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In Episode 154 of Ill Literacy, Tim Benson talks with Sam Rosenfeld, co-author of The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.
Heartland’s Tim Benson is joined by Sam Rosenfeld, Associate Professor of Political Science and Director, Public Affairs and Policy Research Initiative at Colgate University, to discuss his new book, co-authored with Daniel Schlozman, The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics. They discuss how party hollowness lies at the heart of our democratic discontents and how the nation’s parties became so dysfunctional. They also chat about the history of the party system in the United States, how today’s fractious party politics arose from the ashes of the New Deal order in the 1970s, how the 1968 DNC transformed presidential nominations but failed to lay the foundations for robust, movement-driven parties, and how, in Rosenfeld’s estimation, modern American conservatism hollowed out the party system, deeming it a mere instrument for power.
Get the book here: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691248554/the-hollow-parties
Show Notes:
Capital Research Center: Michael E. Hartmann – “Donors, The Hollow Parties, Distance, And Democracy”
The New Republic: Ben Metzner – “The Decay of America’s Political Parties”
New York Times: Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlozman – “The Republican Party Has Devolved Into a Racket”
Politico: Ian Ward – “Democrats Are Feckless and Republicans Are Chaotic. Here’s Why.”
Reason: J.D. Tuccille – “Hollow Major Parties Preside Over a Politics of 'Fear and Loathing'”
Semafor: Davie Wiegel – “Why political parties desperately need to make a comeback”
https://www.semafor.com/article/05/10/2024/why-political-parties-desperately-need-to-make-a-comeback
Washington Examiner: Ben Jacobs – “Political party crashers”
Creators & Guests
Host
Tim Benson
Ill Literacy, the newest podcast from The Heartland Institute, is helmed by Tim Benson, Senior Policy Analyst for Heartland’s Government Relations team. Benson brings on authors of new book releases on topics including politics, culture, and history on the Ill Literacy podcast. Every episode offers listeners the author’s unique analysis of their own book release. Discussions often shift into debate between authors and Benson when ideological differences arise, creating unique commentary that can’t be found anywhere else.
What is Ill Literacy: Books with Benson?
The Heartland Institute's podcast discussing notable new works with their authors. Hosted by Tim Benson.
Watch the time. It's time to get ill. Yeah. Watch the time. It's time to get ill.
Beastie Boys:So watch the time. It's time to get ill.
Tim Benson:Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Illiteracy Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Benson, a senior policy analyst at the Heartland Institute, a national free market think tank. We are in the episode a 150, a 160 range, somewhere in there. Never know the episode number. Sorry about that, guys.
Tim Benson:But for those of you just tuning in for the first time, basically, what we do on the podcast is I invite an author on to discuss a book of theirs that's been newly published or recently published on something or someone, some idea, some event, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera that we think you guys out there would like to hear a conversation about. And then hopefully at the end of the podcast, you go ahead and give the book a purchase yourself and give it a read. So if you like this podcast, please consider giving ill literacy a 5 star review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to this show, and also by sharing with your friends, because that's the best way to support programming like this. And my guest today is Doctor. Sam Rosenfeld.
Tim Benson:And Doctor. Rosenfeld is an associate professor of political science at Colgate University and director of public affairs, at the Policy Research Initiative, also at Colgate, I believe. You may have seen his work in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, The New Republic, and Plus One, as well as in scholarly journals like the American Review of Politics, The Journal of Policy History, Presidential Studies Quarterly, and Political Science Quarterly among others. And he is the author of the book, The Polarizers, Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era. And lastly, he is here to discuss his new book, which he cowrote with Daniel Schlossman, The Hollow Parties, the Many Past and Disorder Present of American Politics, which was published last week, so early May, by Princeton University Press.
Tim Benson:So, doctor Rosenbell, thank you so so much for coming on the podcast. I appreciate it.
Sam Rosenfield:Oh, thanks so much for having me.
Tim Benson:Oh, no problem. So I guess, normal entry question to everybody that comes on the podcast. So, you know, what, what made you guys wanna write this book? What was what was the genesis of the project?
Sam Rosenfield:The genesis was, god, in summer 2016. Danny, who is a friend, was asked to write a paper on parties for, the Social Science Research Council's anxieties of democracy initiative, where they got scholars together to talk about why everyone's worried about American politics. And he asked if I wanted to, you know, collaborate with him on that, and that's where we came up with this notion of, party hollowness. Presented that, at a conference at, Princeton University in October of 2016. On on the car ride back from that conference, we thought, you know, this, there might be a little book here.
Sam Rosenfield:Let's I think if we could just beef it up a little bit, the the idea and the, essay, and we could work up a a short book, get it out there pretty quickly. And so we started working on it, and then 8 years later, the book is no longer small, and it, took a lot longer than expected to, come to fruition. But, it is finally out and became something significantly more historical than, the initial paper was, you know, as it fits both of our instincts to kind of go back further and further.
Tim Benson:Gotcha. So why do political parties matter? Or strong political parties, I should say.
Sam Rosenfield:Well, so political scientists will, is or it's the uphill battle is to try and tell our students and readers that political parties are are important indeed, kind of essential for democracy. E. E. Schatzchneider, a a eminent political scientist from the mid 20th century, described party parties as describe democracy as unthinkable save in terms of the parties, that, they are the one collective institution that, can take all the atomized individuals, in a society that have all sorts of different ideas and interests, put together we kind of mobilized them into collective participation in democratic life and also by, you know, organizing some kind of overarching platform and agenda for, taking power in government actually give individual, citizens a real sense of choice that they can, go into the ballot booth and, exercise a vote for one direction, broadly speaking, or another. Multi party system may have a couple different directions.
Sam Rosenfield:And then parties are the institution that can organize individuals in government, the policymakers, to actually work together on some kind of cohesive, agenda to which voters can again hold them accountable. So you actually have a sense of who you are holding collectively responsible for what for what's going on in government and either throw the bums out or or reward them with reelection. So it's only parties that are kind of motivated to collectively organize efforts to take control of the whole of government, and that's what actually gives meaningful choice, to the decisions that individual voters make. It actually makes democratic participation possible.
Tim Benson:Gotcha. And you guys argue, basically, I won't put words in your mouth, but the the parties are really no longer doing that. That as to the you said in the title, the parties are sort of hollowed out for a variety of reasons. And that they basically, the parties the parties, I think you say, they combine activity with incapacity. So what do you what do you mean by that activity with incapacity?
Sam Rosenfield:Yeah. I mean, because it's it's kind of a it's a paradox. This is what we played around with when we were first thinking about the place of parties in the 21st century. You know, I wrote a whole book about polarization. And in one sense, compared to the middle of 28th century, when the parties had, there were these 2 parties that had conservative and liberal factions that were really powerful inside them and huge amounts of overlap, ideologically speaking.
Sam Rosenfield:And there was a a complaint, including for people like Eve Schaffsteiner, that those parties were so indistinct they weren't giving, kind of meaningful choices to people. Compared to that era, polarization has meant that the parties are more distinguishable and stand for different agendas distinct agendas, than they used to. And partly as a consequence of that partisanship, kind of people's identification with one party, their especially their strong aversion to the other side, is stronger now than it used to be. So kind of because of polarization, parties are everywhere. There are really strong presences in, kind of at the center of people's political identity and political behavior.
