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From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. For all that Donald Trump's politics are soaked in nostalgia, his political career could only exist right now. That's partly because of the media forms that led his 2016 campaign. He is a creation of modern reality television that really flowers in the 90s. He joins with The Apprentice in 2004. He's a creation of Twitter, which launches in 2006. He joins in 2009. He's a creator of a new show called The Apprentice, which launches in 2006.
Donald Trump, celebrity candidate. People know that story. But at most points in American history, he still couldn't have succeeded. Even if Trump had all that notoriety, all that money, he never could have become a major party's nominee for president because the party would have stopped him. That would have been its job. Until the 1970s, there was one way and one way only to win a presidential nomination. You had to win delegates at the convention.
And you actually had to win them. They didn't walk into the convention committed to vote for you. Delegates were members of the party, party regulars, party politicians. They were gatekeepers. And over and over and over again in American history, they locked the gates against people like Donald Trump. But by the time Trump ran in 2016, those days were over. There were no gatekeepers at the convention. There was no gate. If you won the primaries, you won. That change in rules reflected something larger.
a hollowing out of what political parties were, a collapse in the legitimacy of what they once did. Americans, we've never liked parties. George Washington's farewell address was a lengthy warning against our predations. He said, quote, "'The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.'"
But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual. So that's an argument that parties create so much disunion, so much dissension, so much fury that eventually they lead to a despot, a monarch, a strongman.
There's obviously a feeling of prescience in that now. But in an important way here, Washington was wrong. The founders were wrong. Their arguments against parties were, at the very least, unrealistic. Washington warned that parties bring disunity. But the disunity, it's already there. Parties, when they work, what they do is they make disunity manageable. They turn political conflict into politics. It's when they fail, the political conflict becomes violence or collapse. The Republican Party is failing.
Donald Trump is not a uniquely dangerous person. A few years ago, he was a comic figure in American life. He was of interest to tabloids and television executives. You might want him for a Comedy Central roast. Donald Trump is dangerous now because he's taken over the Republican Party. It's his control over a political party that controls the Supreme Court.
that controls the House of Representatives, that controls dozens of governorships and state houses and so many local election boards, that he has been able to bend that party and through it so many of those institutions to his will. That is what makes him dangerous. That in March, he installed his daughter-in-law, Laura Trump, to run that party. That is what makes him dangerous.
that he could ride the Republican Party's support and money and supporters and ballot access back to the White House, that is what makes him dangerous. That is why he matters. The problem is not Donald Trump. The problem is the Republican Party. It always has been. But how did the Republican Party get so weak that he could take it over?
That's not a story that begins in 2016 or 2015. It's a story that begins decades ago. It's a story that the political scientists Daniel Schlossman and Sam Rosenfeld tell in their new book, The Hollow Parties, the many pasts and disordered present of American party politics. We happen to have our interview fall on the morning after Donald Trump's conviction, as virtually every major figure in Republican party politics was lining up to defend him. We really couldn't have picked a better day to talk.
As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com. Sam Rosenfeld, Daniel Schlossman, welcome to the show. Great to be here. Pleasure. So we're talking here the day after Donald Trump was convicted on 34 counts in the Hush Money trial. This is excitingly only one of the four trials he is facing. So let me start by asking a question that I know the answer to, not how I normally try to begin.
Will the Republican Party replace him on the ticket, Sam? Ooh, I got that one. No. Why? To the extent that in 2016, the Access Hollywood tape provided a moment of seemingly contingent point in which elites could have made one move or another to coordinate around Trump. Eight years later, we are far, far down a line of development where you saw Republicans
Every single Republican leader from Congress, from, um,
State houses kind of line up yesterday articulating the notion that this is just as Trump says. And in fact, aping more and more the language and rhetoric of Trump himself, that this is the work of a kind of cabal out there of them that are after your leader. And if they can go after your leader, they can go after you. And they've been absolutely uniform in that position. Let me ask you the same question, Daniel. I mean, there's some way in which what is a party for, if not before a convention has even happened?
to replace a candidate who is both relatively unpopular and is now under criminal conviction. That would require that the party, apart from its leader, if we can call Donald Trump that, and I think it's, he certainly thinks of himself that way and most Republicans think of him that way, to exercise collective capacity to do that. And they haven't done that in 2016. There's no reason, as Sam just said, that having made all those choices, and as we'll
talk about having reached a point where he was even nominated that the party got to the point where he would be the nominee that magically now, very, very, very long into this process, that that would happen. You all are party scholars. What did you think when you saw Laura Trump get elected as RNC chair in March?
It was part and parcel of the 2020 decision by the Republicans to just not have a party platform. They just copy and pasted that from 2016 and then said, what Trump would like is what we stand for. A party platform passed by quadrennial conventions. For a long time, people make a punchline out of
how meaningless it is or how much it doesn't bind anybody. That's a perennial problem with American parties. But that is a perennial thing that dates back to the 1830s. It is a truly venerable thing
institution, and they just got rid of it. It's a very short step from that kind of dissolving of all the attributes of parties as actual organizations that go beyond an individual to become something entirely personalized and at this point patrimonialized around his literal family. You have a quote in the book from William Rusher, the longtime publisher of the National Review,
And he says, and this is decades ago, conservatism is the wine. The GOP is the bottle. Now it feels like Trumpism is a wine or, I don't know, the moonshine, the bleach, the something. And the GOP is the bottle. For people who have grown up in modern party politics, the idea of the party would be anything but the bottle.
for whoever is in charge of it. I mean, I would say the Democratic Party was more or less the bottle into which Barack Obama poured his presidency. I would say that that was not untrue for George W. Bush. What would it look like? What did it look like? Because this is a big part of your book, Sam. What did it look like when parties were more than a bottle?
There was an ethos, a kind of principle articulated explicitly going back to Martin Van Buren and the other architects of the first mass political party in the world.
in the 1820s and 1830s, the Jacksonian Democratic Party, that they served this really important value. And Van Buren saw party as protecting the Constitution, protecting Jefferson's vision of the country from strongmen and demagogues. They articulated the idea that parties subsume individual ambition, that you commit to the party and to the cause, never to the man.
