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Didi Kuo’s The Great Retreat makes a compelling case that the hollowing out of political parties has played a leading role in unleashing the power of plutocrats and authoritarians around the world.
For decades after World War II, political scientists, reform-minded politicians, and pundits lamented the weakness of American political parties. Parties were seen as ideologically incoherent, dominated by regional or group interests rather than unified around a clear platform — think of the fact, for instance, that at one time arch-segregationists and civil rights leaders belonged to the same party. Reformers believed that greater ideological coherence would make government more accountable and party competition more meaningful and help voters better understand the stakes of elections.
Today, however, parties are more ideologically polarized, centralized, and internally disciplined than ever before. Roll-call unity in congressional voting is up; the ideological distance between the major parties has grown; and partisanship is a stronger predictor of citizens’ stances on the issues than ever before — and yet more Americans than ever hate political parties, and the future of democracy itself appears in doubt.
On the surface, this would seem to suggest that political parties are woefully inadequate as vehicles for effective representation and for maintaining a vibrant democracy.
To the contrary, in The Great Retreat: How the Decline of Political Parties Is Undermining American Democracy, Didi Kuo makes a forceful and largely persuasive case that strong political parties are indispensable to democratic health. Far from being obstacles to be overcome, parties with robust internal organization, deep ties to communities and interest groups, and ideologically coherent platforms that reflect the interests of their core constituencies are essential for stemming the tide of authoritarian backsliding and reasserting democratic control over an economy increasingly dominated by billionaires and plutocrats.
The real crisis, Kuo argues, lies not in excessive partisanship but in the hollowing out of parties. To defend democracy and reclaim citizen control over capitalism, she contends, we must rebuild parties as dense, associational intermediaries between citizens and the state.
Historically, Kuo notes, political parties were forged atop preexisting civic, class-based, and religious organizations. They did not merely contest elections but embedded themselves in local communities, linked citizens to state institutions, and cultivated political loyalty through ongoing interactions between election cycles. As Kuo notes of the era of machine politics in the late nineteenth century, maintaining strong connections with supporters “required knowing everything about voters: ‘their needs, their likes and dislikes, their troubles and their hopes.’”
In turn, parties served as the primary conveyor belt for ensuring information reached citizens about what the government was doing on their behalf. In this sense, parties are not just vote-getting machines but democratic intermediaries that both channel grassroots opinions and needs to the party and ensure that grassroots supporters are aware of the work the state performs for them.
In addition to the key intermediary function of parties in the early-to-mid-twentieth century, Kuo emphasizes the critical role played by labor-based and social democratic parties of the Left. These organizations, she argues, succeeded in transforming capitalism by embedding markets within democratic institutions. Left parties institutionalized collective bargaining between labor and capital, expanded social insurance, and advanced redistribution and economic planning to soften the harshest blows of the free market. During this period, political parties were widely understood as democratic solutions to capitalism’s excesses.
By the late twentieth century, however, political parties in the United States, Europe, and beyond had undergone a profound transformation. Where parties once operated as mass-membership organizations embedded in civil society, they have increasingly become professionalized, elite-driven, and disconnected from the everyday lives of most citizens.
This transformation involved the outsourcing of core party functions — such as voter mobilization, organizing, and issue framing — to networks of advocacy groups and consultants. As a result, what we call “parties” today are often little more than loosely affiliated constellations of interest groups, think tanks, donors, and media operations. As a result, parties have increasingly prioritized short-term electoral tactics, branding, and media messaging over sustained engagement with voters.
Rather than maintaining a durable, year-round presence in voters’ lives, modern parties typically appear shortly before elections — if at all — and deploy highly targeted outreach strategies to small and potentially decisive slices of the electorate. In this model, politics becomes episodic and transactional: voters are contacted when needed, segmented by demographic or behavioral traits, and urged to vote — but, beyond a small activist core, are rarely invited to engage in sustained, year-round party activities. Parties may still coordinate electoral coalitions, but they no longer serve as the primary site where political identities are forged or collective interests developed.
Kuo argues that the transformation of political parties was neither natural nor inevitable. It was the result of strategic choices and institutional shifts — many of them driven by center-left parties themselves. As neoliberalism took hold in the 1980s and 1990s, center-left leaders increasingly embraced market-oriented governance, turning to deregulation, privatization, and austerity as tools of statecraft.
During the neoliberal period, as center-left parties sought to stay within the acceptable bounds of economic orthodoxy, their capacity to offer bold and credible policies to help working people was severely curtailed. As left parties increasingly adopted market-friendly economic platforms and pursued political triangulation to broaden their electoral appeal, they became harder to distinguish from the Right on core economic issues.
In turn, their efforts to “compensate the losers” of economic globalization — particularly manufacturing jobs in industrial areas — did little to stem the decades-long decline in the living standards and life opportunities of communities left behind by neoliberal policies. This alienated many working-class voters, who found themselves increasingly unrepresented by the political system.
