Prophets of Party in American Political History

Abstract

This article pursues a developmental understanding of American parties as autonomous and thick collective actors through a comparison of four key historical actors we term “prophets of party”: partisans of the nineteenth-century Party Period; Progressive reformers; mid-twentieth century liberal Democrats; and activists in and around the body popularly known as the McGovern-Fraser Commission. Leading theories portray political parties as the vehicles either of ambitious politicians or of groups eager to extract benefits from the state. Yet such analyses leave underdetermined the path from such actors’ desires for power to the parties’ wielding of it. That path is mediated by partisan forms and practices that have varied widely across institutional and cultural context. As parties search for electoral majority, they do so in the long shadow of ideas and practices, layered and accreted across time, concerning the role of parties in political life. We analyze four such prophesies, trace their layered contributions to their successors, and reflect on their legacy for contemporary party politics.

Separated by a common language: How Breitbart and The New York Times produce different meanings from common words

“…abortion) can be exploited to mobilise people in support of a wider ideological agenda. This is precisely what the American right has done in the case of abortion and various other morally charged social issues (not to mention racial divisions): it successfully aligned (White) religious and socially conservative voters and movements with corporate conservatives, and mobilised them to support the republican party’s neoliberal economic policy agenda (Hacker and Pierson, 2010: 181; Haney-López, 2014; Schlozman, 2015; Schlozman and Rosenfeld, 2019). In our study, we see how such a strategy can be supported by linguistic hacking, given that one of the five most similar words to ‘family planning’ and ‘contraception’ in Breitbart is ‘taxpayer funding’ (Table 1).…”

Hollow parties and their movement-ization: The populist conundrum

“…44 These features of the 'cartel party type' have led analysis to speak of the hollowing out of parties, a feature of US parties as well. 45 I hesitate to adopt the term 'cartel party' to describe American parties, because a central feature of the cartel party is the interpenetration of party and state evidenced by the role of public resources and funding obviously missing in the United States. 46 Accordingly, the cartel party shifts its locus from civil society to the state.…”

“…Yet the term 'hollow party' is apt for trends in both geographic areas. 47 In the United States, too, parties are no longer robust presences in civil society on the local or regional level and they too seem decreasingly able to police their boundaries. Their funding comes not from the state but from wealthy donors or from myriad small donors not tied to the party organization or membership.…”

“…If a populist leader captures a party, the tendency is to further hollow it out, undermining its organizational structures, elites and hierarchies by bypassing them through other sources of funding and direct appeals to 'the base' or the movement via the media. 77 At issue is not ordinary realignment but reshaping the party system to undermine party discipline, dispense with the party hierarchy and replace them with their own clients. This too propels them in an authoritarian direction.…”