Sam Rosenfield:And yet at the same time, parties as organizations, as institutions, show a lot of incapacity, as you alluded to. That they're they're at once everywhere, but they're also kind of not in control of their own destinies. They're not in control of kind of shaping their own internal decision making. There's a lot of activity. There's parties raise money more effectively than they ever have before.
Sam Rosenfield:They've they're kind of teched up. They've got a lot of, kind of institutional resources, but, they aren't good at they can't control their own, decision making when it comes to things like nominations. They struggle to set agendas for their own party and kind of set priorities about what they wanna do in government. And they are kind of swarmed all around by what we call the party blobs. These kind of informal para party satellite organizations of all different kinds.
Sam Rosenfield:There's think tanks, which are wonderful institutions. There are media entities. There are, you know, lobbying groups, issue driven and advocacy groups, all of which these days are kind of oriented around 1 or the other side, but are not actually a part of any formal, accountable party, and they all have kind of somewhat differing incentives. Some are for profit organizations. Some aren't.
Sam Rosenfield:Some have much more clear electoral incentives. Some don't. Sorry for this urban living here. If you can pick that up. And they have encroached more and more on a lot of the kind of core functions of, what had been kind of the traditional prerogatives of formal parties.
Sam Rosenfield:As a consequence of all that, parties, despite how strong they are in kind of organizing people's political behavior, parties don't really inculcate a lot of loyalty, kind of positive loyalty or legitimacy even from partisans themselves. A lot of partisanship is much more motivated these days by negative aversion to the other side rather than any kind of positive feeling about, one side. That's true. And when party leaders speak, they're not speaking with any kind of special deference or legitimacy that they can expect even from the most engaged, kind of political actors on their own side.
Tim Benson:Yeah. And I agree with all that. So, essentially, weak parties invite strong partisanship. So, as you were alluding to or as you said, you know, historically, strong parties decide for themselves what policies to prioritize, you know, where to compromise on certain things, you know, what choices were in the long term best interest of the party and in in their thinking, therefore, the best interest of the country. But weak parties abdicate all these decisions.
Tim Benson:Essentially, now we're in a position where weak parties abdicate all these decisions, the republicans and the democrats, to the loudest to the loudest special interest groups who, are the best at, you know, basically mobilizing and fundraising off of the angriest, most opinionated voters, essentially.
Sam Rosenfield:Yeah. And, you know, partly, we we emphasized there was no golden age. There's no kind of perfect model of a party in American history at work that we're trying to get back to. But it is the case, again, as you're alluding to this kind of paradox. It's just politics is more ideological now than it ever has been.
Sam Rosenfield:There's just a lot of intense conflict organized around a whole bunch of different issues because the the government does a lot of things, and so there's a big there's conflict over what the government should do. And yet the parties are, as you say, kind of less capable than you might expect being the center of all this to actually, shape what it is those agendas look like.
Tim Benson:Right. They've essentially desiccated themselves over the last 40 well, part of that is, you know, federal law will get into McCain Feingold or Bicker, whatever you wanna call it, later. But I don't from reading, you guys are are probably not as down on primaries as I am. I absolutely hate them. Yeah.
Tim Benson:I think I think the part the the the primary process, as we have it in this country, it seems to be, like, the dumbest system for picking a candidate, just because the parties really don't contain there's they have really no control over who gets to be or at least in this country, who gets to say that they're a part of the party and, you know, and, who votes for them, etcetera, etcetera. As far as I know, America you might you might know this better than that. America is the only advanced industrialist country in the world in which its major political parties have, like, comprehensively removed themselves from the responsibility of picking their own candidates. You know? We like, if you're okay.
Tim Benson:For example so say you're in the UK and you're in right? So, you wanna run as, you know, in the as a Tory or, you know, in labor or the Lib Dems, whatever. First of all, you actually have to, like, be, like, a dues paying member of the party. You don't just, like, go to the DMV and, like, you know, fill out your vote on this or that, and that's it. And then you're in.
Tim Benson:So you actually have, like, skin in the game. And then so then you wanna run for office, so you have to go, you know, say for a seat of parliament or, you know, wherever. So you have to go to, like, the local labor council or Tory council, whoever. They interview you, And, you know, they interview all the selected candidates. And then from that, the people who actually belong to the party and pay money to be in the party, then they pick the candidate.
Tim Benson:And then they say to the candidate, okay. You're our candidate. Here is our platform. You know, you this is what you must believe in, what you must say. We can give you leeway on point 6 and 12 and 15 based on the, you know, the the verities of your of the, you know, the of your, district or what have you.
Tim Benson:But this is, like, this is what you gotta you know? And if you don't, then you're not gonna win or we're not gonna support you.
Sam Rosenfield:Right.
Tim Benson:Whereas here, did you I mean, like, you know, it's just they just put it up to a vote, and, you know, the votes aren't primarily party officials or even party stalwarts, you know, as in, like, the old political conventions. Like I said, they're this shifting blob of activists and the voters they can entice to show up. So not only they outsource the responsibility of choosing the candidates, they've outsourced it to, like, essentially the most radical people, you know, in these coalitions. And that's how, you know, you get someone like Donald Trump as the Republican nominee, a guy, you know, who held the Republican party at arm's length for, you know, most of his life.
Sam Rosenfield:Right.
Tim Benson:And if the if the, you know, and if I'm reasonably sure of this, if they, you know, if the party people had any control over who was gonna be the nominee in 2016, it was not gonna be Donald Trump. Same thing with, Bernie Sanders, a guy who, you know, spent his entire life shitting on the Democratic party. He never remember the party. I mean, caucus with them and stuff like that.
Sam Rosenfield:Still isn't.
Tim Benson:Yeah. Still isn't. Like, decides he's gonna run as for the as the Democratic nominee for president. And luckily for the democrats, or in for me. Yeah.
Tim Benson:For for people who are not inclined to vote for that side, the democrats still have the the superdelegates, which is this anti democratic, you know, vestige of the old system that we're like, not where there's no way we're going with this this dude who, you know, isn't even really a Democrat and working about you know, and it didn't work out in the election for him, but, it saved the party from being taken over by the by the Bernie people. And whatever the long term consequences short term and long term consequences of that, you know, we'll never know. But, yeah, this is this the way we just pick these things. You know, like, party leaders had a you know, they used to have a sense of stewardship over over the institutions they controlled. You know, they could, like I said, they could filter out the opportunists, the demagogues.
Tim Benson:They could extract commitments to, you know, principles and notions of responsible government. I mean, the Republican party hasn't had a platform the last 2 of
Sam Rosenfield:Right.
Tim Benson:Election cycles because it's like, yeah, whatever the hell Donald Trump wants, that's what we believe. And that's, that is like, the ass backwards way of doing it. And they'll probably not have a a platform, I'm pretty sure, this election season either. Anyway, so party leaders used to have the sense of stewardship in part because they had a sense of obligation to the long term health of the party. But now, that seems to be completely missing.
Tim Benson:You know, party guys, you know, just don't they just don't seem to really exist anymore the the way it's sorry for rambling. But
Sam Rosenfield:No. You you you you articulated the full throated, case against primaries. I think my work here is done. This is because you're because, because, again, you are kind of, capturing political scientists who are big typically more, strong proponents of parties than ordinary citizens are also have been from the get go more skeptical of primaries. So just to, just to speak to what you said is it's totally correct.
