I'm open to this idea, and would love for it to work, but it feels like any effort in this direction would be swept away by larger social trends toward atomization. When I look at other countries, it's hard to find examples of this sort of thing working right now.
The other worry is that the people most likely to engage in this style of politics would be disproportionately college educated, and skew priorities further away from the average voter.
Again, not ideologically or personally opposed to the idea! I just don't have much confidence it would work.
Hard agree. As someone who spent 20 years knocking on doors and “movement building “ building a connective party is unlikely to happen until and unless new civic patterns emerge and social network practitioners- Gen Z Alinsky- can connect theory and practice. Until then “informed” deliverism or “practical” popularism is the way forward.
This is well worth reading. I find myself thinking, not for the first time, that Henry has offered a clear description of issues that I'd been mulling over in a half-formed way.
That said, I'm more convinced by the diagnosis than I am by the belief that it offers a path forward. I don't know whether this is actionable.
I am reminded of Bill McKibben's description, in _The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon_ of the church that he grew up in. As he says, that was the period of highest membership in mainline Protestant churches and, as a result, churches were, to some extent, lowest-common denominator organizations that both welcomed a large portion of the public and made few demands and were minimally ideological. As church membership declined, churches became more ideological, because they didn't have to address as broad a community.
Right now American politics is highly ideological and addresses a small percentage of the population (as actively involved). That has, as this post describes, certain problems. But I think it's really tricky to think about what would reverse that trend.
Good piece, I'd echo the other commenters concerning that this is partyism valuable but hard (comparative politics might have some models to point to, but the widespread challenges of social democracy suggest that they will be few and far between).
One promising area to address I'd think is the anti-party leanings of many U.S. good governance groups. This goes back to the U.S. founding and suspicion of faction, but practical experience with democracy in subsequent centuries all point to the importance of parties to democracy.
So what can be done:
* I'd think rallying organizations like the League of Women Voters, Common Cause, and political scientist groups to address the challenge of hollow parties. I think some of the post-Watergate reform and campaign finance reform efforts may have put the brakes on partyism in ways that are more easily addressed by policy in the short-term than is the Bowling Alone atomization.
* I think we need to find ways to bring party competition to blue states and municipalities. Popularist and deliverist feeder teams at the state and local level could do the work of experimenting with forming new publics. I don't think this is an easy problem, but it's a possible one. Canada manages separate state and local parties. This is not my area of expertise and currently existing party organization have strong reasons to support the status quo, but many of the necessary electoral reforms can be done at the state or local level and I bet there are ways to design the rules reinforce rather than undermine national party strength.
I like this idea, but I think the "bowling alone" problem, as mentioned in the article, makes this a very, very hard road to follow. The Elks Lodge stopped being a thing because people stopped wanting to be a part of an Elks Lodge.
I wonder if you could make a dent in some of the partyist problems by trying to create more participatory structures in local government--public hearings and meetings and such ARE de facto partyist hangout / meetup events--but I think that you have to somehow ALSO decrease the obstructivist power of such events, which is a pretty hard needle to thread. Right now, everyone knows that the point of showing up to such events is to yell a lot and prevent stuff from happening, so ordinary people understandably decline to hangout with Crazy Yell Liberty Mom or Anti-New Building Guy and.. wind up angry that government never accomplishes anything.
A memory: When I graduated from college in 1980 and moved to NY, the first thing I did was to join the local Democratic club. (I was in Morningside Heights, and the club was Broadway Democrats.) My involvement didn’t last, for a bunch of reasons, but the fact that it even occurred to me to join, and that the club existed as a thing I could find and join, points up real differences between 45 years ago and now.
I don't disagree with the commenters here that point out that this kind of party-building is hard. That said, a first step toward this end would be for party leaders to think about how to rebuild the online fundraising operation so that it is actually oriented toward convincing donors to keep donating, rather than persuading donors through a ceaseless jackhammer of emails and texts that they made a terrible mistake in donating their first dollar.
Really interesting analysis. Of course, both the "neoliberals" and "leftists" would claim their POV is totally centered on the voters, though their focus is crafting the Perfect Message to convince their imagined pool of independent voters.
