A s I write these words, the world awaits the inauguration of the forty-seventh President of the United States—a man long understood by his opponents as a threat to the American democratic experiment. The invitees include a veritable who’s who of the global far right: Nigel Farage, founder of Reform UK (formerly the Brexit Party); Mateusz Morawiecki, former prime minister of Poland and now leader of the European Conservatives and Reformists Party; Javier Milei, Argentina’s president since 2023; Giorgia Meloni, co-founder of Brothers of Italy (a party with neofascist roots) and prime minister since 2022; Viktor Orbán of Hungary, now the fourth-term prime minister of the self-proclaimed “illiberal” democracy; Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former right-wing nationalist president; and so on. Political attendees will rub elbows with some of the richest and most powerful tech moguls in the world, who wield sprawling influence over the increasingly digital means of public debate, and with a panoply of wealthy presidential appointees who, vetted for loyalty, are awaiting takeover of their respective henhouses. One half expects Vladimir Putin himself to make a surprise appearance—maybe to do a little tap dance on the ashes of a copy of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Welcome to the Gilded Age of Neo-American Empire.

For at least two decades, a broad swath of historians, political theorists, and social scientists has sounded the alarm on the decline of democratic representation on both sides of the Atlantic. There are variations on the story, but the gist is clear. Starting somewhere in the 1970s, Western democratic and governing institutions shifted in an increasingly undemocratic, or maybe antidemocratic, direction. Corporations went multinational, finance was set loose, economic inequality skyrocketed, wealth concentrated, taxation became less progressive, and bond markets pressed indebted states into keeping promises to investors instead of citizens. Western elites who celebrated the global spread of markets in the 1990s and early 2000s at best misread, and at worst willfully ignored, what was happening in their own backyards. Formerly community-anchored political parties grew ever more professionalized, unrooted, and unrepresentative—and, in the United States, increasingly walled off inside the Beltway. Ever more campaign-centered and donor-driven, American party politics now swims in an eye-wateringly gargantuan pool of money: At $5.5 billion, 2024 campaign spending exceeded the GDP of a surprising number of small and developing countries.

Didi Kuo’s The Great Retreat synthesizes and extends this disheartening story, with an optimistic twist: She calls on us to believe in political parties again, and to invest our energies in rebuilding them. Currently a center fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, Kuo is an accomplished scholar of comparative politics, a former fellow at New America, and a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. By bringing political parties into focus, treating parties of the mainstream left and right as fundamentally the same kinds of institutions, and casting them as much more than a necessary evil, Kuo provides fodder for a needed conversation that takes a step back from hyperpartisanship. The core message of this well-informed and reader-friendly book is important: Trust in parties is at a global low point, but parties remain the “connective tissue” between governments and citizens; rebuilding them is the only option; let’s get to it.

Kuo defines parties in terms of what they have done historically (functionally) and what they should do in principle (normatively). Parties’ purpose and meaning, she argues, is to serve as intermediaries: They are “tasked with representing the interests of a diffuse citizenry, and…with carrying out a vision of society through a governing agenda that addresses these interests.” Party development—from “small legislative factions, to voluntary associations, then to mass organizations”—is the story, also, of democracy’s development. More than “groups that seek elected office” (Kuo is speaking to her political science colleagues here, I suspect), parties are also bearers of “ideas, values, and shared interests in the public as a whole,” making the difference between representative democracy and democracy-in-name-only. (Good) parties are “integrative (socializing people into politics),” “representative (claiming to act on behalf of a group interest),” and “responsive (shaping policy decisions in accordance with their responsibility to integrate and represent voters).”

Kuo’s historical account of parties’ origins and trajectories is one of linear progression, from the turn of the twentieth century mass parties that “helped to integrate voters into democratic politics” and “placed a premium on…how well they channeled the interests of their base,” to the non-ideological “catch-all party” (in the famous term of Frankfurt School political scientist Otto Kirchheimer) of the 1960s, to the professionalized “cartel party” (Peter Mair and Richard Katz’s term, informed by the work of Angelo Panebianco, among others) of today. The analysis moves loosely between the American and European continents, wrapping multiple party histories into variations on a theme: Parties once educated, represented, responded, and mediated; now they campaign, alienate, and kowtow to the well-resourced. The question is how to (with apologies for the phrasing) make parties representative again.

