Despite our discipline’s proximity to the political process, few of us have bridged the academic and the political world as well as Sam Popkin. His new book consummately combines an insider’s political savvy with the theorist’s ability to get under the surface of events. It seamlessly stitches together the academic literature on parties, Congress, and elections to the nuts and bolts of politics in a way that few of us have mastered. Bravo, Popkin!
The strength of Popkin’s bridging ability is revealed early in the book in his comparison of the new senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz in the early 2010s. Both were Cuban Americans; both came from southern states; and both wore their presidential ambitions on their sleeves. But while Rubio tried to build a broad base, Cruz honed in on Tea Partiers and Evangelicals to appeal to a narrow one. As a result, writes Popkin, “Cruz—the politician most responsible for the party’s failure to pass any legislation, reach consensus on any issue, or expand its electoral base—had achieved the incongruous distinctions of simultaneously being the most reviled man in Washington and a role model that conservative parents held up for their children” (p. 86).
At times, however, Popkin the political insider obscures the skills of Popkin the academic theorist. For example, his treatment of “Trump’s Blue Collar Advantage” over Hillary Clinton (pp. 148–51) in 2016 seems to accept the widespread assumption that the real estate billionaire depended for his election victory on his hold over less-educated white men, eliding the considerable evidence—recently summarized by Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu—that Trump’s alleged appeal to working-class Americans was ambiguous at best (“The White Working Class and the 2016 Election,” Perspectives on Politics, 19(1), 2021).
Popkin’s astute academic chops are more evident when he argues that the collapse of Republican leadership was largely due to the inability of the party’s leaders to forge consensus within their caucus. In this respect, his approach approximates what party scholars call “the UCLA school,” the theory that parties are best seen as coalitions of interest groups (Cohen et al., The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations before and after Reform, 2008; Bawn et al., “A Theory of Political Parties: Groups, Policy Demands and Nominations in American Politics,” Perspectives on Politics, 10(3), 2012). When these internal coalitions fall apart, parties are subject to crack-ups. “No matter how strongly supporters of a party oppose the other party,” Popkin writes, “all coalitions eventually fracture” (pp. 191–92). This, he concludes, is what happened to the GOP between the second Bush and the Trump administrations, the period of Republican politics that he covers in greatest detail.
Three long-term factors are adduced to produce this malaise: the adoption of the direct primary, the McCain-Feingold reform, and the Citizens’ United decision. Together these developments reduced the power of party professionals over policy and nominations, opened the door to extremists to challenge establishment Republicans in local primary fights, and turned the financing of elections over to deep-pocketed private groups with no concern for the party’s needs. He might have added the growth of executive partyism, which shifted policy making from the parties to the presidency on both sides of the political divide (Sidney Milkis, The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System since the New Deal, 1993). The parties, as Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld conclude, have been “hollowed out” (“The Hollow Parties,” in Can America Govern Itself? 2019).
This concatenation of factors leads Popkin to his main explanation for the Trumpian takeover of the GOP: “Someone as ill-prepared and improbable as Trump could only win the GOP nomination because the party had already cracked up into uncompromising groups with incompatible demands, and had alienated so many of its voters that no Republican leader or politician had the credibility to exploit Trump’s record of broken promises, betrayals, and shady deals” (pp. 2–3, italics added).
Popkin’s interpretation of Trump’s ability to gain the nomination puts more emphasis on the GOP as victim than of Trump as victor. Here too, greater reference to the academic research might have strengthened his analysis. For example, there is almost nothing in the book about the interorganizational network (Klandermans, “Introduction: Social Movement Organizations and the Study of Social Movements,” International Social Movement Research, 2, 1989) that the Trump organization built to buttress his campaign in many states (Zoorab and Skocpol, “The Overlooked Organizational Basis of Trump’s 2016 Victory,” in Upending American Politics: Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites, and Citizen Activists from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance, 2020). Through this wide-ranging network, which included Tea Party activists, gun club enthusiasts, the NRA, and Christian conservatives, Trump was able to assemble a remarkable array of support groups (also see my Movements and Parties: Critical Connections in American Political Development, 2021, ch. 8; reviewed later in this dialogue). How he did this is worth a book on its own, but suffice it to say that the array of “uncompromising groups with incompatible demands” that Popkin finds in the Republican Party had little to do with Trump’s electoral success.
