What happened to the Democratic Party? “Where did the national political machine (and its operators and strategists) that was once called the Democratic Party go?” asks Nation DC bureau chief Chris Lehmann. “How did it become so fangless in the face of a presidential candidate so clearly ill-equipped for the presidency? For that matter, where was the Republican Party that might have prevented Trump’s third run for the White House?” How have both of our two main political parties slipped into such a shambolic state of decline? While the outcomes of the 2024 presidential election highlights the institutional collapse of the American party system, the unmaking of it goes back many decades, if not longer—and that is especially true of the Democrats. In an omnibus essay-review for our January issue, Lehmann attempts to find some answers. In Timothy Shenk’s Left Adrift, he finds a story of how a new generation of pollsters and consultants encouraged a Democratic Party already losing its working-class base to give up on it entirely. In Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld’s The Hollow Parties, he finds an even more damning account of the party’s unraveling: how the Democrats, starting in the 1960s, began to abandon the politics of mass movements and coalitions and instead embrace one of technocratic administration and group interests that played competing bases off each other. “What took place in this period of institutional breakdown,” Lehmann notes, “was a hollowing-out of the party system. The toxic compound of ideological drift and errant attention to basic accommodationist party functions steered more and more power into the hands of party elites, who scorned and sidestepped the demands of the party’s traditional working-class base.” Is there any hope to stall the gears of de-alingment? Lehmann offers no prescriptions but does note that, at least, “with the outcome of yet another grinding, exasperating, and soul-deadening election cycle that has accelerated our descent into authoritarian squalor, the real work of politics” can now “begin in earnest. Let us pray, and be anything but listless. Oh, and don’t mourn—organize.” Read “What Happened to the Democratic Party?”
“All writers have tics, a particular repertoire of moves that recur,” the novelist Isabella Hammad writes in her new nonfiction book, Recognizing the Stranger. Hers, she confesses, are found in her tendency to rely on anagnorisis—or “recognition scenes”: Those moments when “the world of the text becomes momentarily intelligible to the protagonist and thus also to the audience…. Everything we thought we knew has been turned on its head, and yet it all makes sense.” In a wide-ranging essay-review of Recognizing the Stranger for the January issue, Abdelrahman ElGendy examines how the struggle for recognition is central to almost all of Hammad’s own literary writings, especially her two novels, The Parisian and Enter Ghost, but also an ambivalence toward it—especially after Gaza: “The recognition of Indigenous peoples by settler colonial societies,” as Hammad notes, “might be a place to start but it is no place to end.” In fact, as ElGendy argues, allowing it to become an end in itself can be counterproductive. It should force “Palestinians…to present a narrative that will educate and enlighten others” and put “the transformation of the contrite Westerner center stage.” Without “subsequent action,” recognition can remain “a hollow gesture—words that try to replace substantive reparations with the illusion of discourse and ceremony.” Read “Isabella Hammad and the Politics of Recognition”
The Minnesota politician presents a riddle for historians. He was a beloved populist but also a crackpot conspiracist. Were his politics tainted by his strange beliefs?
A talk with Dionne Brand about her recent book, Salvage, which looks at how the classic texts of Anglo-American fiction helped abet the crimes of capitalism, colonialism, and more.