Sam Rosenfield:Primaries are a made in America, invention. They're a product originally of the progressive era a 100 years ago or more than a 100 years ago at this point, that, first at, for offices outside of the president, kind of state by state, state local offices and, congressional, offices. They switch to this system in which, as you say, rather than any kind of party organization making a collective decision about, who is going to be running in their own name in the, general election, it was shifted to a system in which it was put up to an open vote of ordinary, citizens, like, kind of pre election election, to get who, the party's, quote, unquote, nominee is gonna be. After, in presidential elections, you had over the course of 20th century, what's was called the kind of mixed convention system where different states did it different ways. There are some states that had, right in the progressive era, switched over to, primaries.
Sam Rosenfield:Others had more or less kind of open conventions that involve more or less participation from ordinary, citizens as opposed party officials. In some places, it's just the state party leadership usually led by the governor, which is pick delegates to the convention. After, 1968, which was a very contentious primary season for the Democratic party. They set up this thing called the McGovern Fraser Commission that, to make a very long story short, event kind of imposed new reforms to the system within the democratic party that ended up being taken up by, the republican side as well over the course of 19 seventies, and that's where you get a shift to this proliferation of, a few open caucus systems and mainly, just direct primaries all over the place. Yeah.
Tim Benson:I think
Buzzcocks:I was
Tim Benson:just saying, 1968 speaking of 1968, Humphrey won the democratic nomination with, like, 3% of the primary voters.
Sam Rosenfield:Yeah. I mean, he has to do right in things, but he won the Right. Nomination that year without at not contesting a single primary.
Tim Benson:Right. And so that's not, I mean, that's not too long ago. In 1968 is what? 50 oh, shit. Almost 60 years ago now.
Tim Benson:Yeah. But not that long ago. But the oh, so the other thing that drives drives me nuts about the primaries is, I mean, some of them some states have closed primaries, so you can only vote in them if you're a registered democrat or registered republican. Some of them are open. So if you're not even a member of the party, you can vote for who the party's nominee is for office.
Tim Benson:And there's 2 ends to that. It's like, well, on the one hand, like, the open primary sort of tends to more moderate voters because it's, you know, graduate more moderate candidates because you're, you know, you're opening it up to more people than the the party, ID logs who are the ones who people the only people who really vote in primary elections for the most part. But on the other hand, it's like, what like, how insane is this that, like, these parties let people that aren't even a member of the party Yes. Pick the nominee of the party. It's just, like, so
Sam Rosenfield:Well and to your point, I mean, in 2016, if I remember correctly, you have this notion that open primaries should invite or should be potentially good for moderate, candidates since it's not just partisans. But in fact, Sanders did better in open states because he got a
Tim Benson:lot That's true.
Sam Rosenfield:Got a lot of left wing voters who didn't like to or he got a lot of voters who didn't like to identify themselves as Democrats, relative to the kind of regular partisans who who voted for Clinton. But, yes, it's the next step in just kind of parties dissolving themselves as meaningful organizations in this quintessential, it it is a quintessential function of parties to recruit and nominate candidates for office in their name, and and and it gives parties in other countries, as you're alluding to, a lot of authority over what it is that members of the party do because they control whether or not those people will get the nomination again next time. It's a it's a way of inculcating, you know, some discipline, some direction in, in, where they're going. And, you know, to quote quote EE Schaffsteiner again, he was a big critic of primaries and a big critic of the he he said democracy exists between parties. It shouldn't exist inside parties then.
Tim Benson:What is that?
Sam Rosenfield:Then it's parties that are organizing, collective behavior to make democracy work. If you try and just open up internal party decisions to a completely free for all of, popular participation, nobody's organizing that. And as you say, it usually means the loudest voices or just kind of temporary fashions, hold sway. Often, it's just a kind of chaos. I mean, the thing about the primary process for presidents, now is just how utterly controlled it is.
Sam Rosenfield:That it's not it's not even that you can really see particular forces being empowered in a systematic way. It's just this gauntlet of, contest state after state, and it's it depends on media momentum. It depends on kind of cascades of polling as people try and and it usually starts out with, like, 20 candidates. Yeah. And it I
Tim Benson:mean, it's just it's just the whole I mean, the fact that, like, different states have different days. So we'd like Iowa and New Hampshire out of all the freaking states. You know, there's, like, 36 people in New Hampshire. And and so and so, like, they have and then basically by New Hampshire Like, for the most part, that's usually, like, you know, okay. We figured that this is who the the nominee is or, you know, or Except for
Sam Rosenfield:for Biden, he it was after New Hampshire. He was Yeah.
Tim Benson:Yeah. I mean, not not always, but it's, like, generally, it seems like by New Hampshire, like, this guy's probably gonna, you know, win or this scale. Anyway but, yeah, I think people think people don't really study this or think about it that I mean, if you just ask, like, the average Joe, like, on the street, I they would I would be willing to bet you they probably think that, like, the whole primary thing is, like, baked into the constitution or something. Like, this is just how we do things. And, you know, and if the parties came out tomorrow and said, nah.
Tim Benson:You know? The hell with this crap. Like, we're just gonna go back and just pick, you know, we're just gonna go in this back in the smokey little room and pick the candidates we think is best, and that's it. And that's how we're doing, you know, because we're a private organizations. We can do whatever the hell we wanna do.
Tim Benson:So we're not, like, public institutions or public trust or anything like that. But, yeah, I think people don't really get that, like, that one, the that this is a relatively new way of doing things. And, you know, it's not something that's, like, constitutionally protected. It's like that.
Sam Rosenfield:You know
Tim Benson:what I mean? But it
Sam Rosenfield:is it it is striking just how much small d democracy is the only kind of framework people have to think about how these organizations should run. So in 2016, it was really telling, you had Donald Trump as this you know, it's it's they've called it a kind of hostile takeover, of he was an outsider to the party. At this point, plenty of Republicans are are are on board. But, like, certainly, Republican, leaders or Republican establishment were averse to Donald Trump. Donald Trump was not a lifelong conservative or lifelong Republican or anything.
Sam Rosenfield:Comes in, manages to, capture the nomination through the primary system. Democrats have these things that you alluded to called superdelegates that were, in fact, a product they they act they operate like the old system, but they were a reform from the early eighties after the McGovern Fraser reforms led to this big pro proliferation of primaries, Democrats started thinking, actually, it would be good to have some, elected officials, like members of congress, governors, and long standing party, officials, exist as a potential gatekeeper, a kind of set of people who could go to the convention, and they're not bound by any primary vote to and they can make their own decisions about who should be a nominee. So we had the democrats had superdelegates. In 9 in 2016, it was a big flashpoint between Sanders and Clinton. But to be clear, Clinton won with earned delegates.
Sam Rosenfield:She she had the most delegates from primaries. And the superdelegates who who generally supported her, they didn't end up end up exercising any kind of, like, tie breaking role or anything at the convention. But you have on the one hand, Donald Trump, captures the nomination on the Republican side. And then after, the primary season for Democrats, what did they do? The Democrats form as a way of kind of healing the divide between Sanders and, Clinton.
Sam Rosenfield:They start a party reform commission, and what they decide to do is, disempower the superdelegates.
Tim Benson:So, I
Sam Rosenfield:mean, the superdelegates no longer have, a vote on the first ballot in the convention. It's like you you might have looked over at the other side, saw what happened when Donald Trump took over the Republican party and thought, Matt, boy, it's it might be useful to have, you know, party actors who are thinking long term about No.
