In response to: The Future of Political Parties
1912 Republican National Convention in ChicagoI am very grateful to Richard Reinsch, the editor of Law and Liberty, for inviting me to write an essay on “The Future of Political Parties” and for enlisting three perspicacious critics to respond to it. It is gratifying that my frantic attempt to place the madcap events of 2016 in historical perspective resulted in such probing responses—a credit less to the quality of my essay, I think, than to the intelligence of my interlocutors and the times in which we live. All of us are trying to get our heads around history as it happens—a risky and stimulating scholarly…
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Sidney Milkis represents the finest tradition of American political science. His research on the presidency and the parties has always been topnotch, and his broad understanding of political history gives his analysis of contemporary affairs special weight. Best of all, the University of Virginia’s White Burkett Miller Professor of Politics is interested in the big…
In his excellent Liberty Forum essay on party politics, Sidney Milkis mentions Richard Nixon’s role in shaping the party system that we have today. The point is worth exploring in more detail. President Nixon’s story tells us a great deal about where the parties have been since the middle of the 20th century, and whither…
In his very thoughtful analysis of the 2016 election, Sidney M. Milkis asserts that “the rise of Donald Trump as the Republican nominee and his election as President have been the equivalent of a political weapon of mass destruction.” Milkis laments this as the culmination of a divisive partisanship in which “candidates not only differ…