One thing I've been thinking about is party infrastructure. All that "organic connecting" costs money, as a long-term ongoing investment. Who funds it? How do the competeing think tanks and advocacy organizations stack up? Who funds CPAC? The Federalist Society? Are there Democratic equivalents? Are there enough Democratic billionaires? I agree with the core premise that connecting with voters rather than messaging at them is the only viable plan for competeing with the Republican party, but it ain't cheap, unless you go Tammany Hall and just start bribing them. Obama is probably right about rebuilding the Democratic party from the ground up, but who will step up to do that, and how will they pay for it?
You and the rest of the Democrats keep talking about how Trump remade the Republican party. He didn't. Trump wouldn't be the future 47th POTUS if it wasn't for the voters aka the American people. That's what Seth London is saying when he says Democrats need to stop focusing on the politicians and return their focus to the voters. Duh!
Trump didn't remake the party so much as just strip off the fading veneer of Reasonable Republicanism. And Trump is the future 47th President because of 2 things, his celebrity-based ownership of the Republican voter base and the unwavering support and protection by the Republican party. A small plurality of eligible voters chose Trump, and about the only lesson to take from that is messaging ain't worth shit.
Been thinking along similar lines for a few years now. In another life I wrote a PhD about Scottish party development at the end of the 19th / early 20th C. One of the few lines I can recall from memory was my argument that following the 3rd reform act votes became something parties organized to collect. Can’t help but think that improved organizational infrastructure, not necessarily focused on politics, would close a number of gaps that mark contemporary American life.
This is an example of a discussion I wager we all wish we could have offline, in meetings, at people's doors, but that may not seem realistic because of the cognitive or algorithmic great sorting that (I suspect) this very conversation represents.
However, to suggest that there isn't time, that it will take too long is to give up the vision of a public that Farrell suggests, and to "demobilize" its very possibility.
I've seen two things that give me hope over the last 25 years. One, on the day after 9/11, I was at Moraine Valley Community College, at a public meeting that was called by a couple of political science teachers and a local rabbi. These people didn't do a presentation, just said it was important that people gather, and it was an astonishing counter-example to the retreats from campus and from corporate offices the previous day. They invited students to speak if they wanted to say something, I have a vivid recollection of a woman in a hijab speaking articulately, and a young guy in a trucker cap listening and then responding respectfully. This was a public, created during an emergency, and those students had a different sense of themselves afterward, I would wager, because of the fact that they had experienced this (an alternative to the radio/TV etc.)
Two, four years later, my local political party had a debate (the only one I've seen in the 25 years I've been engaged with them) about whether to march in the 4th of July parade, or to decline out of a principled stance of solidarity with a peace group that had been disinvited from participating because of some very strong political messaging the previous year.
The debate needed a chair with the skills necessary to foster an exchange between the two sides and a vote, but we as a party became a public right there. People vehemently disagreed, and despite a couple defections by people whose side lost, I think most of us were amazed and gratified that such a thing was possible.
This is a historically very conservative collar county, and the Democrats haven't won much there ever. But the local paper covered our decline of the invitation above the fold, with the chair saying that not everyone agreed with the peace group, but felt if was an important principle that their speech be heard (since the parade obviously was and always had been a site of political messaging). The community committee that was in charge of the parade and the simultaneous festival fell apart at least partly as a consequence of this pushback on our part, and when we marched in the parade the following year, people applauded all along the route, welcoming us back.
We got wiped out at the County level this past election, erasing our gains towards flipping the county, and my stake in this debate right here is whether it is possible for us to somehow get back to 20 years ago manifesting as a public tribune rather than just a GOTV machine.
William James talked about the necessity of a will to believe in situations of emergency and uncertainty. We can't win this battle primarily online, although this is where I am right now, and I am heartened by the energy manifested here. Let's make sure we get offline too, where the arguments get real.
I'm in the choir here, going on 20 years, back to Skocpol and Putnam, after seeing our controlling elites pivot so easily to a deranged imperial response to 9/11.
The problem where I am, in Illinois, is that when push comes to shove, the party is articulated ENTIRELY as PACs. Election finance law seems to dictate that you can only work for your unit (mine is McHenry County, and so a county unit), and if you stray beyond that, you get your hand slapped, ostensibly because people are nervous about violating laws. It is absolutely counter-intuitive when you're walking around as a PC, when my idealist self is telling people we're feeding their responses up the pipeline; all these legal PAC boundaries feel like one more way of being divide-and-conquer demobilized.
