A major history of America\'s political parties from the 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.
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..
Party hollowness lies at the heart of our democratic discontents.
Instead, modern American conservatism hollowed out the Party system, deeming it a mere instrument for power.
Activists in the wake of the 1968 Democratic National Convention transformed presidential nominations but failed to lay the foundations for robust, movement-driven parties.
And they show how today\'s fractious Party Politics arose from the ashes of the New Deal order in the 1970s.
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.
Today\'s parties, at once overbearing and ineffectual, have emerged from the interplay of multiple Party traditions that reach back to the Founding.
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.
A major history of America\'s political parties from the 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