That's what inculcates a lot of kind of discipline, a lot of the attributes of the 19th century party model that fall under a lot of strain by the 20th century. But it's in part a principle that political scientists tend to try and instill in students with varying success and to other kind of normal people out in the world.
that there's something about political parties that is valuable in and of themselves as a essential mediating institution between atomized individuals and the government, and that you actually want to protect and strengthen that form above and beyond whatever particular ideology or particular leader happens to be at a given moment. Let me hold on that quote for a second, the party and the cause, not the man, because it gets to something that was on my mind reading the book, which is this question of,
What gives a party meaning? You hear in that two things. The cause. So, I mean, you know, I think most people now think of the Democratic Party as a liberal party. Republicans are theoretically conservative, maybe a little less obviously ideological right now.
Then there's the party, right? The people in it. I think we sort of understand this as machine politics or somewhat corrupt, right? People there who they want to get something out of being part of the party, right? They work for it. You know, they get some kickbacks from it or they get a job from it. Patronage early on patronage was a very important part of parties there.
You can imagine constituencies as one of them, right? Parties sort of are an organizer of different groups into coalitions. And because we have a two-party system, you need to do that. So it's really about like the coalitional groups in them. I think that has felt true on the Democratic side.
What other sources of meaning are there for parties? And at what points have different ones been dominant? Part of the argument we make is that there are profound variation in party formations across American history. And it's kind of irreducibly historically contingent. So there's not one thing that we say is party organization and you see it all across. And that there's always this bottle and then it just depends on what kind of ideas you pour in as the wine. In fact, form and substance form.
are kind of inextricably linked. And one of the things we talk about is different party formations at different times have different what we call privileged partisan actors. Sometimes they are the kind of party activists you're mobilizing through patronage, and that's the kind of quintessential machine politics. Other times you have much more... You have a great quote. I just want to stop for a minute because I love this quote from the book where somebody from Tammany Hall is basically saying about him and a guy in the opposite machine. He's like, look, we disagree on everything, but
But we agree that if you work in politics, you should get something for it. Yeah, exactly. George Washington Plunkett. Other times there was the kind of short-lived progressive party, state-level reformist post-war Democratic parties in the North.
policy-oriented, issue-driven activists actually have a real driving force. The McGovern-Fraser reformers had a vision of social movements as kind of much more permeable and influencing parties, but giving them strength. Different formations at different times are acting at the behest of different kinds of actors. And sometimes they're more what we think of in 21st century terms as ideological and programmatic, and sometimes they're not.
So I got into covering politics. I came and worked at the American Prospect with Sam in another life in 2005. And the conventional wisdom was that the Republican Party was a stronger and more ideological party than the Democratic Party.
And if you think of the Obama era, there is this idea then that the Republican Party has become maybe extreme, but its extremism is ideological. It will not compromise on cutting taxes for the rich, right? People are very upset about the anti-tax pledge Republicans all take, right? They're sort of extreme compared to other modern conservative parties across the world in terms of their approach to the welfare state, in terms of their approach to economics, right?
And then within a matter of just a couple of years, this party that seems like it is uncompromising on behalf of its ideology, there's a whole big important political science book, Asymmetric Parties, written about this, becomes, I don't want to say non-ideological, but becomes uncompromising in service of, I think, what you would identify as conflict, right? Trumpism is Trump himself is a candidate of conflict.
How do you understand that? Because the rapidity of that change, what the Republican Party was about, I still think is somewhat under-remarked in politics. You know, the aughts, when we were starting out, had an air at that time of a kind of electoral juggernaut on behalf of a rigidly and impressively programmatic, disciplined ideological agenda. And it was just kind of bestriding the country, right?
That was pretty temporary, it turned out. It all kind of fell apart due to Iraq, due to Social Security privatization, due to Katrina, et cetera. And I think post-Bush, you see...
how much to a certain extent that moment was a bit of an aberration and that there is more continuity to this politics of populist socialist resentment in coalition with what we all call the pro-capital strand, getting tax cuts, getting what you can get out of government economic policy. And that coalition is much more haphazard and not electorally efficient and efficient
all-powerful and much more of a careening beast than what we saw in the kind of peak Bush rove. There's not a rove of that. Trump has been electorally successful without a rove. Steve Bannon does not have, in the way rove did, a sense of what are the demographics who are going to power my majority. It's let's throw a lot of resentment at the wall and see what sticks.
I go in for zero, zero of like the liberal, strange new respect for George W. Bush and Karl Rove. And I'm glad they come into this because I blame them and their presidency for where we are now. There's this moment, this very weird moment where
Where after George W. Bush loses the popular vote and gets in based on some chicanery with butterfly ballots in Florida, but then is president during 9-11 and there's a strong rally around the flag effect. They have a strong 2002 midterm campaign.
where Rove, with their sort of ideological plasticity, tax cuts, but they're going to do Medicare prescription drugs for seniors, they're going to do immigration reform to win over more Hispanic voters. There's this weird idea that they're going to pass like three or four or five of these big bills and like that's going to be the end of the Democratic Party. What actually happens is they fail at governance so unfathomably catastrophically in invading Iraq and
in mismanaging financial regulations. So there's a huge financial crash that my read of Republican Party politics to some degree since then has been that that I don't want to call them like the center, but like what you used to think of as mainstream Republicans have been functionally discredited.
And, you know, there are some gasps of it still, right? You know, Mitt Romney won the nomination in 2012. But part of why he loses is Republicans are still blamed for the financial crisis. And all the sort of Republican views on it are attached to him. And Obama runs against those views. And then Donald Trump emerges and runs against George W. Bush. He doesn't just run against Barack Obama. He runs against the Iraq war. He runs against all these idiots who sold out the country. He runs against free trade.