The state party is an entirely separate PAC, which isn't accountable in any way to local/county parties, ie no information flow going up the pipeline, and really, none coming down either. How were officers elected up there? Who knows, and they don't have to and won't tell you. At a time of potential movement away from Mike Madigan's opaque control toward something democratic, this is REALLY frustrating.
Organizations (parties as) have their strengths and weaknesses; when people are not paid, as party members mostly aren't, they tend to take their payment through control. Consonant with what Brian T says below, these ideas are primary to my hope of overcoming the atomization/disconnection, building a base that the party has to be responsible to, but also gives it the power of real constituencies. But it is like building the renewable grid we need equally as much: it is hard!
Perhaps the decline of partyism on the Democratic side is its unwavering focus on rights instead of results, on progress rather than people. In striving to make sure that everyone is entitled to the bounties and opportunities America can offer, they made it seem as though this was a zero sum game. The conservative promise that a rising tide will lift all boats is as disingenuous as it is a dubious outcome of conservative policies. Democrats focus on making the boat is big enough for everyone rather than making sure the tide comes in.
Immigration is a sad but critical example. Voters have come to believe that Democrats saw the interests of undocumented immigrants and refugees as more important than the interests of American citizens. It may be that this attitude reflected in part prejudice and unfounded fear but that does not mean a relaxed approach to border control and refugee claims is sensible policy. If Democrats listened, they would have nailed down effective immigration controls before worrying about family unification. You can do both but people who feel secure are more willing to feel generous.
Democrats believe in government but their approach makes it seem more like an end than a means. By all rights, Democrats should be seen as the party of family, not the party of government. The very nature of family embraces the necessity of helping one another, a very progressive concept. Democrats should address themselves to making sure government works for families with concrete programs, not process.
Having a more effective and organized party makes sense. Yet voters want to see good, effective government that is competent, results-oriented, and unobtrusive. We don’t need government to moralize or champion anything — that’s what Substack is for….
I agree that Partyism broadly defined as a mechanism for genuine on-the-ground presence in people's lives is a good idea. However this is a much harder lift for the Democratic party to pull off as almost by definition it is not the party of the majority ethno-religious faction in the USA and as the liberal party, has tasked itself with representing vastly disparate minority groups many of whom are only willing to engage with the Democratic party or even the liberal project only as long as it serves their narrow self interest. The GOP doesn't have to artificially organize any block parties or have neighborhood captains because churches, gun clubs and farm events occur organically across the country as a natural part of the majority cultural group's nationwide social network. That is simply impossible for the Democratic party to replicate as there is no natural basis for such organizing. Sadly I think the Democratic party or liberal parties in multicultural democracies are structurally condemned to play second fiddle. As we have seen since civil rights, Democrats mostly get elected as the clean-up party after the GOP administration ends in a catastrophe.
@John Darger, farmers in any country are literally "sons of the soil" and in the USA the majority of farmers belong to the majority ethnic group. So they moved to the GOP both in the south and elsewhere as FDR's new deal coalition collapsed post 1965 civil rights. Furthermore, farmers and ranchers, as rural land owners, economically tend to have a small government ethos and as the GOP adopted an intense small government mindset to fight federal enforcement of civil rights, it naturally aligned with their economic interests as well.
Thank you, Das P. Michael Albertus's argues in LAND POWER that land power contributes to, is the base of, racial hierarchies, among other problematic hierarchies. If you want to dismantle the racial hierarchy, you have to reshuffle the land, with all the perils that this entails, which he historically documents, on both left (Mao) and right (Brazilian landowners). He also shows that it can work, and notwithstanding all the painful limits, is happening in South Africa, in Bolivia, elsewhere.
It needs to happen here too, for social and environmental reasons.
Thank you @John Darger. Land reform should have occurred in the USA after the civil war in 1865 as freed slaves were promised "40 acres and a mule" but this promise was quickly broken. 160 years later the US economy is not only both post-agricultural and post-industrial but society overall is much more fragmented into many ethnic groups due to subsequent waves of migration from all over the world. So such a program is virtually impossible now and even if it could be implemented in some slow but non-disruptive way the political ramifications of such a realignment would probably be dwarfed by larger forces like climate change, automation and the collapse of the US safety net.