Tim Benson:In case of emergency, break glass. You know? Like, it might
Sam Rosenfield:be a But it's just there is no this is why it's interesting you read the book and thought, they're iffy on primaries, but, you're more of a critic of primaries. Because Danny and I are as proper Well, we're at least to
Tim Benson:the point, you did you said, you know, a lot of people you know, you mentioned the, McGovern Commission. Right. I think you said something like the, you didn't think the McGovern Commission was, like, the primary culprit
Buzzcocks:for
Sam Rosenfield:Oh, that's true.
Tim Benson:All this out. Yeah. Yeah. So
Sam Rosenfield:But So
Tim Benson:and I think it's one of the the major well, I don't know how aligned we are, but it's, like, to me, it's, like, one of the 2 big,
Sam Rosenfield:things. Yes. As a historical explanation, absolutely. I just mean in terms of reforms, we would love to just make parties stronger stewards, of decision making over their own nominations, including getting rid of primaries. We do, though, because we think part of the problem part of what makes parties hollow in the 21st century is the lack of legitimacy and trust that they enjoy among Americans.
Sam Rosenfield:Simply going back to smoke filled rooms, at the with the snap of a finger, now
Tim Benson:No. It's never gonna happen. But would be
Sam Rosenfield:would be hard, but we do you know, part of what we want is long term. We want hardy actors to speak with a little bit more confidence about, you know, what is important about, what they're doing. If if if they don't speak up on behalf of themselves, no one else will.
Tim Benson:Yeah. And just for people to remember that small d democracy in all things, every in all places and all times is not great. There's a you know, like, the military is not, you know, small d democracy, you know, for for good reason. And there's a good reason why the parties weren't for so long. We talk about the institutional capture of the Republican Party by Trump and the Trumpies.
Tim Benson:Definitely true at this point. I think that the, you know, this, primary cycle, if anything, showed that, case. But in defense of the members of the Republican party, the members of congress, and, people that work for the party, I would be willing to bet you with a high degree of certainty that if you've said to these people, here's this magic thing that's just gonna make Donald Trump disappear, like he's just not gonna exist anymore, you know, and then the party can go on from there. I'd be willing to bet you, 85 to 90% of the members of Congress, Republican members of Congress, members of state, state houses, members of the party themselves, and even members of the, of the blob, would would unhesitatingly Right. Take that.
Tim Benson:So, yeah, I still think there's you know, I I've basically given up on the Republican party at this point. Or
Sam Rosenfield:But that underlines the point. I mean, because in the absence of genies, what you what you need is collective capacity to to make that happen. But instead, every everyone you just listed is Yeah.
Tim Benson:I know. They're all quietly or,
Sam Rosenfield:you know, or they get run out of the party if they Right.
Tim Benson:Right. Right.
Sam Rosenfield:Yeah. Loudly.
Tim Benson:You have no career if you're
Sam Rosenfield:Yeah. And that's that's what's alarming. I think the sense I mean, you're describing incapacity. These are people who cannot be kind of collective stewards of, their own political movement, and and by themselves. Find themselves captive by a guy, but also by their own voters, by their sense of, what it is they would or would be wouldn't be able to succeed in convincing voters of, if they spoke out.
Tim Benson:Yeah. And also to be to be fair or the republic, I don't think this is something that would be uniquely an issue with I you guys might, probably differ Mhmm. On that. But I think something like this could, you know, just as easily happen in the Democratic party as the Republican party, just because I don't know. It is seems to me everyone's just full of shit.
Tim Benson:You know? Like, all these peep, like, politicians and, I like, I I think some the parties are so weak now. I think the ability for someone, you know, say there was, like, a some sort of bizarro left wing version of Donald Trump, You know, there there are no institutional the the amount of institutional sort of defenses against someone like that is, is maybe not equally as weak, but but in the same ballpark as weak in the Democratic Party. Like, I could very much see that happening. You know?
Tim Benson:I I don't think it's something that's unique to
Sam Rosenfield:the Republican party. Here's what how I would put it because, you know, I would not personally equate Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump. But Bernie Sanders, as as we've said, he he is a, he is far out on the, ideological spectrum within the Democratic party. Yeah. Doesn't affiliate it doesn't actually nominally affiliate with the Democratic party even though he's a he's a perfectly cooperative, member of the caucus in in congress.
Sam Rosenfield:But in 2020, it's easy to read back into that, primary process and think, oh, well, we ended up getting Joe Biden a totally mainstream, you know, democrat's been around forever. So so democrats still kind of the the party is still kind of in control or something. With huge amount of momentum out of the, out of Iowa and New Hampshire. Biden has been kind of flailing one among many anti Sanders candidates. Nobody can kind of coordinate around which one because they're all running.
Sam Rosenfield:It's Buttigieg. It's Klobuchar. It's all these others. And Biden's looking he's very old. His campaign is, fairly feeble.
Tim Benson:I wouldn't even find the Klobuchar if she would have won. Like, she's I don't know. For some reason, I'm I don't I mean, not like I I don't agree with her probably in, like, 80% of things. But if, like, she but if she won the Democratic nominee, I'd be like, yeah. That's cool.
Tim Benson:You know? Like, I don't know. Instead, she decided to, you know, stab her, staff her with a
Sam Rosenfield:with a comb. No. She ate the salad.
Tim Benson:Comb. Yeah. Yeah. They ate the salad with a comb or whatever. But But but what all to death with the salad.
Tim Benson:Yeah.
Sam Rosenfield:It was in it was this completely nobody was in charge and democrats, including tons of people to to your point about if you pulled 90% of republican elected officials, lots of democrats were skeptical. They weren't they didn't hate Bernie Sanders and, you know, their hearts are in the same direction, but they thought of him as electorally weak, too extreme, etcetera. But there was a sense what was if he keeps winning these popular primaries narrowly in caucuses, he'll be the nominee. There's nothing we can do about it. And then it was just this very contingent, like it was like, Jim Clyburn, South Carolina comes out forcefully for Joe Biden that gives him a nice win in South Carolina that all of a sudden triggers this cascade of events where, you know, Obama makes one phone call and Buttigieg and Klobuchar drop out, and get behind Biden, that instantly provides that kind of, coordinating kind of direction for voters who finally think, oh, okay.
Sam Rosenfield:I've been skeptical about voting about supporting Sanders. This is who we're gonna go with instead, and then you get this huge cascade by Super Tuesday. But all that is not like a confident Right. Party making deliberative decisions months in advance. That is a kind of panicked, alright.
Sam Rosenfield:You all drop out here, and it it was it was an undirected, process, that did reveal that among ordinary voters, there was a big reservoir of there was a ceiling to Sanders' support, that ended up doing him in, at that moment, but it could have easily gone in a different direction. One other
Tim Benson:thing I'll say in Klobuchar's favor, now that I'm thinking about it, I think that if Biden had picked her to be his VP nominee, I think he would be in much better shape head to head against Trump right now than, Kamala Harris, who is just, like, a walking and she's a terrible she's very bad at the politics.
Sam Rosenfield:Well, now now we're getting
Tim Benson:we're getting foggy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Sam Rosenfield:But Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. I have a comment that I should say doesn't stem from my expertise with political science.