And you're historians. History is at least somewhat contingent. It does seem to me that a lot of our history turns on the failures of George W. Bush and particularly a lot of the Republican Party's history turns on the failures of George W. Bush and what emerges as the actual disgust and willingness Republicans have to see somebody come in and destroy their own establishment theoretically on their behalf.
I'd say two things. On the mismanagement story, that's in part the wages of and the costs of a party program that has been dominated by a conservative movement, what we call a party blob of think tanks, activists in the Republican side. Media is a huge force, even in the early aughts.
that kind of infects how decision-making happens in the Bush administration, both in terms of ideologically extreme and politically disastrous efforts to do things like privatize Social Security in a technocratically unsound way, deciding to invade a country for no reason and do it in an incompetent and disastrous way. All the stuff we used to talk about in the aughts about the groupthink that seemed to be infecting everybody, the inability to hash out and kind of put things to the test of
of reality as they were making decisions. That is in part the story of a conservative movement that had gotten very bad at coming up with an agenda that was actionable. On the flip side, though, and here it's less contingent on competent management, a lot of that agenda...
You see it much more clearly with Romney and Ryan. The agenda of elite movement conservatives had become so detached from the priorities of their own Republican base, particularly the economic agenda of that party. Even as they were making kind of deft moves with prescription drugs, et cetera, it was Trump sniffing out this huge gap that had emerged between what it is that movement conservatives who had controlled the commanding heights of the Republican Party by the 2000s
wanted and pursued in office and what their actual voters cared about. I would have called the Republican Party, I have called the Republican Party, an engine for turning social resentment into tax cuts, right? That's sort of what it looked like to me for a long time. How much of what we're seeing is simply that that uneasy and somewhat illogical equilibrium broke?
And the ability to keep the social resentment power in service of the tax cut end, well, it might still happen. In fact, Donald Trump made clear that he's going to keep cutting taxes. There is still an effort to make tax cuts happen, right? So that part of the party still gets served. But it does feel like the social resentment energy now serves social resentment conflict.
It's not cleanly moved into conservative economics in the way that Paul Ryan or in an earlier guy's Mitt Romney was trying to do.
Go back another round. Go back to, let's say, Newt Gingrich, the key figure in from his first election in 1978 to Congress through speakership. And he has all these ideas. He's a font of everything. He's a futurist. But what he wants is power. Here's Newt Gingrich. This is 1978. He's talking to college Republicans, Republicans.
You're fighting a war. It is a war for power. But what's the primary purpose of a political leader above everything else? And this system is to build a majority capable of sustaining itself. Because if we don't do that, we don't make the laws. We don't write the taxes. We don't decide how to start a war. We don't keep the country strong. We don't do nothing except carve from these people's ability. And in my lifetime, we have not had a single Republican leader capable of doing that.
But even in the quote you give from him, he's saying you get power to do these things. You get power to make tax policy. You get power to make budget policy. You get power to be the person who decides whether or not or the party that decides whether or not we're going to go to war and in what way. And by the time you get to Trump, I'm not saying there's no policy content. And I think it's easy to underestimate his policy content. He really does have policy content on immigration, on trade. But
It feels a lot more flexible than it was under Gingrich. It does feel like the policy structure of the party has become unsettled, even as its level of resentment, its appetite for conflict, its sense of embattlement has become stronger. So I'm curious first if, Danny, you agree with that. And if you do, what you think is a force that is leading the party's policy impulses to weaken?
One thing we haven't talked so much about is the role of media and the increasing role of writing media. The, quote, third generation of conservatives, as they titled themselves, begins in the 1980s. And they see themselves as media figures first and conservative ideologues second. And the extent to which conservatives see themselves as conservatives
engaged in the public game of lib owning with that as the real forum rather than the forum of policy. And I think is a important piece of that. The other is just the sheer unpopularity of a lot of the substantive agenda. And so as they are looking more plastically than if lib owning works in a system that is geared toward conflict, that's where you go.
You had described the mobilization of social conflict into tax cuts, and it continues to be the test that was never in the first term. And it doesn't sound like it's going to be for his potential second term. The test that was never exercised was would in fact be.
this decaying remnant of a Republican establishment and their big donors have in fact revolted against Trump. It turned out he wasn't lying about raising taxes on hedge funders or something. If he had pivoted on taxes, it would be a measure, a test of the true plasticity of this post-policy era we're in. If for whatever reasons, whether it was going after his enemies or it was electorally beneficial, he actually did that. ♪
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Let's go back another round because I think Gingrich is a great figure to bring into this. And I also want to bring Nixon into this because when you're thinking of Republican presidents who do criminal acts, right, I think Nixon comes pretty quickly to mind. But Nixon is conducting Watergate in the context of a very different Republican Party, a Republican Party that sounds very different.
So I mentioned earlier, Laura Trump is, again, I really want to keep emphasizing this now the chair of the Republican National Committee. But back then it was George H.W. Bush. And this is how George H.W. Bush talked about Watergate as RNC chair. Here's the key on this Watergate thing. The criminal justice system in the United States is...
It's gonna work. It is working. It takes some time. In the meantime, the rights of individuals must be assiduously protected. And I'm confident that the guilty will be found guilty. I'm confident that the innocent will be proved innocent. And long after the cast of characters of Watergate's been forgotten, what will be remembered is. And what's fundamental to our system is that the criminal justice system works. And there's no partisan advantage in that.
And Watergate has this other feature, which is that congressional Republicans participate in a very serious way in the investigation. They ultimately participate in a serious way in the impeachment. Nixon is convinced to resign by a delegation of Republican senators. It includes Barry Goldwater. So, Sam, why is the Republican Party at this point in the 70s willing to treat the crimes of its own president as a matter worthy of investigation? I mean, the simple answer is,
you have in the early 1970s a Republican Party that has not been captured or predominated by the conservative movement. Conservative movement actors were much more staunchly on board defending Nixon come what may. But like George H.W. Bush...
is very much an actor in Republican politics who doesn't come out of the conservative movement and what we call the long new right, a tendency and an approach that is more ideologically plastic, that is more populist, and that is much more kind of ruthlessly instrumental towards all sorts of institutions.
political parties, the rule of law. That's a continuity that just comes to be by ideological sorting and party polarization far more predominant by the 21st century. So Larry Hogan is one of the very few Republicans yesterday who came out with a statement that was not full-throated pro-Trump.
