The authors meticulously documents the history of the fall of party significance, and their belief in the cause, while somehow ignoring what I think is actually the BIGGEST root cause: MONEY. They mention money only a couple of times in passing, like it's almost irrelevant.
"THE SECOND PRINCIPLE OF NONSENSE: Rigorous argument from inapplicable assumptions produces the world's most durable nonsense.
-R. A. Rosanoff, "A Survey of Modern Nonsense as Applied to Matrix Computations", April 1969.
While the authors' assumptions aren't completely inapplicable, they certainly are far less important than other causes that they ignore.
Both parties chase after the money. After all, everybody works for who pays them, and the rich and the corporations pay the parties to look out for them, and we the voters are left with just empty words.
The abysmal turnout by voters in most elections here should show you that many people have just given up on the process. They don't believe that voting makes any difference in their lives no matter who or what party is elected. Both Obama and Trump ran on a sorts of promises, raising hope, only to demonstrate that they meant very little that they said during the campaign.
I hold Reagan primarily responsible for rehabilitating greed, transforming it from a vice to a virtue, to which we should all aspire, as in "he who dies with the most toys wins". And it's destroying us.
The Democratic leadership feign an interest in what we want, but in fact, they are all about war and Wall Street. Even Obama, who should have known better having been a community organizer, betrayed his supporters once in office. But plenty of voters have figured out the truth and have left the party in droves.
Remember Hillary's speech in probably 2016 to rich donors that was done in secret and we never found out anything about it? How much do you want to bet that she told her rich donors not to worry about her populist speeches, because she wasn't going to do any of that if she became president? And Biden even said publicly "Nothing will fundamentally change" when change is what we desperately need to end the legalized bribery.
The Republicans don't even bother feigning anything, or they make up obvious lies, which explains Trump's popularity with his personality cult. The cult knows the traditional Republican Party doesn't care about them, and the cult is large enough, that most Republicans are spineless and afraid to tell the truth, and instead have become merely shills for Trump.
Both parties have just about completely lost touch with the voters, as evidenced by the decline in the number of people willing to be a part of either party. I would not be a member of a party if I weren't running for a state office where I need the support of a group of some sort, and state politics are affected less by money.
Both parties treat what should be a philosophical debate of ideas as a professional spectator sport. Each side has to treat their side as always right, the other side always wrong, unwilling to objectively look at the other's ideas which might have merit. Ridicule and ad hominem attacks have replaced reasoned discussion, thanks to the goal of mainstream news being profit and manufacturing consent, not actual information transfer. I don't remember seeing the book calling out the spectator sport aspect as causing major polarization at all. And that's a result of Reagan's elimination of the fairness doctrine, and Clinton's Telecommunications act. There's an incredibly high correlation between money and success in campaigns. And these authors basically mention nothing about that.
In addition, our primary election system usually results in two extreme candidates in the general, because most voters don't participate in the primaries. The extremists are usually the ones who do participate, in which case the most extreme candidate usually gets elected. Then the general election is between two extreme candidates. The book "The Politics Industry" by Gehl and Porter explains why this happens in great detail and what we could do about it. I highly recommend this book. It's really intuitively obvious, but I saw NOTHING about this in the Jacobs and Milkis book.
The issue is not 'presidential centered politics' the issue is the 'presidential betrayal of voters' not to mention the betrayal of the voters by the leadership of both parties due to MONEY. The reason why parties no longer play a temperancing role in populist movements is that parties no longer represent the concerns of the voters and we know it. The parties have betrayed the voters in favor of the moneyed interests.
And we can't have major campaign finance reform even if it were to pass, because reforms gets overruled by the Supreme Court, because the majority of members (the conservatives) is completely out of touch with how corrosive money is to everything, even science. The Jacobs and Milkis book has barely a peep about this fundamental fact.
This book is useful, however, for it did give me some reasons to not completely write off the usefulness of parties like what my opinion was before reading the book. It does give a detailed history of party politics, but I find it very much off the mark as to addressing the root causes (as I've described above) of our lack of civility and the lack of the center today. They could have written a book that could have called this out and have truly moved the ball forward toward reform, but for some inexplicable reason, they failed to do this.
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- Reviewed in the United States on June 8, 2022