Sam Rosenfield:This is pure punditry. But, I would say this. If they had a vice president that they were more that the party was more confident in right now, what it would have probably translated into is a much more forceful, set of voices suggesting that Biden be a one term president. But it because they didn't because there was, like, a vice president who would be the natural successor, but nobody's her. No and Biden wants to run again.
Sam Rosenfield:There's no one wants to have a fight.
Tim Benson:I think this is just my theory. But I think Joe Biden or the people who told Joe Biden to choose Kamala Harris as his running mate, This was, like, next tier level just, like, awesome thinking because if I if we remember we're getting off topic here, but remember in 20 2016, Kamala Harris didn't even make it to the Iowa, caucus. She dropped out beforehand with, like, I don't even think she had 1% of the vote. So terrible thing. Yeah.
Tim Benson:So Biden knows that the age thing isn't it was an age issue 4 years ago. It's still a thing. You know, basically, it was just like, well, it's just you're the guy to defeat Trump. And, you know, basically, once you do that, you've, you've, for the most part, outlived your usefulness to us in the Democratic Party. So by picking someone so just just so god awful I mean, not as, like, a person, but just, like, at, like, retail politicking, at just, like, you know, speaking, you know, in coherent sentences or the like, and also because or so by picking her, someone who is, like, probably easily, like, the worst politician in that field and, you know, being in the Democratic party and being that Kamala Harris is a, you you know, black woman, there is no way in hell that a Democratic Party that is so focused on racial issues as it is nowadays is going to drop a black woman from the ticket in order to put in Gavin Newsom or, you know, somebody else.
Tim Benson:So, therefore, that is his that was his, way to blunt the the age thing. Right? So, like, you gotta drop out because you're too old and, like, you you know, you got apple sauce brain and you you know, like, everyone is concerned about your age. You gotta drop out. And then it's like, okay.
Tim Benson:Well, if he drops out, then Kamala's president. And then it's like, oh, shit. So we gotta run behind Kamala? Like, no. Never mind, Joe.
Tim Benson:Like, you know,
Sam Rosenfield:just just just He was playing the long game
Tim Benson:for I think so. I think that was, like, sneakily one of, like, the most astute moves, of, like, covering your ass in, like, the history of politics.
Sam Rosenfield:I don't know. Eleven's dimensional Yeah.
Tim Benson:Yeah. Just like yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Who I mean, it might not have been Biden.
Tim Benson:Probably was not Biden himself, but whoever was in Biden's circle, I think, you know, when they were mapping this all out, I heard that they I think they they hit, like, the perfect,
Buzzcocks:you
Tim Benson:know, the literally, like, the perfect candidate for him to be his vice president just because, you know, to to save Biden, she was the one. So well, then that's just my personal theory.
Sam Rosenfield:Anyway Amazing. So Alright.
Tim Benson:Alright. Away from the the pun the random tweet and back to the book. Alright. So I don't think we've really, I've been shitting on the primaries for, like, half an hour, but we really haven't talked about so how the parties how did the parties hollow out? You know, what were the trends?
Tim Benson:You know, how did they come to a head, etcetera, etcetera, that sort of thing?
Sam Rosenfield:Yeah. So this is so as you've seen, the the book ends up being a history in the mid it's kind of sandwiched into the stuff about the hollow parties. It's a Yeah. We're not gonna have any of it. No.
Sam Rosenfield:No. History of American politics, it goes all the way back to the the founding. But we do think colonists is a kind of contemporary problem, and it has a history to its self that originates in the 19 seventies. So we emphasize the 19 seventies as a really pivotal, decade. That's awesome.
Sam Rosenfield:I mean, the seventies is really pivotal for a lot of things, including polarizations. It's the kind of origins of polarization. But you have both sort of changes in that era to the broader political economy in the country, to the organization of politics, the kind of organized context in which politics happens, and then also changes to the the party coalitions that all work together and start, feeding on each other to kind of hollow the parties out. So organizationally, we've alluded to it. I mean, there there there is, changes to the nominations for for president that is clearly matters.
Sam Rosenfield:Part of why we think it can be overemphasized is that we just think there's broader things going on with the parties than just presidential nominations. But McGovern Fraser inadvertently, I should add, the actual reformers in Montgomery Frasier didn't think that what they were doing was, leading to a bunch of open primaries. They thought they were just re changing nominations so that activists and movements had more, it was more permeable to their kind of, influence and voice. But, anyway, McGovern Fraser leads to the proliferation of primaries, for presidential nominations. That has, among other things, an effect on state parties that used to be state party organizations had a lot of clout at the national conventions because they're controlling delegates, to the national conventions.
Sam Rosenfield:And so there were these important kind of brokers, and that falls by the wayside. You have changes in campaign finance. There was both this law called FICA, the Federal Elections Campaign Act, that puts initially limits on both how much people can contribute to, candidates and parties and how much parties and candidates can spend in campaigns. And then you have a very important supreme court decision in 19 76 called Buckley versus Valeo that finds it unconstitutional to have caps on how much, parties, and campaigns can spend even though you can retain the limits on how much people can contribute to them. What that does is it means that there's no overall limit on the rising costs of elections if they they just get more and more expensive, given technology like television and cost of advertising.
Sam Rosenfield:But formal parties themselves now have these caps, these regulations on how much people can contribute to them, and that incentivizes money to start to be channeled into outside groups. This is where you start to get the rise. First of all, the kind of middlemen called political action committees that bundle together contributions to distribute to different candidacies. And then you get the rise of these outside groups. This is long before Citizens United.
Sam Rosenfield:It's long before super packs and dark money and the kind of contemporary manifestations of this. You're getting an incentive of of resources and money to be channeled, outside of formal parties starting in 19 seventies. You get an explosion in 19 seventies of it's called the efficacy revolution, just the rise of lots of new interest groups, ideological groups, kind of single issue, groups, around all sorts of different issues that are now pressing their concerns in Washington and in state houses, again, outside the purview of formal parties. Mhmm. And then you have changes with the within the parties themselves and the coalitions.
Sam Rosenfield:You have the rise of new social and cultural issues coming out of the 19 sixties that, both means there's a kind of cultural left that it becomes a bigger and bigger part of the Democratic, party. At the same time, you get the rise of, the so called new right, the rise of the conservative movement exercised around issues of of culture and morality and, social issues, etcetera. That both triggers the, polarization of the 2 parties, that kind of ideological sorting of the 2 parties over the next few decades. So it's making politics more and more conflictive and ideological, but a ton of that activism. And particularly on not only on the, on the right, but particularly the kind of ascendance of, the conservative movement, on the right from the 19 seventies onward, gives rise to a a kind of very mobilized para party set of actors that treat the republican party as, you know, a punching bag and also just a vessel for, whatever it is they want to
Tim Benson:Yeah. That that Bill's Russia line about the conservatism is the wine and the Republican party is the the
Sam Rosenfield:Is the bottle. Yeah.
Tim Benson:Bottle. Yeah. Yeah.
Sam Rosenfield:That's what I'm saying. This is after in the 19 seventies for a while, there was a move to replace the Republican party. Bill Russia wrote a book about it. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Sam Rosenfield:And then in in 1976, instead, you know, they wanna recruit Ronald Reagan to run as this kind of third party actor. Instead, he just decides to launch a very, effective, intra party challenge to Gerald Ford. He almost captures the nomination in 76. So that's why we see in the seventies, kind of set of developments that really play out over the next several decades, in ways that kind of manifest differently, but the same the same underlying problems of hollowness, in the in the Democratic and Republican parties.