And there was a kind of pile on among co-partisans about his statement. I mean, there are far fewer Larry Hogan's in the Republican Party now than there were in which is funny, too, because Republicans should be I mean, maybe piling on him is actually good for them in this way. But they they should want Larry Hogan to attack Trump as hard as possible because he's the popular former governor of Maryland. He is running as a Republican for Senate.
If Hogan can pick up a Senate seat for Republicans in Maryland right now, right? That's sort of like Joe Manchin holding the Democratic Senate seat in West Virginia. It's a very unlikely thing to have happen. And you need to really sharply break with the party. But it increases Republican power in the Senate and over politics really dramatically if it happens. I mean, here you see the politics of social resentment, also the politics of
of what we call the populist strand, a kind of tradition of approach to politics in the U.S. that cleaves society between people and their enemies and that holds up the only person standing between the people and their enemies is a leader, a strong leader. Here you see that commitment to a strong leader and the incapacity of a party to act like a party in any kind of strategic way
swamp even their own short-term mercenary electoral incentives. Donald Trump's not interested in having Larry Hogan bash him to maximize the seats of Republicans in the Senate because Donald Trump wants an entire party subservient to his own personal interests. And that an effective party, a party that has some kind of capacity apart from its leader, in fact, will have some of its members subservient
deviating from the party line, as it were, so that they can maximize their electoral advantage because that's the system we operate in, in which candidates are elected individually on a party label rather than some kind of party list. But there's also an, I don't want to call it an aesthetic, but something that really struck me as true, but I want you to expand on, Daniel, in your book, is your association with the politics of the new right, the right that ultimately does take over the Republican Party and
As a politics built around conflict, not a politics built around ideology, I do think of that as a different story than is often told. I think that when many people tell the story of conservatives taking over the Republican Party, they tell it as a story of kind of ideological fanatics for low taxes and anti-communism and so on taking over the Republican Party. When you separate out conflict as almost an end unto itself or a politics unto itself, what are you separating out?
So in 2016, in her final presidential endorsement, months before her death, Phyllis Schlafly, who's been involved in politics on the right for well more than half a century, was
Prominent for Barry Goldwater, lead stop ERA. She endorses Trump, not Ted Cruz, Donald Trump. Why, she says, because Trump is the only one who can stop the kingmakers. So she has the same analysis in 2016 that she had of Goldwater, that there are these mysterious kingmakers and they are the key to the Republican Party and they need to be stopped.
And if you think about stopping the kingmakers, then each of these moments we've been talking about of what's happening on the right looks a little different because you see a through line that is not how ideological are they and then what's an ideology of how do all the issues come together. But what comes together is that they are using issues to get what they want, and that is to stop the kingmakers and to put their vision to power. I don't think I understand the kingmakers idea here.
And I mean that on two levels. So one, during much of this time, I would call Phil Schlafly a kingmaker, right? A conservative elite in a period where conservatives have taken over the Republican Party. But it also brings to the center this question. When you say the Republican Party is taken over by people for whom the point is conflict, conflict with whom and based on what? William F. Buckley wrote a book called Up from Liberalism that...
articulated the case for fusionism, you know, bringing together moral traditionalists, free marketeers, and anti-communists into a new conservative movement. And there's all sorts of work to try and make that
intellectually and ideologically coherent. But his argument was entirely about what all three of these tendencies share is a common enemy, liberals and liberalism. That at the very essence of this project is owning the libs. And that's where you get a very, in terms of policy and ideology, a kind of plasticity. And you also get
Schlafly feeling like she's the aggrieved victim fighting the Kingmakers as late as 2016 is of a piece with the Republican Party continually not being able to hold on to a speaker of the House of their own party because you get this endless cycle of recrimination. Whoever is in charge and has to do anything to govern immediately falls victim to this same sort of story. There's also this period, and I think this is interesting
interestingly embodied actually by Buckley, where one of his first books in a book you spend some time on in your book is a, I would call it a defense of Joe McCarthy. And this defense of Joe McCarthy is particularly angry at pearl-clutching Republicans who agree with McCarthy's hunt for communists in the American government, but don't agree with the crudeness of
the rudeness, the brashness of his methods. It presages a lot of what we end up hearing about Donald Trump. How much is this desire to have a Republican Party that treats liberals aesthetically as the enemy versus a Republican Party? Maybe you could associate this more with a sort of George W. Bush compassionate conservatism approach, certainly what he ran on in 2000. But a lot of members of the Republican Party, just like members of the Democratic Party,
who want to compromise, who understand party politics as a kind of legitimate contestation of ideas, who, you know, as George H.W. Bush had in that clip I played, a kind of attachment to the institutions of American governance, right? There are political styles that are fundamentally, that fundamentally believe in both like the legitimacy of the system and of the antagonists in the system. Yeah.
And then there are political styles that are more, you know, the Flight 93 election, right? Like, this whole thing is going to crash, like we're in the final years of Rome, and either you functionally, like, wipe the other side out, maybe permanently, or you're going to lose everything you hold dear. There's a more apocalyptic style of politics.