Animated by his theory of parties, Popkin tries to take his analysis across the aisle to the Democrats, who have been riven by progressive/moderate cleavages since well before the election of the current president. For example, in Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, he sees someone whose “absolutism” (Popkin’s term) delayed her ability to see that she would have to make compromises with people “who only partly agreed with her” (p. 214).
If I must criticize, it would be to wonder whether Popkin places too heavy an emphasis on the fractures within the parties, and this for three reasons. First, because he sees parties as essentially coalitions, when a party suffers internal fractures, it will eventually crack up. But if parties are more than coalitions, they may have incentives to stay together. In their thoughtful analysis of the theory of parties, Nolan McCarty and Eric Schickler write of the UCLA school of party theory that “the bold simplification at its core obscures the critical role played by both elected officials and voters in party politics, and elides the extent to which changing institutional rules empower officials, activists, groups, and voters in different ways” (“On The Theory of Parties,” Annual Review of Political Science, 21, 2018, 175–93, 190).
This leads to a second question: Can we use the same logic to account for the cleavages within both parties? In their carefully documented book, Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats (2016), Matt Grossmann and David Hopkins assembled abundant evidence that the voters and activists who support the GOP are far more animated by ideological commitments than their opposite numbers in the Democratic Party, who have been a coalition of interest groups since the New Deal. In contrast—at least since the entry of the New Right into the GOP (Rich Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, 2009)—Republicans have been far more animated by ideological commitments. As Grossmann and Hopkins put it, “Whereas the organization of activists within the Democratic party has tended to be divided into multiple social groups and issue areas…the conservative ascendency in the Republican Party occurred via a broad mobilization of ideologically motivated activists who promoted an alternative philosophy that applied across a broad spectrum of policy domains” (2016, p. 135).
This takes me to my third question. Along with many scholars of the contemporary party system, Popkin sees deep-pocketed outside actors impinging on the historical functions of party elites. That is certainly true, but his book largely elides the social movements that have arisen alongside the two major parties and to some extent within them (McAdam and Kloos, Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Post-War America, 2014; Tarrow, Movement and Parties, 2021). Even the deepest-pocketed outside actor—the Koch network—is a “hybrid” interest group and movement. As Charles Koch’s statement of his aims made abundantly clear, “his language was militant,” demanding that “our movement must destroy the prevalent statist paradigm” (Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires behind the Rise of the Radical Right, 2017, p. 66).
These features came together in what Popkin sees as the Republican “crackup” during and after 2016. In Donald Trump, the GOP became subject to an outsider demagogue who was shrewd enough to capture the support of both internal activists and a spectrum of ideologically driven movement allies. Not to put too fine a point on it: the GOP’s crackup was also a crack-in.
The major question that scholars will want to ask as they come away from Popkin’s engaging book is, Does Trumpism signify the nadir of the party— its “crackup”—or its “redemption,” using the term to evoke how white supremacists regained control of southern politics after Reconstruction? Trump reordered the pieces of a party that had been deeply fractured by the cleavages that Popkin abundantly details in his book. But what have Trump and his supporters put in its place? And what does the future augur for this political family? If Trumpism was constructed out of an opportunistic coalition of the Cruzes, the Rubios, the McConnells, and the Kochs (who have already moved a distance from him), then it may have a short life, as the alliance among these actors “cracks up.” But if, as I suspect, it was built on an ideologically structured coalition held together by “protective white nationalism” (Smith and King, “White Protectionism in America,” Perspectives on Politics, 19(2), 2021) and by opportunist leaders at its summit, we may be in for a decade or more of Trumpism after Trump.
But these are more questions for Popkin than criticisms of what he has accomplished. In Crackup, we have a definitive account of the evolution of the Republican Party from a common or garden-variety conservative coalition to the strange combination of a movement and a party that we see today.