Tim Benson:Okay. I'm gonna go off on another little rant here
Sam Rosenfield:on Sure.
Tim Benson:Campaign contributions. Anyway but one thing about, you know, I was looking more into, Buckley v Valeo, and, you know, the Buckley famously is senator James Buckley, Bill Buckley's brother who
Sam Rosenfield:Right.
Tim Benson:Was senator of New York not as a Republican as the conservative party. Yes.
Sam Rosenfield:But I did not confusion. Yes.
Tim Benson:I but I did not know that, Gene McCarthy and the, basically, the the New York affiliated of the ACLU, the Libertarian party were all plaintiffs in Buckley v Valeo. I did not know that. So that was, interesting. But, anyway, alright. So you kind of alluded to it.
Tim Benson:There's or you talked about it. The Federal Election Campaign Act 74, amendments to it limit individual contributions to parties and candidates, and then we get Buckley v Valeo. So the court the Supreme Court upheld the limits, on contributions to candidates and upheld the aggregate limit on an individual's total contributions to all candidates and committees in the calendar year. But at the same time, it struck down limits on independent expenditures. So, you know, expenditures by other groups or individuals.
Sam Rosenfield:And and it's it it's, eliminated limits on expenditures of formal campaigns as well. They could they could they could spend as much as they wanted. There was just limits in how much so called hard money
Tim Benson:they could
Sam Rosenfield:get from individuals, in in raising it. Right. So then,
Tim Benson:let's see. 30 years later, 25 years later, we get, the bipartisan campaign reform act, which otherwise otherwise known as famously known as McCain Feingold. Mhmm.
Buzzcocks:I
Tim Benson:know BCRA, BICRA, whatever you wanna call it. So, which I think George w Bush actually should have been impeached for signing after he literally said, I think this is unconstitutional. This bill is unusual, but I'm gonna sign it anyway. Well, it's like, well, dude, you took an oath to uphold the constitution, and you just said you're just gonna sign on the constitution bill. So you're obviously not doing it.
Tim Benson:So, anyway, so alright. Okay. So prior to became Feingold, prior to BICRA, federal law permits corporations and unions as well as individuals who had already made the maximum permissible contributions to federal candidates to contribute, nonfederal money, you know, soft money to political parties, for activities intended to influence state elections, local elections, that sort of thing. So, but it also didn't have to be used solely to help state local campaigns. You know, they could use it for get out the vote efforts, that sort of thing, and that can be used for legislative advocacy, media advertisements that use the name of federal candidate.
Sam Rosenfield:Exactly. The the soft money the big loophole that by Yep. The Clinton core campaigns really started to, exploit is you could you're spending money on, you know, party building at the state level, and some of that did happen, that you could raise in unregulated or or, you know, uncapped amounts, the soft money. But you could also use it for educational advertising. So it did Right.
Sam Rosenfield:So you didn't mention a candidate. You could run issue ads that were clearly happening during a campaign season and clearly meant to to, aid the party's campaign. So there are kind of campaign ads in, in all but name. All of that is what McCain Feingold goes after. They see these loopholes that the parties themselves are exploiting, and they, they ban them.
Tim Benson:Yeah. So like I said, at this point, smoke filled room's long gone. But with the individual donation limits still in place, this, you know, this loophole, the soft money loophole, you know, it meant that the vast amount of money in politics was still actually being channeled through the party. So they still had so that gave them a lot more institutional power. Right?
Tim Benson:So along comes BICRA to change all that, but, you know, because the idea was by doing this, we're gonna get money out of politics and soft money out of politics and all that, which is, of course, didn't happen.
Sam Rosenfield:Right.
Tim Benson:So instead of that, Bickard just transfers the power away from the parties, and this is where you have the rise of the the super packs and, you know, the small money donors. You know? And this really this really, more than anything else, destroys the party's ability to gatekeep and, you know, that campaigns still rely on their large donor programs. You know, you host the fundraiser, and you get all the the rich guys to max out and all that. But the rise of Internet, you don't need to spend as much valuable time, you know, doing all these fundraising events.
Tim Benson:You can have all these data teams and digital teams now that, you know, Facebook and YouTube and Twitter and, I guess, TikTok now. I don't know if they're doing any of that crap on TikTok. They probably are. You know? So we're, there's that rise, which is I don't know.
Tim Benson:I can't really blame McCain Feingold for that. But anyway. But so, I mean, the argument was that the big money donors don't represent the interests of the average voter. But I would argue that they can do the small money donors. You know, something like 3% of Americans donate to the political candidates, maybe even maybe even less than that.
Tim Benson:I'm not but it's around 3%. And for the most part, those donors, the small money donors are motivated by anger, outrage. You know? You know, Jerry, I heard him describe this way. Generally, big money donors donate because they wanna win.
Tim Benson:Right? And they wanna have influence. I mean, for the and small money donors donate because they're pissed off and they wanna be heard. You know, they wanna send a message. They wanna vent their spleen.
Tim Benson:And, and we've seen this that candidates who, you know, who depend on small donors to for most of their fundraising or majority of their fundraising, you know, tend to take more polarizing positions, are are more likely to be outside of the political mainstream. Like, that's why you have, you know, these chuckleheads like Marjorie Taylor Greene and AOC on the other side. You know? Like, that's their bread and butter. And, so and, you know, they don't really care too much about electability.
Tim Benson:I mean, that's part of that is just gerrymandering because, you know, everything's gerrymandered to you know, none of most of these districts aren't safe. That's a whole another issue. I mean, are are safe. So Mhmm. They don't care about electability, so they push their party to take more extreme stances, and that makes the party, the brand of the party, less appealing to, you know, normal everyday, Americans, you know, the the normies.
Tim Benson:And, it it so and then now we have, you know, we get things where we routinely, we have things like, you know, democrats pissing money away on guys like Beto O'Rourke in Texas or that the the blonde lady with the sneakers, the abortion what was her name?
Sam Rosenfield:In Texas? Also in Texas? Yeah. And and then, the the the fighter pilot in, who ran against McConnell. Oh, Amy McGrath.
Sam Rosenfield:Right. Right. Right. Amy McGrath. So She
Tim Benson:I mean,
Sam Rosenfield:she she got, like, a bajillion dollars from ordinary Right. Democratic donors to lose by, you know,
Tim Benson:50 points. So we so we have these people pissing me 1,000,000 of dollars on these ideologically blue state candidates in red states
Buzzcocks:Yep.
Tim Benson:You know, who pander to the views of their donors. Like, people sending the money out of state donors rather than their
Sam Rosenfield:more Yeah.
Tim Benson:Right. Rather than their more conservative, but but still persuadable in state voters. And we have the same thing on the Republican side. You know, all these Republicans outside core challenges to, you know, to use the money to fight her core challenges to, you know, to fight the stolen election and all that Right. Crap, which, of course, she doesn't do.
Tim Benson:So, I'm rambling again, but I've been keeping this in for such a long time. It's like
Sam Rosenfield:You know, my my again, I I'm I'm superfluous here. You're you're you're laying out the whole story.
Tim Benson:So yeah. Anyway, so the point is we're at this point where the most ideologically polarized candidates monetize the most ideologically polarized voters, which, again, just feeds into this further polarization. You know, most Americans don't you know, clearly, they don't vote I mean, donate money.
Sam Rosenfield:Right.