The long new right, the continuity of the long new right is a continuity of style and approach. And that approach is always, it does not go in for thinking of parties as articulating partial visions, that you have a vision for the common good, but you know, ultimately, other people disagree. You're going to win some, you're going to lose some. And the system is about a kind of clash of partial visions. It rejects that. It rejects
the norm of mutual toleration, and it is prone to existential apocalyptic rhetoric about what the other side is going to do. And so McCarthy and his enemies, that's the name of the book. William F. Falkley writes with a guy named Brett Boesel, who becomes a major movement conservative as well. Also, his grandson got arrested at January 6th. So the family... A storied political family. Yes, exactly. And it is so instructive, that book, that does not...
to directly defend McCarthy, but instead makes what we call an anti-anti-argument that it is politically bad, it is morally cowardly to have all these namby-pamby hand-wringers siding with the enemies of the Republic rather than standing by this guy who might have crude tactics but is on the core right side of the political battles of the day. That anti-anti approach to argumentation is...
is all over the Trump era. I mean, you saw it just last night. Some conservative lawyer tweeted that he has not voted for Trump in either election, but he's going to crawl through broken glass to vote for him in November because of this conviction, because of how much of a
illegitimate abuse of the law, this conviction of covering up with porn star dalliance was. That's an anti-anti-politics. And the Trump campaign says it raised, I mean, by the time we walked into the studio at 11 a.m. the day after the conviction, the
It says it raised $35 million in small donor donations, which is just an absolutely huge haul. And another piece of the long new right is to understand just how much small donations have been, especially in the online era, but back to direct mail King Richard Vigory, who's really important for putting the infrastructure of this together, the power of the right. And that small dollars given by direct mail often doesn't
with various pieces of grifting involved, advertisements for gold coins, that much more than the much-discussed Cokes and Melons and Scapes and Coorses are the financial forces behind the long new right. Wait, expand on that. I think that's an important point. When I hear liberals complain about what the Republican Party is or assign blame for it, they tend to think about the big donors, the Cokes, the Adelsons, etc.,
When you say small donors were a more important force in hollowing out the Republican Party and making this possible, lay that out for me. So Richard Vigery is an important figure here. He arrives in 1961 from Houston as executive secretary of Young Americans for Freedom, which is this group founded at William F. Buckley's estate of right-wing activists. And the Yaffers, as they're known, their descendants are everywhere in modern Republican politics. And Vigery is
decides that he's going to go into direct mail. And what he does is starts off and copies by hand all the donors to Barry Goldwater's campaigns. And then he seeds single issue groups. And what he does is using new magnetic tape technology, that's the big thing in the 1970s, he figures out how donors to one right-wing cause can give to another. And so he gets George Wallace's donors. And
And he will send you an anti-abortion mailer. He'll send a mailer to individual right-wing candidates and seed all these different causes. And the people who are sending money through the mail, this is not melanin scape money. This is little old ladies who see a mailer and give and receive.
That is the motor of the single-issue politics of the Republican Party in the 1970s. Karl Rove gets his start by beating Vigory at his own game in direct mail. That's his origin story. And...
The scammy quality of this direct mail is absolutely part and parcel with its success. And so the gimmicky stuff, when WinRed, now you have to give automatically every month unless you uncheck some box and all these poor people are saying, why am I giving to Donald Trump 10 months in a row? Sam and I kind of laugh and think, ah, plus ça change. That these techniques, I mean, they're often with...
There's gold coins. There's subscription by mail, multi-level marketing. This is the technology that powers the right. And for whatever reason, the kind of popular story of rise of the right has missed it. And yet, just inductively, when you want to figure out any given puzzle of how did this person come to prominence? What was the source of that person's success? The stories of direct mail, grift,
Small donors just keep coming and keep coming and keep coming to prominence. And just in addition to the scamminess, the quintessential style of direct mail is appeal to emotion, appeal to negativity and conflict. That's what works. And that continues to this day in terms of online small donors. Endless appeals with lots of conflict so that by the end you might turn off. I mean, I think that was the Trump speech that we were watching this morning before we started recording.
And fear, right? I mean, one thing about all direct mail, not all, but a lot of it, and now direct email, is the...
tone, which also I think is a reflection of having to stand out in like a mailbox, right? Or in an email inbox. I mean, everything now has sirens in the subject line. Oh my God, did you see this? And then you realize it's from the DCCC. Yeah, and it's from Democrats. Sure. Like Ezra, I'm on my knees begging and it's like Chuck Schumer. I'm like, I don't think Chuck Schumer is on his knees begging. I mean, liberals and conservatives learn from this. Morris Dees, later at the Southern Poverty Law Center, invent some of this stuff and
for the McGovern campaign and Vigory picks it up. But it is the right much more than liberals who are able to take these kind of direct mail appeals and make something of them ideologically. Time is luxury. That's why Polestar 3 is thoughtfully designed to make every minute you spend driving it the best time of your day. That means noise-canceling capabilities and 3D surround sound on Bowers and Wilkins speakers.
Seamlessly integrated technology to keep you connected and the horsepower and control to make this electric SUV feel like a sports car. Polestar 3 is a new generation of electric performance. Book a test drive at Polestar.com. The McGovern campaign. That brings something up here. So 1968, there is a devastatingly
violent, catastrophic Democratic convention. This is what leads in part to Richard Nixon becoming president. After that convention, there are a series of reform commissions, but very importantly, McGovern-Fraser, which changes American history. I've been thinking a lot about political conventions this year for a number of reasons, but changes American political, not just history, but structure, because before that,
presidential candidates are chosen by party regulars at conventions. And after that, they are chosen at primaries. So, Sam, tell me a bit about McGovern-Fraser, what it actually says and does, and also how its effects maybe are not exactly what was anticipated. Sure. So this is the pre-reform era is what's known as the mixed convention system because the
Quadrennial conventions have been with us since the middle of the 19th century. They bring together delegations sent by state parties. Well into the middle of the 20th century, it just varied how they selected those delegates. Some states had what we think of as direct primaries. Other states had state party conventions that chose the delegates that went to the convention. Others, it's just the state party leadership just chose it.
After the divisive primary battles of 1968, in which Hubert Humphrey ends up winning the nomination famously without having contested any actual primary because he had all these other delegates, their support locked up.