Yet as Kuo describes, the neoliberal shift did more than reshape economic and social policy; it redefined the role of the state and parties in society. Rather than positioning themselves as defenders of the state’s capacity to deliver collective goods, center-left parties often echoed the neoliberal view that government was inefficient or burdensome. In doing so, they contributed to a broader erosion of public trust in government.
This ideological turn was compounded by an organizational retreat: as parties shed their role as intermediary between state and society, they ceased to serve as the conduits through which citizens experienced the benefits of public policy. The result was a hollowing out of democratic representation, in which parties no longer linked voters to the state but merely sought their support at election time.
Meanwhile, elected officials from center-left parties grew more socially and economically distinct from their traditional working-class base and increasingly shifted their electoral appeals to more highly educated and affluent voters. This class divergence — combined with ever-more-professionalized and elite-driven party operations — further weakened parties’ ties to working-class communities and undercut their legitimacy among working-class voters.
In the political vacuum left by center-left parties’ pivot toward neoliberalism, disaffected working-class voters are often mobilized not by programs of economic renewal but by right-wing populists who redirect class grievances into resentment over immigration, multiculturalism, and crime. As Kuo explains, “Working-class voters opt for populist and extreme-right parties on issues related to immigration and law and order, particularly when the mainstream parties downplay the salience of economic issues.”
When mainstream parties fail to prioritize the economic concerns of left-behind communities, they leave space for authoritarian populist leaders who translate those anxieties into cultural grievances, often in the service of elite economic policy goals or undermining democratic institutions.
Kuo proposes a range of strategies aimed at reembedding parties in society and regaining the trust of citizens to stem the tide of authoritarianism and plutocracy. She calls for rebuilding parties as associational institutions through reforms such as centralizing party control over campaign financing to mitigate the role of outside funding, reinvesting in local party infrastructure, and broadening membership participation.
She also describes creative efforts by some European parties to offer incentives for joining — ranging from offering opportunities for policy input and discounted services to social events and leadership access. Other scholars have similarly found that grassroots inclusion is vital to maintaining strong ties between parties and citizens: research on Uruguay’s Frente Amplio shows that offering activists a real voice in decision-making helps sustain support and mobilization. In Mexico, the Morena party has taken a more radical approach, randomly selecting candidates from lists of party activists — dramatically increasing representativeness and deepening voter identification with the party. But while these measures may encourage involvement at the margins, they are unlikely to reestablish the kind of social embeddedness that once sustained mass parties.
Indeed, one of the limits of Kuo’s analysis is the extent to which it underestimates just how historically contingent strong parties were. As Kuo recounts in detail, strong parties emerged under very specific conditions: industrialization; a large, politically active, and less occupationally differentiated working class; and a much stronger fabric of civic-associational life.
Those conditions have largely disappeared. Without them, it’s unclear whether anything resembling the mass-party model can be revived. Kuo acknowledges this tension but does not fully reckon with its strategic implications. If parties can no longer rely on the labor movement or civil society to sustain them, what are the real prospects for party renewal? Or are we simply left with an understandable but largely unhelpful nostalgia for an admirable yet sadly anachronistic mode of politics?
If the era of mass-membership parties built over the scaffolding of strong civic institutions is unlikely to return, a different kind of party-building effort is needed — one that reverses the traditional relationship between parties and civil society. Instead of waiting for strong intermediary institutions to buoy party renewal, local party efforts may now have to generate social ties where few currently exist. That means rejecting the model of campaigns as large ad buys and last-minute voter-turnout efforts, and instead investing in long-term organizing strategies that build relationships, trust, and shared purpose in politically neglected communities.
One promising example comes from the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative (RUBI), whose Community Works program operates in low-income rural counties in Virginia and Georgia. These programs — food drives, safety equipment distribution, neighborhood cleanups — are nonpartisan in tone but backed quietly by local Democrats. They aim to reestablish a positive, sustained presence in communities often written off by the party.
Over time, such efforts might not only improve public perception but also provide the basis for more enduring political ties. While this is just one small example, it reflects a broader strategic orientation: progressives must think less in terms of electoral cycles and more in terms of the long-term rebuilding of hollowed-out institutions.
Of course, developing this kind of political infrastructure is a major challenge, but the resources needed to begin the work on a significant scale are not hard to find. In the 2024 election cycle, for instance, Democratic campaigns spent billions of dollars on ephemeral tactics like ad buys of uncertain electoral value. Redirecting even a modest share of that spending to year-round, community-rooted organizing could build meaningful ties in areas long abandoned by Democrats, and without significantly affecting the resources needed to compete effectively in the next election.
This is not to suggest that local party-building alone can resolve our current crisis of democracy. But it may be one of the few viable tools left for restoring the link between citizens and state. Political parties will not save democracy on their own. Yet without them, democracy’s future may prove tenuous.
Great Job Jared Abbott & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