Tim Benson:You know? Most Americans don't, you know, have Fox News or MSNBC on 247. I mean, I know a lot of people do, but most Americans don't. Mhmm. You know, and most Americans don't even vote in primaries.
Tim Benson:But we're at this point now where this very infinitesimal slice of this entire country who do all 3, who watch cable news religiously, who vote religiously, and who donate often, are the the ones that have captured the primary process, and it's just completely, totally fupar. They may have
Sam Rosenfield:stopped now. The primary process, they've also they influenced the to to the extent there is any agenda formation process. They're the ones doing it as well. So I'll just add to your account of the 21st century
Tim Benson:trajectory of
Sam Rosenfield:campaign finance. So you get McCain Feingold. It goes after the the kind of loopholes that the formal parties, exactly as you said, had started and formal candidate campaigns had started to exploit. They tighten those up again, and then you get 2 things that happen subsequently. You have, as you say, technology it's just a technology story that the Internet makes it radically easier to raise small donors.
Sam Rosenfield:So this is, you know, the Republican party and the conservative movement were the great pioneers of direct mail.
Tim Benson:Oh, yeah. Richard Biggiri. Yeah. Yeah. Sure.
Sam Rosenfield:Yeah. And, like, it's like that cranked up, in in both parties. This is ends up being something we talk about in the book with an, an audience of democrats in mind who I think both had been big champions of campaign finance for a long time and operated from an assumption that used to be true, but hasn't been true for a long time that their side, that the democrats and the left is is, operating under a kind of handicap where they don't have as much money as the other side. That's not true anymore. That's partly because of the Internet.
Sam Rosenfield:As you say, small donors small donor politics explodes. It is also polarizing. Yeah. The other but then what does happen with Citizens United is that there'd already been all this kind of, incentivization for money to flow outside the parties and, from candidates that, McCain Feingold, accelerated. Citizens United at once, kind of lift made it so that unions and corporations could give directly out of their general revenue to politics.
Sam Rosenfield:So it kind of opened the spigots a little bit wider of just, like, of money coming from those organizations. But then it also confirmed that there is that on first amendment grounds, there is no constitutional ability to regulate either on the donor side or the spending side, independent expenditure activity outside the candidates. And so that's where you get the rise of super packs, which is a kind of political action committee where there is no limit to how much people can give to those PACs. They're not subject to hard money, FICA, limits. And then dark money is, 5 zero one c nonprofits who don't have to disclose the identity of their donors.
Sam Rosenfield:They can as long as it's less than 50% of their operating expenses, they can get involved in electioneering as well. And those it's like there's small donors, and they're very ideological. As you say, there's the traditional, like, well heeled donor that is about access, about hedging their bets. They're they're more like they're more likely to be kind of interest groups that are given to both parties depending on who's gonna take power. And, like, that's, like, corrupt, but it's not polarizing.
Tim Benson:I mean, but but, like, that's, like, human. You know what I mean? Like, that's, like, normal. You know? Like,
Sam Rosenfield:I Yes. And then but you do have then mega donors. You have billion millionaires and billionaires that also in their own way are typically pretty ideological and and do have more of a presence now, kind of at the high end in the world of, the pair of party blobs and super pacs and and dark money. What both of those sides, both the small donor side and the, kind of post Citizens United accelerated side of, of high end mega donors contribute to is just this sheer abundance of money. The whole system is completely flooded with money.
Sam Rosenfield:As you say, it's still a very small portion of the polity, the citizenry that is participating in any of this, but it's also not like a couple people controlling the strings and making decisions in a in a any kind of deliberative way. Either it's this big mass of money and participants where nobody is in charge, where the where it's all about, attempting to shape the activities of these 2 polarized political sides, but there's no organizational structure to to do that in either a responsible way or a long term way or a way that maximizes the electoral, kind of benefits of whatever you're trying to do. It's a it's a kind of omnidirectional mess of activity Yeah. That is kind of what we diagnose as hollowness.
Tim Benson:Yeah. Well, alright. I've already kept you in over an hour, which is longer than I said I would. My apologies. But, like I said, just so I guess we should really get to what are your what are your how do we fix this?
Tim Benson:What do we do? What are your ideas for how we, or some of them? Or give me a give everybody the the rundown of what you think what you guys think we should do to to combat this this, this week this sort of desiccation of the 2 parties.
Sam Rosenfield:Right. I mean, it is it's tough. It's always the hard it's like the last chapter you write of a book you're expected to solve the problem that you've spent. You're, you know, years, thinking about and writing as a real problem. So these are big problems that we don't, pretend to have, easy fixes.
Sam Rosenfield:I have a couple
Tim Benson:of them, but they're not in any way, shape, or form, palatable. Yeah. I I wanna
Sam Rosenfield:hear I mean, speaking to what is and even palatable, it's like we partly just say this is a book that's trying to, like, kinda spread the good news about parties. That political parties in history, political parties in certain places now do something really important that no other organization does. And I agree. People people who are engaged in politics and want to do things to change the direction of government or or, or, you know, just participate in democracy should, start to rethink their, their, you know, emotional and psychological views on party. And partisan actors themselves should stop, kind of keeping their heads down or or talking around what it is they do as, you know, stewards of collective, actors in American democracy, and they should also speak with more confidence and authority.
Sam Rosenfield:From there, you know, we think, there is part of the story here is that the parties organizationally have gotten, top heavy, have kind of atrophied at the state and local level along with lots of other kinds of, civic organizations that, like, parties are not, meaningful rooted organizations in in in communities in a lot of places, and that you do need to start I mean, it it all ends up sounding very, very much like a bromide. You know? Like, think
Tim Benson:Think globally. Act locally. Think globally or whatever.
Sam Rosenfield:But, like, you should. Yeah. If you are at all interested in politics, you should go out and actually look at what's going on in your community and, like, work with others in a, to start or participate in, a local party organization to get some stuff, that you wanna get done or pick some fights that you wanna fight with others that you see in in the community. It it starts there, and then we we you know, we on the Democratic side, we point to a kind of state party that we think because it forged important ties with, in this case, the labor unions. It's the Nevada democratic party in the in the 2000.
Sam Rosenfield:It's kind of retained a real connection to, working people and material, in their kind of material lives, and at the same time, they retained a real sense of professionalization and commitment to making the formal party the kind of center of politics, around there that other other places could take up. So, yeah, we were throwing out a few things, and then we we tell donors. You know, the people who spend a lot of money in the para party blobs to think more seriously about, like, you know, staying in their lane to a certain extent to channeling their money to formal parties and not trying to grow reinvent the wheel and grow new institution organizations that encroach on, what it is that, strong parties are supposed to do. So those are some of our messages.
Tim Benson:Alright. Yeah. Mine are a little bit more radical.
Sam Rosenfield:Well, I unless you're on, you should have the
Tim Benson:Well, I mean I mean, obviously, like, just completely get rid of the primary process altogether or or at the very least, like, at the very, very least, like, tighten the qualifications for who gets to vote in them. Mhmm. I know there's, like, state election laws that that go with this, but I'd also like to see, like, I don't know if this has anything to do with, like but I'd like to see the parties. But I think it'd be interesting, would be cool, would be instead of having, like, oh, we go to Iowa. You know, Iowa leads us off, and then it's New Hampshire, know, like know, like in the NBA or the NFL or something like that.