The anti-war candidates' forces, as they lose trying to get an anti-war platform plank, they lose the nomination. As a sop to them, Humphrey forces agree to this commission that the DNC is going to authorize and give a pretty forceful mandate to reform nominating procedures into 1972. Long story short, what that commission institutes is uniform national baseline procedures
requirements for all state party delegate selection, that they have to be procedures that are transparent, that are open to participation from anyone who wants to participate. You have to actually have clear procedures publicized so people know when these decisions are being made. Unintentionally, inadvertently,
The practicalities of implementing and adhering to these rules lead to a total proliferation of just direct primaries. But Donald Frazier, the chairman of the commission after McGovern leaves the commission to go run for president, is on record saying, I think primaries are terrible. He comes out of Minnesota in a tradition of
issue-driven activists powering actual formal party conventions at the state level, and they make these decisions. And that's kind of what he has in mind, and a lot of McGovern-Fraser reformers have in mind of
Not getting rid of parties and just having a big free-for-all direct election for who the nominee should be, but empowering social movements to really influence and issue-driven activists to influence these decisions at the state level. But what you get instead is first among Democrats and then, because this is a creature of state law and it ends up applying to Republicans as well, a pretty rapid transformation of the system to one in which Democrats
Formal party actors no longer have any say in this at the state level. The conventions no longer perform any meaningful deliberative function because the delegates are all pledged to particular candidates based on who won the primaries in open caucus or open caucus in their state. And you get the modern nomination system, which is a completely open, free-for-all, uncoordinated gauntlet of one state primary or caucus after another.
This is a part I've never understood, and you just maybe explained it to me, but I still don't understand why this would be true, which is OK. You have the McGovern-Fraser Commission. The next election, which is the first under these new rules, McGovern wins the Democratic nomination. He wins it through primaries, and then he gets completely annihilated in the general election. I mean, one of the worst runs in modern political history. Mm-hmm.
And meanwhile, the Democrats don't go back to the old system or cap the new one. And the Republicans seem to adopt the same primary structure. And I've never quite been sure why it spreads to them. Well, on the first point,
What the political scientists critical of this as it's happening, led by Nelson Pilsby, say is the old system. Sure, it wasn't democratic, but it was a mechanism by which the National Party could arrive at a lowest common denominator point of consensus within the party for a nominee. And you're going to get mainstream nominees that way.
This new system is going to be good for ideological extremists or just outsiders who can ride media momentum and potentially capture nomination. In 72, you get a good example of a more ideologically extreme candidate capturing the party based on the enthusiasm of movement activists. Then he loses very badly. You then get an outsider who wins in 1976, Jimmy Carter, and his presidency lays bare the costs of
Someone who has no relationship with key factions in the party and didn't have to build those relationships to win the nomination. He becomes an ineffective president. And so Democrats do. People forget. Democrats do learn from this. And through another commission, the Hunt Commission in 1981, they implement this thing called superdelegates, which is the idea there was it's important to think of a national party as an institution that has power.
including elected officials who have some knowledge about how to read the electorate and long-term party loyalists and stalwarts who have been leaders in the party, they should be a part of the decision-making process. So we should incorporate a fraction of delegates at the convention and empower them to be unpledged and perform a kind of deliberative process
gatekeeping function. And there we go. They got a really popular thing that we all love, superdelegates, that was very popular. So, but then the story of the superdelegates is one we can keep talking about. But I want to pick up on the gatekeeping function in a second. But why does this spread to the Republicans? You said it's because it's a function of state law. I don't understand what that would be. There's a not truly fascinating answer, but mechanically, that parties are this complicated amalgam of their, in Leon Epstein, political scientist terms,
private utilities, and they are therefore amalgams of state law and
rules that are outside the jurisdiction of the courts and parties are least subject to state of federal law at the national convention because states can't govern what happens at a convention that has delegates from all the states. So as states set rules for primaries to meet the requirements of McGovern-Fraser, those rules applied both to the Republican Party as well as to the Democratic Party that
State legislators would enact, we're going to have a primary, it's going to be open to all comers, it will have delegate school be pledged, and those apply to both parties. That's the mechanical answer. There's a, I think, deeper and more important side of what happens on the right, and that goes back to Kingmakers and Schlafly, which is Republicans have their own and much more powerfully elected
set of actors who do not want the long established figures at the top of the party to have too much influence in delegate selection. And therefore, they are perfectly happy with a system that takes away the old
state chairs and time servers who had been electing, in their view, two moderate candidates and hadn't paved the way for real movement conservatives. And so in a world in which Democrats do not have McGovern-Fraser, it's hard to imagine the mixed system surviving with such forces on the right. And with McGovern-Fraser implemented, you get Ronald Reagan's very potent challenge to Gerald Ford in the 1976 primary.
And so then you have the loss of, I think, a couple of things here, right? I mean, I'm not somebody who believes the old eras in American politics were great machine party politics were very corrupt. You really did have this kind of hammerlock of the party regulars.
But these things have their virtues as well as their vices. And one virtue might be that there is a tendency to try to choose candidates who you think will appeal to a broad party electorate. But the other tendency is a gatekeeping tendency. The other virtue is the gatekeeping virtue. A point that Levitsky and Ziblatt make in How Democracies Die, which is like the
big book a couple years ago that at least as lore in part leads Joe Biden to run for president, you know, they make this point that you've always seen figures like Donald Trump in American life, right? You can think about Henry Ford. You can think about Father Coughlin. You can think about Huey Long. But figures like that couldn't make it through the convention. And so even if you had these people who had an intense relationship
adoration of 30% of the electorate. They couldn't make it through the convention, and so they didn't rise to the top of American politics. And that absent the gatekeeping function, right, the gatekeeping function of the conventions, I would say there's a real irony in Trump winning through the Electoral College because the Electoral College was also meant to be a gatekeeper against a Trump-like demagogue. But absent the gatekeepers of parties and arguably the Electoral College, you now have this vulnerability to Trump-like figures. But
Did we lose too much in losing conventions? Well, look, you're talking to two political scientists, political scientists, generally speaking, much more skeptical of open primaries and freewheeling systems, much more supportive of parties that actually have the ability to make their own internal decisions as to who is
going to be their nominee. Political scientists tend to adhere to some version of E.E. Schatzschneider's claim that democracy exists between the parties. It should not exist inside the parties. And so, yeah, I think you did lose something. Now, one thing we try and make clear in the book is that we don't think the mechanical changing of the rules over the course of the mid-1970s
is the decisive pivotal point. That, like, on the one hand, what's going on with the right is eroding, in a much more fundamental way, the legitimacy of the very ideas of gatekeepers, the very idea of drawing lines against extremism or kind of outside anti-democratic elements within the conservative movement. They're eroding their own capacity to make those arguments, regardless of what the rules are, and which is why we think there's a real...
force unto itself that would have broken through whatever the rules were, whether or not McGovern-Fraser actually got implemented. But on the Democratic side, the problem is parties are only capable of doing things if there's some degree of legitimacy and trust and respect and loyalty among their own members. And what you see with the superdelegates, which I think we would be perfectly happy to say we thought were a good idea.
