All right, welcome listeners to episode 98 of Know Your Enemy.

I'm Matt Sittman, your podcast co-host, and I'm here as always with my great friend Sam

Mother Bell.

Hey Sam, I'm Matt.

Are you as excited for the Democratic National Convention as I am, Sam?

My favorite time of the election cycle.

All our favorites come out, we get to see Bill Clinton, Hillary.

I'm ready to do the Macarena.

I heard Kathy Hocles even speaking.

Wow, she deserves it.

But I do mention the convention because it does connect to this episode, which is about

political parties. We did specifically time it to release it between the two conventions, the RNC, and the DNC,

and we had on two guests who are the co-authors of a new book called The Hollow Parties, The Many Pasts, and Disordered Present of American Party

Politics. The authors, and our guests, were Daniel Schlesman and Sam Rosenfeld.

Danny is an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and Sam

Rosenfeld is an associate professor of political science at Colgate.

Yeah, this was a really interesting conversation, timed well between the two conventions, and it's a really interesting book.

It's both a history book and a political science book, and it's really an account of how the parties, the two parties in America, were hollowed out, become these kinds of,

in the case of the Democrats, this kind of listless ineffectual party in the case of the Republicans so powerless to prevent the sort of radical forces

within the conservative movement from taking over.

So it's two different results of this holiness that they identify as the sort of signature feature of political parties in the contemporary

era, but the cause is this same emptiness and weakness at the center of our party system.

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