Tim Benson:And they have, like, all the balls in the in the thing blowing around. And then they pull it out and it's like, oh, you know, North Dakota is number 1 this year or or, Mississippi, wins the overall pick and then, you know, that'd be fun. And then maybe, like, the states could, like, trade spots, like, even I don't know. But, that's just, like, some goofy shit I thought of. But
Sam Rosenfield:Well, yeah. I mean, along the lines of, actual formal changes, you you alluded to this, but, like, it varies state by state. These are all still kind of creatures. Elections are shaped by state level laws. Right.
Sam Rosenfield:There's a lot of places where state and local party organizations are hindered by state law from even endorse you know, offering just their own endorsements of potential candidates, not choosing the candidates, but actually weighing in in a formal sense on, in primaries. There's also kind of there's a lot of state level restrictions on what, state local parties can or can't do financially, that in a systematic way, people should be looking at those and and rethinking them and not kind of ham stringing these organizations in in some of their most essential roles.
Tim Benson:Yeah. But any any measure that would give delegates to state and national conventions more responsibility, for deciding who does or doesn't get the nomination is, like, something supportive. And then on the money side, I don't know. We're probably we probably differ on, like, what we think about the idea of, like, money and politics. I don't really, like, care how much money we're, like, we're spending on campaigns and all that stuff.
Tim Benson:Like, people some people think that's, like, it's outrageous we spend all this money on, like, campaigning. I'm like, well, part of it is our stupid primary system. But, like, the other part is, like, well, these things are relatively important to, like, how's the direction of the country's going. So, you know, maybe we probably should spend some money on it, every 4 years or every 2 years or whatnot. But I wouldn't favor, like, something like repealing McCain Feingold gold in favor of, a no limits system, but it's, like, immediate disclosure.
Tim Benson:No limits, but everything's out in the open. And, like, this is, it's not that I mean, there's already this happens on, like, the state and low the state level. Already, there's, like, 11 states who have this for, for state races. I think, like, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia. There's there are no limits on how much an individual can contribute in a state level race in those states, and that seems to be working fine with me, where, you know, the house hasn't fallen down.
Tim Benson:So I would do that. I mean, just you can give whatever you want, but it's gotta be, like, open and everyone knows and
Buzzcocks:all that.
Sam Rosenfield:Sure. And certainly, like, Lyft, I think there's common ground, I would say, of raising the limits for contributions to formal parties, road. That happened a few years ago. Mitch McConnell was a big proponent of it, and it did pass. But doing that more, it's gonna open shifting the sleuth scapes so that more money can be traveled in parties.
Sam Rosenfield:We're all for I think the, again, when we speak to kind of fellow goo goo progressive types, we're trying to we're trying to certainly inculcate some realism that the idea that getting money out of politics, money will find a way. It's the kind
Tim Benson:of Right. Yeah.
Sam Rosenfield:Of course. And, so that's a pipe dream that ends up having if you pursue it, it ends up having actually bad, unintended effects. You know, the a progressive reformist message that acknowledges that would, might be like rebuilding a movement for a floor of public financing that everybody gets some, money, to be competitive, and then there's no limits on if you if you wanna raise and spend as much money as you want, go for it. So that would be probably the progressive pitch for at least acknowledging that money is gonna be, we'll find a way. I wouldn't,
Tim Benson:just off, you know, having molded in the last 15 seconds that you said. I don't think I'd necessarily be opposed to that. It might be able to be talked out of it, but, sounds reasonable. Yeah. Anyway We saw.
Tim Benson:Anyway. Yeah. Yeah. I think we did. Alright.
Tim Benson:Yeah. So my apologies again for keeping you along, but and for ranting and, monopolizing our time somewhat. I don't normally do that, but like I said, this has been, like, something that's been, you know, building in me for for a long time. But, anyway, so normal exit question that everyone gets before we go, and that's, you know, you know, what would you like the audience to get out of this book, or, you know, what's the one thing you'd want a reader to take away from it having read it?
Sam Rosenfield:I would like readers to come away thinking, oh, wow. Parties have important valuable, significance and virtues that I had. Even as a someone who was interested in politics and have been, have taken a partisan side my whole life, I, John q Reader or Jane q Reader, didn't really appreciate, the democratic virtues of strong parties, and I'm gonna now direct my engagement in in in politics, with that in mind. Alright.
Tim Benson:Great. Well, again, the, the book is The Hollow Parties, the Many Past and Disordered President of American Party Politics. Fantastic, fantastic book. I was really looking forward to this ever since. So, Princeton, reached out to me about it, and I wasn't disappointed this you guys are I mean, aside from, I have my nitpicks with your, with the whole long new right and that whole we didn't get a chance to get into that.
Tim Benson:But, like I said, I have some quibbles with it with, how things got to where they were and all that. But for the most part, you guys are speaking my love language, with this. And, so much so that this book is almost like a fetish property for me. But, no.
Sam Rosenfield:No. But yeah.
Tim Benson:Let me there's just a lot of stuff in here that I've been, you know, you know, thinking for years and, having discussions with family and stuff about for years and, and about what has gone wrong and, you know, how things got to where they are and all that. And and but it's also a fantastic look at just the history of the parties in the United States in general. I mean, not just the Democratic party, the Republican party, but, you know, the Whigs and the Mug Lumps and the Progressive Party and all these things, and how the parties got shaped and, you know, to where the how we basically got to the party system we have today from our past. And that's a very, very interesting read. So I highly, highly recommend this book.
Tim Benson:To everybody out there, you will you will really enjoy it. And it's also it's not very I know a lot of times people are like, oh, it's an academic press book. It's gotta be, like, dry and boring. No. Not dry.
Tim Benson:Not boring.
Sam Rosenfield:We got stories.
Tim Benson:Yeah. Yeah. We got stories. Very lively narrative. It's a really, really fantastic book.
Tim Benson:I'm I'm, so glad I got to read it. So, again, the name of the book, The Hollow Parties, the Many Past, and Disordered President of American Party Politics, and the author is, Daniel Slotsman, and my guest today, Sam Rosenfeld. So, doctor Rosenfeld, thank you again so so much for coming on the podcast and discussing the book with me. And, you
Sam Rosenfield:know, thank you to both
Tim Benson:of you guys for, you know, taking the time and effort to actually write the thing so that, you know, we can all enjoy the fruits of your labors.
Sam Rosenfield:This was a ton of fun. Thank you so much.
Tim Benson:Oh, it's no problem. And again, if you like this podcast, please, consider leaving us a 5 star review and sharing with your friends. And if you have any questions or comments or you have any suggestions for books you'd like to see on the podcast, you can always reach out to me at, tbenson@heartland.org. That's tbensonheartland.org. And for more information about the Heartland Institute, you can just go to heartland.org.
Tim Benson:And we do have our, Twitter x account, for the podcast. You can also reach out to us there. I don't even know why I say x. I'm just always gonna call Twitter. Everyone's always gonna call Twitter.
Tim Benson:The x thing is just stupid. Anyway, so, yeah, Twitter account. Same thing. If you have any questions, comments, or anything like that, feel free to share them there. Give us a follow.
Tim Benson:Our Twitter handle is at the books at I llbooks so make sure you check that out and yeah that's pretty much it so thanks for listening everyone we'll see you guys next time Take care. Love you, Robbie. Love you, mom. Bye bye.
Buzzcocks:Inside. Hollow inside, you were hollow inside, but I couldn't find out what the reason