They never exercised actual pivotal decision making. They never proved to be the decisive block that gave the nominee to someone who wasn't the pledge delegate winner. And they didn't because they knew if they ever did that, it would just tear the party apart. They didn't have legitimacy. Yeah, they didn't have any legitimacy. And in turn, party actors never did it. The political scientists are not powerful enough to defend parties. If actors believe in parties, they need to do it.
It's always struck me as very telling that...
Between 2016 and 2020, so after watching Donald Trump capture and take over the Republican Party, that the way Democrats change their rules is to weaken the superdelegates, right? The exact group of people who could, in theory, prevent something like Donald Trump on the left. Like Democrats, and I mean, they're doing this because of the Bernie Sanders experience and the anger of Bernie Sanders supporters. But what Democrats do is weaken the party's gatekeepers. Yes. And that this could be a story for a different kind of left that said...
maybe in a Corbynite way, although that didn't end very well for them, that we are going to take over this party and we are going to make sure that the superdelegates, all the members of the DNC, are our people. Instead, it was tear it all down. In 2016, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, then DNC chair, it was in 2016, right? Yeah, February 2016. Democrats are having discussion about superdelegates and their legitimacy. The
Head of the party, if anyone's going to speak on behalf of the party and its rules, presumably it should be the Democratic National Committee chair. How did she defend or describe what superdelegates even were? She said that...
There were so many grassroots activists who wanted to be delegates and having superdelegates gave more of them the chance to go to the convention, which is completely fake, phony, stupid. She did not say members of the party with long term interests, members of the DNC, members of Congress, big city mayors, governors should have a right to and the party is better off when they have their voice at the convention. She knows that she wouldn't say it.
This has all been on my mind this year because I have argued for an open Democratic convention. I think I really like Joe Biden as a president in a bunch of different ways, but I think he's at this point a quite weakened candidate. Obviously, I think Republicans are picking their functionally weakest candidate. Like if the Republican Party were any kind of functional organization, they would not be going into war with this guy. That Nikki Haley or any number of other Republicans would win this election easily.
And so Republicans cannot, on the one hand, and will not change course of Donald Trump. I think we see that.
Donald Trump is weakened but dangerous and in the lead. We'll see what this does, if anything, to his poll numbers. Democrats, I think you could easily imagine a convention in another age choosing a candidate well-suited to taking advantage of Trump's particular weaknesses, right? One thing I heard back after the convention piece I did was just from a lot of Democrats who are superdelegates or would be the kind of Democrat who would have power at a convention just saying –
We don't have the muscle for that now. We don't know who the delegates are. We haven't done that in a long time. Even if I agree with you that there's a real weakness here, I don't trust a convention because we just have not run one in the memory of functionally any of the people who would be there. And it just feels like a year to me when the hollowness of the parties to make strategic decisions
late in a election year is really on view. I mean, it's just that we are going to end up here with someone as dangerous and flawed and compromised as Donald Trump running against somebody who is as
weakened as Joe Biden, with the stakes being what they are for Donald Trump winning again, it really speaks to parties not acting strategically any longer in a way that has, I think, now become a genuine danger to American democracy. But I find it's almost hard to even put it in those terms because people hate the party so much and they're angry at them for this. The idea that you would then give them more power is
It feels like empowering the very culprits of the thing you're mad at. But that's where we are. Why write a book that is in so many ways a defensive party? It is to say that, no, these guys are good. And why have a chapter about the glories of free labor republicanism? It is to say that the best thing this country ever did since the founding to save the union, free the slaves, reconstruct the Constitution was fundamentally a party project. And...
all these ways through American history that we've seen parties do vital, important work to give ardor to supporters of parties. More specifically, on the challenges of this year, ever since, this is Daniel Klinghardt's book, Political Scientist at Holy Cross, ever since presidents took over national committees at the end of the 19th century, presidents who want to win renomination have won renomination. However...
The circumstances under which the parties restrain them, the choices that they make cognizant of the possibilities of renomination, those have all changed. And so we've not seen anything like the world of 1944, where the high figures of the Democratic Party told a dying Franklin D. Roosevelt that Henry Wallace was not going to work. And Harry Truman turned out to be, with great consequence, the one figure who could bring together Southern conservatives, Democrats,
the famous clear it with Sidney of Sidney Hellman of the CIO, Northern Machines. And maybe Sam can talk to this. The circumstances of Joe Biden's nomination in 2020 set up the party for failures that were not apparent in 2020 and I think very apparent in 2024. Yeah. I mean, you articulated a great,
sales pitch for our book, if anyone wants to make sense of both why we're at a point where the parties have such glaring incapacity to do things like nominate their most effective candidates, and also why, unfortunately, it's not a book that's a how-to in the next couple weeks, how to put all of it back together again, because it's the product of decades now of eroding capacity, eroding trust, eroding legitimacy that
puts us in this state, which say the specifics right now with Biden do date back to contingent developments in 2020. I think there's come to be the idea that Biden managed to capture the nomination in 2020 as a reflection of the Democratic establishment being strong and in control. But I remember that as much more of a
haphazard drift and stumble of Joe Biden. People could count. They knew how old he was in 2020 and could think ahead where it was a demonstration of hollowness in 2020, where there's a complete, there's 20 candidates. There's some potential moderates out there, but they either have crazy lack of background like Pete Buttigieg or for whatever reason, no one gets a signal to coordinate who the non Sanders candidates going to be. And then you get in a period of a weekend where,
This scramble after South Carolina for Buttigieg and Klobuchar to drop out. Maybe it was because Barack Obama made a phone call. And then all of a sudden there's a cascade towards Biden as a coordinating function. That's real late in the game.