No question about reconstruction, but "dwarfed by climate change" begs the question: who is going to grow our food? It is true that our young farmers are afraid of their fragile business models being overcome by drought and flood. But land tenure and solidarity are possible factors in something that transcends the Grapes of Wrath plot from the 30's. If the kinds of land reform happening in Bolivia, in South Africa, in Columbia and Peru are an indication of possibility, all hard fought and imperfect but stepping toward dismantling these social hierarchies, I choose to believe in this crisis that it is possible in US too. Circling back around to where you and I started, having the Democratic Party, or some future coalition like the New Deal coalition, have farmers and the rural economy as part of its base would be part of that solidarity and that support of land tenure. Part of my credo is that boomers COULD help that happen with all their 401k money, which of course we are NOT doing now. Evidence on your side of the argument, doubtless.
@John Darger, land reform/redistribution movements are democratically viable in Bolivia, South Africa, Columbia and Peru for a key reason: The settler colonialists and their descendants who appropriated land during and after the colonial era are distinct numerical minorities while indigenous groups demanding land reform form strong numerical majorities in each of those countries. In the USA, the settlers are now the vast majority and current land owning farmers represent the core ethnic identity of the country as a whole. So the situation is not comparable at all. Native Americans are a tiny minority relegated to reservations. Any talk of land redistribution in the USA will be even more unpopular than reparations for slavery and democratically impossible.
The idea that partyism is declining is very common and obvious today. We have had many discussions about the reasons for this decline.
The harder question is: Why did partyism flourish before? Why did many people join the party without wanting to build a political career? Why did it work before?
This is too indirect and time-costly. There is already a good system: you get people elected, and you pass enduring laws.
To get people elected, see Rahm Emanuel interviewed by Ezra Klein. Get Rahm back, to chair the DNC.
To pass enduring laws, change the intellectual zeitgeist of the electorate. This will be much easier than it sounds. We have been swallowed by free-market fundamentalism. Instead, inside everyone's head we need to place a general understanding of non-market (social) organization alongside the market. Both market organization and non-market organization are necessary.
This can be accomplished in a dynamic illustration. See the playlist "New Addition to Economic Theory and Method" here:
I'm open to this idea, and would love for it to work, but it feels like any effort in this direction would be swept away by larger social trends toward atomization. When I look at other countries, it's hard to find examples of this sort of thing working right now.
The other worry is that the people most likely to engage in this style of politics would be disproportionately college educated, and skew priorities further away from the average voter.
Again, not ideologically or personally opposed to the idea! I just don't have much confidence it would work.
Hard agree. As someone who spent 20 years knocking on doors and “movement building “ building a connective party is unlikely to happen until and unless new civic patterns emerge and social network practitioners- Gen Z Alinsky- can connect theory and practice. Until then “informed” deliverism or “practical” popularism is the way forward.
This is well worth reading. I find myself thinking, not for the first time, that Henry has offered a clear description of issues that I'd been mulling over in a half-formed way.
That said, I'm more convinced by the diagnosis than I am by the belief that it offers a path forward. I don't know whether this is actionable.
I am reminded of Bill McKibben's description, in _The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon_ of the church that he grew up in. As he says, that was the period of highest membership in mainline Protestant churches and, as a result, churches were, to some extent, lowest-common denominator organizations that both welcomed a large portion of the public and made few demands and were minimally ideological. As church membership declined, churches became more ideological, because they didn't have to address as broad a community.
Right now American politics is highly ideological and addresses a small percentage of the population (as actively involved). That has, as this post describes, certain problems. But I think it's really tricky to think about what would reverse that trend.
Good piece, I'd echo the other commenters concerning that this is partyism valuable but hard (comparative politics might have some models to point to, but the widespread challenges of social democracy suggest that they will be few and far between).
One promising area to address I'd think is the anti-party leanings of many U.S. good governance groups. This goes back to the U.S. founding and suspicion of faction, but practical experience with democracy in subsequent centuries all point to the importance of parties to democracy.
So what can be done:
* I'd think rallying organizations like the League of Women Voters, Common Cause, and political scientist groups to address the challenge of hollow parties. I think some of the post-Watergate reform and campaign finance reform efforts may have put the brakes on partyism in ways that are more easily addressed by policy in the short-term than is the Bowling Alone atomization.
