Rethinking Parties in American History: Facets, Prophets, and Strands

• In Event: Political Organizations and Parties in Historical Context

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new framework for understanding parties and their development across American history. We treat parties as thick, autonomous actors with distinct doctrines and goals that serve as vehicles for projects to reshape state and society—and not merely as the agents of ambitious politicians or of groups eager to extract benefits from the state. Drawing on hallmarks of analysis in American Political Development, we emphasize both the layered accretion of party forms and the interplay of ideas and institutions across time. And from historians we take a concern to interweave party politics with the myriad social forces that shaped them and that they shaped in turn.

We place party formulations across American history inside a common framework. When contemporary party actors ask how and in whose interest they wield power, they ask the same questions as their predecessors since the dawn of mass politics. And when they search for answers, they combine and recombine venerable tropes and patterns from a deep historical well. We identify eight fundamental questions that parties must answer—facets of party, in our language—beginning with their goals in wielding state power, and proceeding through their internal organization and their views on race and capital. We then apply those facets to the visions of seventeen different parties or party-factions—prophecies of party, in our language—that have shaped and reshaped party forms across history. Such building blocks serve, in combination, to reveal deeper patterns of party behavior in American history. And so we end by sketching six distinct approaches to party and its place in society—party strands, in our language—that have recurred in interaction with each other since the early republic. Together, the accommodationist, anti-party, pro-capital, policy-reform, radical, and populist strands illustrate not only the sheer breadth of party purposes in American history but also parties’ centrality to key turning points for the American polity.

Authors

• Daniel Schlozman

• Sam Rosenfeld, Colgate University