American political parties: Too weak? Too strong? Hollowed out?

I've been thinking that what we've seen in recent years is some kind of real internal collapse of the Republican Party. And that without a serious turning away from the current neoliberal party orthodoxy, the Democratic Party is likely to face something similar. But I've never articulated it quite that way. Because "collapse" implies falling apart, like the Whig Party in days of yore. And we see that the Democratic and Republican Parties are very much functioning institutions with their own political directions.

Jan-Werner Müller, who has become well-known for his work on populism, addresses this phenomenon in a different way in What Are Parties For? Boston Review 11/06/2020.

He frames the problem of one of the parties filing to perform the proper function of democratic political parties. As he puts it, "high levels of political polarization in the United States co-exist with hollowed-out parties, which lack robust internal decision-making structures and often have only the most diffuse of programs."

The link in that quotation is to "The Hollow Parties" by Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld, a chapter in Can America Govern Itself? (Frances Lee and Nolan McCarty, eds, 2019). They note that for the US, "in the mass electorate, party identification predicts voting behavior better than any time since the dawn of polling." (my emphasis)

And yet, even as the party divide defines the sides in America’s political war, parties do not feel strong. They seem inadequate to the tasks before them – of aggregating and integrating preferences and actors into ordered conflict, of mobilizing participation and linking the governed with the government. This sense cannot merely be chalked up to popular misimpressions or to a mistakenly formalistic conception of the modern party. For years, warning bells had sounded. Parties’ capacity to influence the political scene had grown brittle, they seemed to signal, and their legitimacy in the eyes of ordinary voters and engaged activists alike had abated. And then the warning bells became a honking siren. The developments of 2016 should upend any settled consensus that all is well in the party system. American parties are weak. [my emphasis in bold]

It's a textbook civics idea that the parties are important institutions in linking individual citizens to the institutions of government. Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama described this deficit in the Democratic Party's functioning when he said after the recent election (Burgess Everett and Heather Caygle, ‘We’re not some demonic cult’: Democrats fume over faulty messaging Politico 11/10/2020):

Jones, the sole incumbent Democratic senator to lose, said both party campaign arms need to change their mission. He said Stacey Abrams’ work in Georgia should be a model for the party’s work in individual states, while he contends the “DSCC and DCCC spend too much time investing in candidates and not the electorate. They don’t invest in House districts, they don’t invest in states.”

In other words, for a party to be successful in its role of mediating effectively between the people and governing institutions, there has to be some significant level of identification and personal connection of the party's supporters to the party structures. A party which functions primarily as a funding mechanism for media campaigns is not equipped to adequately fill that textbook mediating function.

Müller in making a case for stronger parties is not calling for a rigid party establishment that calls the shots. On the contrary, he writes, "parties that are internally authoritarian — for example, no real dissent to the thin-skinned, vengeful Trump has been allowed among Republicans — will also have authoritarian tendencies in government. That is why some constitutions require pluralism inside parties." (my emphasis)

"Bipartisanship" and the hollowing of the two parties

A significant and painfully obvious part of that process in the US is the rising inequality of the last 40 years of dominance of neoliberal policies, along with the Supreme Court greatly facilitating the flood of money from corporations and the super-rich into political campaigns. President Obama's actions afterward didn't nearly match his words, but what he said just after the Citizens United Supreme Court decision came down in January 2010 was plainly correct. "This ruling strikes at our democracy itself," he declared. "I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest." (Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Obama Turns Up Heat Over Ruling on Campaign Spending New York Times 11/23/2010) In his State of the Union address that month, he said, "With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests –- including foreign corporations –- to spend without limit in our elections." (Remarks by the President in State of the Union Address Obama White House Archives 01/27/2020)

This problem has not been fixed during the last 11 years.

As Schlozman and Rosenfeld note, "In the 2014 election cycle, 1 percent of 1 percent of Americans, a mere 31,976 donors, gave 29 percent of all dollars disclosed by federal election committees."

Part of the current dilemma of the US two-party system is that for most of the 20th century, the left-right ideological divide curt across party lines because there was effectively a one-party system in the "Solid South" until circa 1970. During Franklin Roosevelt's Presidency, for instance, Progressive Republicans voted with liberal Democrats on New Deal projects while Southern conservative Democrats opposed them. But FDR found more ready agreement among Republicans for military rearmament after the German invasion of Poland in 1039 than among conservative Southern Democrats. Barry Goldwater's failed Presidential campaign in 1964 dramatically illustrated the cleft over civil rights that crossed party lines.

And until the Presidential election of 1992, California was considered a "safe" state in Presidential elections. Which also created a strong incentive for the Democrats to show "bipartisan" appeal to California Republicans. It was actually a Republican California Governor, Pete Wilson, that dealt a death blow to that tradition with his infamous Proposition 187 in 1994, a moment covered in the KCET documentary, 187: The Rise of the Latino Vote (2020). A classic example of a short-term win - the xenophobic initiative passed and was quickly overturned by the courts - and resulted in higher future turnout by Latino voters and a stronger tilt among them to the Democratic Party. (Note: Pete Wilson was a moderate Republican, but he eagerly supported this xenophobic, nativist measure. This was 22 years before Donald Trump was elected President. Trumpism has deep roots in the Republican Party.)