* I think we need to find ways to bring party competition to blue states and municipalities. Popularist and deliverist feeder teams at the state and local level could do the work of experimenting with forming new publics. I don't think this is an easy problem, but it's a possible one. Canada manages separate state and local parties. This is not my area of expertise and currently existing party organization have strong reasons to support the status quo, but many of the necessary electoral reforms can be done at the state or local level and I bet there are ways to design the rules reinforce rather than undermine national party strength.
I like this idea, but I think the "bowling alone" problem, as mentioned in the article, makes this a very, very hard road to follow. The Elks Lodge stopped being a thing because people stopped wanting to be a part of an Elks Lodge.
I wonder if you could make a dent in some of the partyist problems by trying to create more participatory structures in local government--public hearings and meetings and such ARE de facto partyist hangout / meetup events--but I think that you have to somehow ALSO decrease the obstructivist power of such events, which is a pretty hard needle to thread. Right now, everyone knows that the point of showing up to such events is to yell a lot and prevent stuff from happening, so ordinary people understandably decline to hangout with Crazy Yell Liberty Mom or Anti-New Building Guy and.. wind up angry that government never accomplishes anything.
A memory: When I graduated from college in 1980 and moved to NY, the first thing I did was to join the local Democratic club. (I was in Morningside Heights, and the club was Broadway Democrats.) My involvement didn’t last, for a bunch of reasons, but the fact that it even occurred to me to join, and that the club existed as a thing I could find and join, points up real differences between 45 years ago and now.
I don't disagree with the commenters here that point out that this kind of party-building is hard. That said, a first step toward this end would be for party leaders to think about how to rebuild the online fundraising operation so that it is actually oriented toward convincing donors to keep donating, rather than persuading donors through a ceaseless jackhammer of emails and texts that they made a terrible mistake in donating their first dollar.
Really interesting analysis. Of course, both the "neoliberals" and "leftists" would claim their POV is totally centered on the voters, though their focus is crafting the Perfect Message to convince their imagined pool of independent voters.
One thing I've been thinking about is party infrastructure. All that "organic connecting" costs money, as a long-term ongoing investment. Who funds it? How do the competeing think tanks and advocacy organizations stack up? Who funds CPAC? The Federalist Society? Are there Democratic equivalents? Are there enough Democratic billionaires? I agree with the core premise that connecting with voters rather than messaging at them is the only viable plan for competeing with the Republican party, but it ain't cheap, unless you go Tammany Hall and just start bribing them. Obama is probably right about rebuilding the Democratic party from the ground up, but who will step up to do that, and how will they pay for it?
William James asked the same question long ago.
You and the rest of the Democrats keep talking about how Trump remade the Republican party. He didn't. Trump wouldn't be the future 47th POTUS if it wasn't for the voters aka the American people. That's what Seth London is saying when he says Democrats need to stop focusing on the politicians and return their focus to the voters. Duh!
Trump didn't remake the party so much as just strip off the fading veneer of Reasonable Republicanism. And Trump is the future 47th President because of 2 things, his celebrity-based ownership of the Republican voter base and the unwavering support and protection by the Republican party. A small plurality of eligible voters chose Trump, and about the only lesson to take from that is messaging ain't worth shit.
Been thinking along similar lines for a few years now. In another life I wrote a PhD about Scottish party development at the end of the 19th / early 20th C. One of the few lines I can recall from memory was my argument that following the 3rd reform act votes became something parties organized to collect. Can’t help but think that improved organizational infrastructure, not necessarily focused on politics, would close a number of gaps that mark contemporary American life.
Exciting to see this get some attention.
This is an example of a discussion I wager we all wish we could have offline, in meetings, at people's doors, but that may not seem realistic because of the cognitive or algorithmic great sorting that (I suspect) this very conversation represents.
However, to suggest that there isn't time, that it will take too long is to give up the vision of a public that Farrell suggests, and to "demobilize" its very possibility.
I've seen two things that give me hope over the last 25 years. One, on the day after 9/11, I was at Moraine Valley Community College, at a public meeting that was called by a couple of political science teachers and a local rabbi. These people didn't do a presentation, just said it was important that people gather, and it was an astonishing counter-example to the retreats from campus and from corporate offices the previous day. They invited students to speak if they wanted to say something, I have a vivid recollection of a woman in a hijab speaking articulately, and a young guy in a trucker cap listening and then responding respectfully. This was a public, created during an emergency, and those students had a different sense of themselves afterward, I would wager, because of the fact that they had experienced this (an alternative to the radio/TV etc.)
