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Our Attenuated Politics and the Age of Reagan

In a recent essay, political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld (forthcoming) argue compellingly that contemporary American political parties are ‘‘hollow.’’ Despite the high degree of partisan polarization that is evident all across the political system, American political parties are ‘‘neither organizationally robust beyond their roles raising money nor meaningfully felt as a real, tangible presence in the lives of voters or in the work of engaged activists.’’ If the two major parties each used to possess some degree of capacity to mobilize their voters, nominate candidates, and generate a party agenda, they now seem significantly less capable of doing so. No single moment in recent memory may be more illustrative of the point than the 2016 presidential election, when both major parties experienced organizational failures of different kinds. The hollowness of our parties today is matched only by the narrowness of the underlying electoral foundation that anchors our politics. Comparatively few Americans seem consistently and genuinely connected to our political life. For all of the polarized discourse that is constantly churned out over the airwaves and Internet, voter turnout at the national level continues to lag substantially behind many other rich democracies (Desilver 2018), and voter turnout at various levels of the political system remains relatively low by our own historical standards. On numerous other measures of political participation, Americans continue to turn away from engagement with the public sphere. The participation that does occur is distributed unevenly across the population, concentrated as it is among older, white, and more affluent Americans—as well as those with more extreme views (Macedo 2005). Far from being rooted in a broad base, our democracy is rooted in a narrow one. Our political life was not always so attenuated. How and why have American parties and politics changed for the worse in these ways, and how is their deterioration related to the intensification of partisan polarization and economic inequality? Josh Pacewicz’s Partisans and Partners: The Politics of the Post-Keynesian Society is a creative and evocative study of party politics in two Iowa cities that provides important new clues about the answers to these vital questions. Pacewicz originally arrived in Iowa during the run-up to the 2008 election with a different project in mind, thinking he would interview people about their political preferences. But speaking with his respondents led him to quickly realize that something profound had happened in their political lives over the years. Many of them spoke sincerely of a ‘‘transformation’’ that had occurred in ‘‘the 1980s,’’ a transformation that affected the larger political system no less than the minute ways they related to it. Drawing on a well-integrated combination of ethnographic observation, in-depth interviews, and archival research, Partisans and Partners sparkles with insights as Pacewicz describes and explains what has happened to American politics in Prairieville and River City, pseudonyms for the two cities that serve as his field sites. Partisans and Partners: The Politics of the Post-Keynesian Society, by Josh Pacewicz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 384 pp. $35.00 paper. ISBN: 9780226402697.