That history shaped the view of many of today's establishment Democrats, including Joe Biden. The DLC/Third Way notion of neoliberal "centrism" was based on those now long-gone partisan alignments.

What would it take to strengthen the parties on a democratic basis?

One of the most distinguishing facts of the American political scenes remains the asymmetric partisan polarization. Müller closes his piece with this observation: "As with so many other aspects of U.S. political life, the situation is polarized, but not symmetrical. What Jedediah Purdy has called “the rancid right” is much further from what a proper party should be than the Democratic party. U.S. democracy as a whole is suffering the consequences." I guess Müller hasn't gottent he memo yet that we're all supposed to be very nice and gentle to the Republicans' post-elecion wounded fee-fees.

Currently, we're stuck with what Schlozman and Rosenfeld call the "paradox of parties dominating politics while seeming institutionally ancillary to that very domination – at once central and wraithlike."

Nevertheless, they caution against uncritical nostalgia for the past party functioning:

Any historically grounded account that indicts contemporary American parties runs the risk of golden-age-ism. If only the parties still dispensed turkeys at Thanksgiving, then somehow everything would be better again. But Americans have never had properly responsible parties in their history. Fully ideologically defined and sorted parties emerged only after the parties’ coordinating capacities had collapsed, and to seek to revive those capacities is to pursue something new in American experience. Reconstruction of the parties begins, moreover, with the bedrock facts of a Madisonian political system, a sprawling state, and a distrustful public. The organizable alternatives in national politics flow from those harsh realities. Given the deep roots of contemporary polarization, our choices are circumscribed. Either Americans live with hollow parties or we reach for responsible parties.

I assume the "turkeys at Thanksgiving" reference is to the classic city party machines, which left historians recognize served a genuine and important democratic function even while recognizing legitimate criticisms of their corruption and rigidity.

One of the most encouraging features of the current political scene for the Democratic Party is that progressive organizations like the Sunrise Movement and Justice Democrats has established effective small-donor networks that give progressive candidates the possibility to compete in fundraising with opponents relying on large donors. But so long as the current Democratic establishment regards some operations with hostility and mounts active opposition against them, that kind of resource can provide only limited support to strengthening the party organization.

But, "Since their birth at the dawn of mass politics, parties at their best have been deeply egalitarian institutions. They should not become mere vehicles for plutocracy." (Schlozman and Rosenfeld)

Cleaning up the party financing will be a big lift. It will require a Constitutional Amendment to overturn Citizens United. And it will require effective statutory spending limits and a major reining in of the so-called "independent" expenditures in campaigns.

And strengthening the party structures has a relatively recent real-world model, which Schlozman and Rosenfeld cite with approval, "Howard Dean’s short-lived but fruitful Fifty-State Strategy for the DNC early in the twenty-first." See also Bob Kuttner's interview with Dean, Q&A: A New 50-State Strategy The American Prospect 01/17/2017. As Dean says there, "The first mistake is only focusing on the donors. You have to emphasize grassroots activities. ... mainly you have to build the base and it has to be a significant base."

Tom Sullivan sums up the importance for the Democratic Party in having that solid local organizational basis everywhere (Getting it ass-backwards Hullabaloo 11/14/2020):

Time after time, huge (apparent) Democratic vote leads run up in blue cities during early voting evaporate on Election Day when returns come in from smaller, red counties in the countryside where Democrats have little foothold or organization.

While promoting his 50-state strategy, Howard Dean would say, “We’re going to be in places where the Democratic Party hasn’t been in 25 years.” And, “If you don’t show up in 60 percent of the country, you don’t win, and that’s not going to happen anymore.” The 50-state strategy lasted through the 2006 and 2008 election cycles, both Democratic landslide elections. Then it was gone.

You can’t win if you don’t show up to play. If you do show up, you’d best have “game.”

That is not about better policies or messaging, but basic, competent organization at the county level. [my emphasis]

And he describes was doesn't work:

But the basic organizing strategy of the party is top-down (and ass-backwards). In presidential years especially, the big money and media presence of the presidential campaign dominates organizing strategy at the state level. Money and organizers flow into the few, big blue cities where reside large blocks of Democratic voters. And then, only in blue cities in swing states. It’s logical. It’s efficient. Until the dozens of red, rural counties Democrats ignore begin reporting votes and their leads slip away.

You can’t win if you don’t show up to play. ...

Stacey Abrams [whose organization registered hundreds of thousands of new voters] didn’t turn Georgia blue [in the 2020 general election] on Joe Biden’s campaign coattails. He won the state on hers.

On Abrams' achievement in Georgia, see: Katanga Johnson and Heather Timmons, How Stacey Abrams paved the way for a Democratic victory in 'New Georgia' Reuters 11/09/2020.