Two, four years later, my local political party had a debate (the only one I've seen in the 25 years I've been engaged with them) about whether to march in the 4th of July parade, or to decline out of a principled stance of solidarity with a peace group that had been disinvited from participating because of some very strong political messaging the previous year.
The debate needed a chair with the skills necessary to foster an exchange between the two sides and a vote, but we as a party became a public right there. People vehemently disagreed, and despite a couple defections by people whose side lost, I think most of us were amazed and gratified that such a thing was possible.
This is a historically very conservative collar county, and the Democrats haven't won much there ever. But the local paper covered our decline of the invitation above the fold, with the chair saying that not everyone agreed with the peace group, but felt if was an important principle that their speech be heard (since the parade obviously was and always had been a site of political messaging). The community committee that was in charge of the parade and the simultaneous festival fell apart at least partly as a consequence of this pushback on our part, and when we marched in the parade the following year, people applauded all along the route, welcoming us back.
We got wiped out at the County level this past election, erasing our gains towards flipping the county, and my stake in this debate right here is whether it is possible for us to somehow get back to 20 years ago manifesting as a public tribune rather than just a GOTV machine.
William James talked about the necessity of a will to believe in situations of emergency and uncertainty. We can't win this battle primarily online, although this is where I am right now, and I am heartened by the energy manifested here. Let's make sure we get offline too, where the arguments get real.
I'm in the choir here, going on 20 years, back to Skocpol and Putnam, after seeing our controlling elites pivot so easily to a deranged imperial response to 9/11.
The problem where I am, in Illinois, is that when push comes to shove, the party is articulated ENTIRELY as PACs. Election finance law seems to dictate that you can only work for your unit (mine is McHenry County, and so a county unit), and if you stray beyond that, you get your hand slapped, ostensibly because people are nervous about violating laws. It is absolutely counter-intuitive when you're walking around as a PC, when my idealist self is telling people we're feeding their responses up the pipeline; all these legal PAC boundaries feel like one more way of being divide-and-conquer demobilized.
The state party is an entirely separate PAC, which isn't accountable in any way to local/county parties, ie no information flow going up the pipeline, and really, none coming down either. How were officers elected up there? Who knows, and they don't have to and won't tell you. At a time of potential movement away from Mike Madigan's opaque control toward something democratic, this is REALLY frustrating.
Organizations (parties as) have their strengths and weaknesses; when people are not paid, as party members mostly aren't, they tend to take their payment through control. Consonant with what Brian T says below, these ideas are primary to my hope of overcoming the atomization/disconnection, building a base that the party has to be responsible to, but also gives it the power of real constituencies. But it is like building the renewable grid we need equally as much: it is hard!
Perhaps the decline of partyism on the Democratic side is its unwavering focus on rights instead of results, on progress rather than people. In striving to make sure that everyone is entitled to the bounties and opportunities America can offer, they made it seem as though this was a zero sum game. The conservative promise that a rising tide will lift all boats is as disingenuous as it is a dubious outcome of conservative policies. Democrats focus on making the boat is big enough for everyone rather than making sure the tide comes in.
Immigration is a sad but critical example. Voters have come to believe that Democrats saw the interests of undocumented immigrants and refugees as more important than the interests of American citizens. It may be that this attitude reflected in part prejudice and unfounded fear but that does not mean a relaxed approach to border control and refugee claims is sensible policy. If Democrats listened, they would have nailed down effective immigration controls before worrying about family unification. You can do both but people who feel secure are more willing to feel generous.
Democrats believe in government but their approach makes it seem more like an end than a means. By all rights, Democrats should be seen as the party of family, not the party of government. The very nature of family embraces the necessity of helping one another, a very progressive concept. Democrats should address themselves to making sure government works for families with concrete programs, not process.
Having a more effective and organized party makes sense. Yet voters want to see good, effective government that is competent, results-oriented, and unobtrusive. We don’t need government to moralize or champion anything — that’s what Substack is for….