to the extent there was any coordination, it was held up as illegitimate. Like, oh my God, did you hear Barack Obama made a phone call? Like, that's what kind of a smoke-filled room anti-democratic system is this? And then we get the president we get. Then he chooses the running mate he chooses. And you- Chooses without the long-term interest of the party. He has some short-term reasons that he wants someone with Harris's background, but this is not a pick that is made a la 1944 thinking about-
What are the factions that I need to assuage in my party and how is this going to work after I'm gone? Well, I think it might have been. I think they might have just gotten what factions were going to need to be worked with wrong. I mean, I will say about the Joe Biden moment in 2020, I give everybody involved a little more credit. I do think it reflected that.
Something that you don't see in the Republican Party in this period, which is party actors converging, if in a haphazard way, and party regulars listening. Yes, the voters wanted, were looking for a signal. The voters were looking for a signal and they took the signal. And I also think, though, and this to me is one of the places where I'm a little bit more frustrated with Biden and his team than other people. There were a series of signals sent very clearly that.
that he was going to very seriously consider not running for reelection, right? There were all these stories written where, in fact, like people named as advisors to him said that he was going to only serve one term. It was not a pledge he made. People talked about him making that pledge. He didn't. But the expectation, I think, among Democrats and Democratic elites was that if age became an issue, a significant issue for him, he was not going to run. Everybody knew how old he was. Like, you know, running an 81-year-old was going to be a very risky endeavor. Right.
And things have sort of teetered on the edge of that. He is able to fulfill the job of the presidency, and he has trouble routinely and effectively performing the job of the presidency in front of cameras in a way that has become a huge and so far not really solvable political liability for them. And given that they have not done the thing I think they signaled they would do, which is take that seriously and either figure out a way to solve it or he doesn't run.
The fact that Harris didn't work out as a VP politically that well and they have not figured out a way to make her work that well or replace her, like, has also created a lot of static about what to do. I think people could see that this would happen, but they expected –
Biden and his team and some of these other party elites to do something about it if it happened. And the thing is, they didn't. And then nobody else was able to. You say they and there's just Biden. There's just Biden in terms of politicians. They're driven to lead and they want to keep leading and they're not going to listen to people tell them not to leave. Then we go back to Martin Van Buren then.
Having leaders who are unconstrained by party, even when they are fundamentally responsible leaders, is dangerous. And in a lot of ways, the whole party is an argument against the presidentialization of our politics. I try to end every podcast on Martin Van Buren.
So I think that's the place to finish here. Always our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience? I think we said we're going to give each of you one and then a joint pick. I'll start with speaking of the Jacksonian era. Aziz Rana was a law professor. He has a giant new book out about Americans' views of the Constitution. But he, in 2010, wrote a very substantial and brilliant book called The Two Faces of American Freedom.
that is a good synthesis of a master theme in American history that goes back in scholarship to people like Edmund Morgan, that grapples with the idea that it's precisely in a settler society that creates mass democracy in the world, pioneers it. It's precisely the commitment to equality and freedom among a country's citizens that
that intensifies and sharpens the violent subjugation and exclusion of those who are outside of that citizenry. And so it's precisely the most small-D democratic forces across American history that are also often the advocates of the most eliminationist, genocidal, or tyrannical treatment of those
not included. And grappling with that duality is a huge part of making sense of 19th century America, but it's a kind of duality that plays through all the way through American history. We've talked today plenty about, as conversations about party politics tend to do, the political machine, which is typically...
alluded to more than it's actually understood, whether as the kindly ward healer giving away Thanksgiving turkeys or as the nasty engine of patronage and actually understand what the political machine did. Wonderful book by Stephen Erie, Rainbows End, Irish Americans and the Dilemmas of Urban Machine Politics, 1840 to 1985. What a great title. It is a great title, and it also has the all-time best academic book cover I've ever seen, which is
It's a St. Patrick's Day parade in Chicago, and there are all these patronage guys with, just after Richard J. Daly dies, and they all have posters, and they say, with Daly's image, our friend in our hearts and minds forever with the shamrock. And so when we were asked to come up with ideas for a cover, we said, like Rainbow's End.
And it's a real model for us of— They didn't listen to you, I guess. No. No. But alas, what Rainbow Sand offers is a claim of what the machine actually did, which is to direct its benefits not sprinkled around to everybody, but to core Irish constituencies that Irish Americans rewarded their co-ethnics and that there was actually less patronage to go around than one might have imagined. Right.
to understand what machine politics is. And then our third pick is 1968 is much in the air. The best to our mind book about an American political campaign ever written is an American melodrama, the presidential campaign of 1968 by Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson, and Bruce Page. And I talk about it. Yeah. Three British reporters from the Sunday times.
It's a breezy 800 pages, but it is not only, a lot of books written about 1968. It's an incredibly dramatic year. This one managed- Putting a new good one, The Year That Broke Politics. Yeah, exactly. It combines a kind of, you know, fly on the wall, all the kind of narratives
novelistic attention to the inside players with a really profound grasp of the bigger stakes, the deeper history, what's going on in Vietnam and the American empire as a kind of context for all this. It brings it all together. It's a great read and it is unfortunately out of print. So if anyone wants to publish a new edition, we'd be delighted to write a forward. Sam Rosenfeld, Daniel Schlossman, thank you very much. Thank you.
This episode of the Ezra Klein Show is produced by Elias Isweth. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker, Kate Sinclair, and Roland Hu. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Amin Sahota and Afim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin and Kristen Lin. We have original music by Isaac Jones, audience strategy by Christina Simulowski, and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser, and special thanks to Sonia Herrero.
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