by and large, is that the Democratic Party was slaughtered. Two political scientists have another opinion. They say the Democratic Party was already dead. And so is the Republican Party. “Hard shells, marked with the scars of interparty electoral conflict, cover disordered cores, devoid of concerted action and positive loyalties.”
That’s how political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld describe political parties in their latest book, The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics. As members of that select set of people who think about what a political party really is more than DSA members do, Scholzman and Rosenfeld argue the long legacy of the New Right is really the gutting of American political parties’ capacity. With no control of the true levers of power, American parties are left vulnerable to hostile takeover from the Right (Donald Trump) and the Left (Bernie Sanders).
If you’re familiar with the subject, they don’t cover too much fresh land, but the book is still a well-written presentation of hundreds of years of political party history, including an interesting discussion of Las Vegas DSA’s failed takeover of the Nevada Democratic Party. There’s also some understandable overlap with Timothy Shenk’s recent book Realigners.
Those already conversant with theory might be interested in how the authors of a book on political parties understand what a party actually is, a significant framing decision. They opt to adopt E.E. Schattschneider’s definition of a party as “an organized attempt to get control of the government.” Or, to borrow from the late journalist James Reston, “the function of a political party in this country is not to preside over a philosophical debate, but to control and direct the struggle for power.” Good news for folks who want DSA to be a political party: by this definition it already is.
For the aspiring socialist organizer, though, Thomas Schwartz’s understanding of the party as long coalition remains my personal favorite. Schwartz succinctly argues that parties are ways to avoid cycles where different majorities form around individual bills, leaving all actors worse off. To head off these cycles at the pass, majority parties limit what legislation makes it to a vote and minimize “the cost of being on the losing side” for their members. They also work to prevent intra-coalition division by not making their members cast costly votes. Similar logic applies outside of the legislature: organizing coalitions form to change public policy according to shared goals and need to avoid touching the live wires of their disagreements.
While American political parties do still play this specific role on occasion — why doesn’t Medicare for All get a floor vote? — the picture Schlozman and Rosenfeld paint focuses more on the parties’ inability to discipline rogue actors. Of course, American parties frequently fail Schwartz’s test as well: left-liberal New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote a good article recently on Democrats’ inability to organize themselves and actually act as a party-in-opposition. But the insufficiency of party infrastructure is even more striking.
The Republicans and Democrats have both shunted almost all of the traditional responsibilities of political parties onto nominally independent organizations. Policies get cooked up by think tanks, not Congressional offices. In 2024 the Trump campaign even offloaded their get out the vote operation onto Turning Point Action, a decision which led to Democrats preemptively salivating at headlines like “Trying to Find Trump’s Ground Game in Pennsylvania” and “Donald Trump’s Weak Ground Game Could Be His Undoing.” And thanks partly to Citizens United and partly to the lack of membership dues, the parties don’t even do that much direct funding of their own campaigns. Neither ActBlue nor WinRed are owned by the parties they exist solely in order to boost.
Ever “capital-D Democrats,” as they admit in the first chapter, Schlozman and Rosenfeld argue the late Nevada senator Harry Reid’s state machine is the model to ape going forward. Their case that unions are a necessary and valuable part of any left-of-center coalition is unlikely to surprise any socialists. The same is true of their bemoaning state parties’ current existence as mere “custodians of a ballot line.”
But while Reid’s operation is a plausible model for a remake of the Democratic Party, or for any new third party efforts, socialists, as good internationalists, should also continue to look abroad. Despite early concerns, the Mexican political party Morena seems to have easily weathered longtime leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s departure from the presidency. Alex González Ormerod’s profile of the party for Americas Quarterly is worth reading. In part by railing against the status quo, and in part by expanding social programs, Morena not only defied the post-COVID incumbency curse but won a landslide victory, securing both the presidency and a supermajority in the legislature.
So what’s the first lesson democratic socialists afraid of DSA becoming yet another hollow party ought to internalize? Listen to turn-of-the-20th-century machine politician George Washington Plunkitt: “Men ain’t in politics for nothin’. They want to get somethin’ out of it.” In a more academic register, Theodore Lowi wrote in his introduction to the second edition of Harold F. Gosnell’s Machine Politics: Chicago Model that “destruction of the party foundations of the mayoralty cleaned up many cities but also destroyed the basis for sustained, central, popularly based action.” If things potential voters actually care about aren’t within the domain of politics, they are going to tune it out. Salience matters.
Schlozman and Rosenfeld agree to an extent, writing that “modern-day judgments tend to condemn all the money but view the mass participatory politics more kindly. Yet the two were completely intertwined. All the cash bought a formidable civic presence at a steep price.” In other words, people cared about municipal politics when it directly affected their livelihoods, either by threatening the job they’d received as patronage or their ability to call upon a machine-aligned city employee to make their lives a bit easier. Once the machines were cleared out, folks only kept showing up on election day, if that. A quid (political participation) requires a quo (some material reward).
As an example, Elizabeth Brown wrote in The Call arguing that DSA should pursue official partnership with left-wing labor unions. However, if, as she suggests, said partner unions would have to contribute $5 per member annually, there’d need to be something in it for them. During the New Deal, unions gathered under the Democratic Party umbrella because Democrats passed transformative labor legislation like the Wagner Act. Even if DSA advocates for the ideal set of pro-labor policies, which is no small task given the variegated interests of America’s fragile unions, it’ll need to provide receipts. The refrain of anti-labor voices within the Democratic coalition is that this party policy or another is just a sop to self-interested unions and will make everyone worse off. This may be true in specific instances, but invariably neglects the necessity of connecting ideological projects to material rewards.
Today, no one besides Trump is really calling for a functional repeal of the Pendleton Act and the following century-plus of civil service reform. Political machines as such remain as dead as the American political party and, in contradistinction to the parties, are unlikely to ever rise from their grave. But to begin the world over again socialists must still unravel politics’ Gordian knot and get a public with a distinct distaste for politics qua politics to go out onto the streets and the picket line and into the ballot booth.
Personally, I think NYC-DSA mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s promises to fight “halalflation,” beyond grabbing valuable headlines in less political outlets like Eater, exemplify the sort of retail politics socialists-in-office need to champion. For other founts of inspiration, I’d look to the KPÖ’s relative success in Graz, Austria. Or Abdullah Farooq’s recent analysis of Belgium’s PTB-PVDA and Jack Lundquist’s piece about the PT in Brazil which were both published in this publication. Some of the analyses of Brazilian president Lula’s political dominance in the aughts are also well worth revisiting, especially those that touch on the effects of the transformative welfare program Bolsa Familia.
There are, of course, other challenges which confront every radical movement socialists must keep in mind. Perhaps in part because Scholzman and Rosenfeld are not self-conceived radicals, they’re also fairly adept at identifying these. They write:
“When radicals fail to deliver systemic change from a beachhead of concentrated support—a mayor here, a member of Congress there—they strengthen the arguments of both maximalists who want to make change through direct action rather than electoral politics, and pragmatists who want to focus on building majorities inside the system.”
Members of any socialist organization ought to keep their words in mind. As Max Weber wrote, “politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.” Even radical politics.
Yes, transformative proposals can win majority support if enough effort is put in and organizers are lucky. But any true political transformation will require the prudent maintenance of a long coalition that statesmen engaged in during the New Deal and Radical Reconstruction. Members of the political Left who dream of a better world need to supplant America’s hollow parties.