I agree that Partyism broadly defined as a mechanism for genuine on-the-ground presence in people's lives is a good idea. However this is a much harder lift for the Democratic party to pull off as almost by definition it is not the party of the majority ethno-religious faction in the USA and as the liberal party, has tasked itself with representing vastly disparate minority groups many of whom are only willing to engage with the Democratic party or even the liberal project only as long as it serves their narrow self interest. The GOP doesn't have to artificially organize any block parties or have neighborhood captains because churches, gun clubs and farm events occur organically across the country as a natural part of the majority cultural group's nationwide social network. That is simply impossible for the Democratic party to replicate as there is no natural basis for such organizing. Sadly I think the Democratic party or liberal parties in multicultural democracies are structurally condemned to play second fiddle. As we have seen since civil rights, Democrats mostly get elected as the clean-up party after the GOP administration ends in a catastrophe.
When and why did farmers become a "natural" part of the Republican Party? This is not natural, I would argue.
@John Darger, farmers in any country are literally "sons of the soil" and in the USA the majority of farmers belong to the majority ethnic group. So they moved to the GOP both in the south and elsewhere as FDR's new deal coalition collapsed post 1965 civil rights. Furthermore, farmers and ranchers, as rural land owners, economically tend to have a small government ethos and as the GOP adopted an intense small government mindset to fight federal enforcement of civil rights, it naturally aligned with their economic interests as well.
Thank you, Das P. Michael Albertus's argues in LAND POWER that land power contributes to, is the base of, racial hierarchies, among other problematic hierarchies. If you want to dismantle the racial hierarchy, you have to reshuffle the land, with all the perils that this entails, which he historically documents, on both left (Mao) and right (Brazilian landowners). He also shows that it can work, and notwithstanding all the painful limits, is happening in South Africa, in Bolivia, elsewhere.
It needs to happen here too, for social and environmental reasons.
Thank you @John Darger. Land reform should have occurred in the USA after the civil war in 1865 as freed slaves were promised "40 acres and a mule" but this promise was quickly broken. 160 years later the US economy is not only both post-agricultural and post-industrial but society overall is much more fragmented into many ethnic groups due to subsequent waves of migration from all over the world. So such a program is virtually impossible now and even if it could be implemented in some slow but non-disruptive way the political ramifications of such a realignment would probably be dwarfed by larger forces like climate change, automation and the collapse of the US safety net.
No question about reconstruction, but "dwarfed by climate change" begs the question: who is going to grow our food? It is true that our young farmers are afraid of their fragile business models being overcome by drought and flood. But land tenure and solidarity are possible factors in something that transcends the Grapes of Wrath plot from the 30's. If the kinds of land reform happening in Bolivia, in South Africa, in Columbia and Peru are an indication of possibility, all hard fought and imperfect but stepping toward dismantling these social hierarchies, I choose to believe in this crisis that it is possible in US too. Circling back around to where you and I started, having the Democratic Party, or some future coalition like the New Deal coalition, have farmers and the rural economy as part of its base would be part of that solidarity and that support of land tenure. Part of my credo is that boomers COULD help that happen with all their 401k money, which of course we are NOT doing now. Evidence on your side of the argument, doubtless.
@John Darger, land reform/redistribution movements are democratically viable in Bolivia, South Africa, Columbia and Peru for a key reason: The settler colonialists and their descendants who appropriated land during and after the colonial era are distinct numerical minorities while indigenous groups demanding land reform form strong numerical majorities in each of those countries. In the USA, the settlers are now the vast majority and current land owning farmers represent the core ethnic identity of the country as a whole. So the situation is not comparable at all. Native Americans are a tiny minority relegated to reservations. Any talk of land redistribution in the USA will be even more unpopular than reparations for slavery and democratically impossible.
Fascinating piece and one that I find myself agreeing with the more I read (I'm more on the deliverism side of the equation).
The idea that partyism is declining is very common and obvious today. We have had many discussions about the reasons for this decline.
The harder question is: Why did partyism flourish before? Why did many people join the party without wanting to build a political career? Why did it work before?
This is too indirect and time-costly. There is already a good system: you get people elected, and you pass enduring laws.
To get people elected, see Rahm Emanuel interviewed by Ezra Klein. Get Rahm back, to chair the DNC.
To pass enduring laws, change the intellectual zeitgeist of the electorate. This will be much easier than it sounds. We have been swallowed by free-market fundamentalism. Instead, inside everyone's head we need to place a general understanding of non-market (social) organization alongside the market. Both market organization and non-market organization are necessary.
This can be accomplished in a dynamic illustration. See the playlist "New Addition to Economic Theory and Method" here:
https://www.youtube.com/@ecolanguage