Two broad forces feature in Kuo’s account of parties’ fall from grace: a transformation of party organizations, and a change, in the context of globalization and neoliberal faith in markets, in how parties navigate tensions between democracy and capitalism. In the former, parties “retreated from the representative functions they once performed,” focusing more on winning campaigns than channeling their constituents’ needs and demands. Parties stopped investing in the time- and people-intensive local work of recruiting, socializing, and grounding themselves in community networks, relying instead on activists and lobbyists. And in the latter, by drinking the neoliberal Kool-Aid, they stopped offering meaningful alternatives in terms of economic policy: “By embracing a method of governing that prioritizes markets,” Kuo argues, “parties exempted themselves from responsibility to respond to the demands of citizens,” and democracy went into retreat.

Kuo’s story vacillates between placing responsibility at parties’ door, pointing to changing constituencies (namely, business and educated professionals) as central drivers, and highlighting broad economic changes that shifted capital into the political driver’s seat. The eternal problem of party agency raises its head here. But questions of where responsibility lies, and whether things could have been different, will probably never be settled. Regardless, Kuo makes the point that representative parties mean responsive policy, and responsive policy fosters citizens who like their governments. If parties aren’t vehicles of responsive policymaking, constituents perceive (correctly) that government isn’t working for them. Linked to this—indeed, wrought by unresponsive policymaking—is a transformation in government familiar to scholars of neoliberalism: As the government increasingly operates through market-building and private-sector outsourcing, its capacity to deal with crises wanes. For Kuo, this problem came to a head in the context of COVID-19, which she narrates as a kind of denouement or “great retreat”: The private sector stepped into a vacuum created by a government sapped of capacity and legitimacy. Hence the mess we’re in today.

What to do? Kuo calls on Americans to proactively embrace the political party, and on party leaders to engage in what she and a co-author, Tabatha Abu El-Haj, have elsewhere termed “associational party-building.” Parties, for their part, need to “reclaim the function they once served to bind citizens to the state.” Saving democracy requires a collective rethink of parties’ purposes and structure—that is, we need to remind ourselves that parties are the means to democratic government and focus our energies on restoring their representative capacity. For Kuo, this is especially critical now, since meaningfully representative parties, she argues, block antidemocratic candidates and counter antidemocratic “propaganda.”

The Great Retreat is not presented as a work of history; it’s a synthetic analysis and a call to action. Understandably, if the aim is to get us excited about party-building, Kuo mostly sidesteps the less savory aspects of party history in the United States. As she well knows, the stories told by Kirchheimer, Panebianco, Katz, and Mair are largely Western European ones. She doesn’t say so, but it is true that, as global capitalism consolidated in the late nineteenth century, North Atlantic linkages multiplied and intensified, and national trajectories—including the trajectories of parties—were intertwined. And Kuo is right that, at the turn of the twenty-first century, the rise of the unresponsive, elite-dominated, unrooted party was a broadly international phenomenon. But there are some details of the American story that, if the goal is to resuscitate parties’ mediating and representative functions, should probably be noted.

Telling of nineteenth-century American parties that “welcomed newly enfranchised voters, including waves of migrants into cities,” The Great Retreat passes over the ugly racial dynamics of migrants’ political incorporation. Stated most bluntly: Many Democratic Party leaders were happy to incorporate migrants, particularly the Irish, so long as they understood themselves as “white” voters—that is, if they offset the Black vote. Kuo mentions that the late nineteenth century was a time of regress for Black political rights, but only incidentally, and without significant attention to the terrorization that was that regress’s driving force. Political leaders’ accommodation and cultivation of ethno-nativist politics in general, not just in the notorious anti-Black, Jim Crow mode, also come to mind—for instance, with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which initiated a freeze on immigration from Asia and the Middle East that lasted the better part of a century and deprived Chinese workers, including longtime residents, of basic rights.

Labor historians likewise might raise their eyebrows at Kuo’s contention that turn of the twentieth century American parties, in general, “took on the hard work of representing varied interests,” including “those of the burgeoning working class.” This is true, sort of, but (again) only for segments of that class, and surely not thanks to the uniformly enlightened, voluntary goodwill of party elites. Working-class representation was won, by hook and by crook, in the face of violent repression. Violent repression was not exactly spearheaded by the two major political parties—which, as national organizations, lacked the centralized capacity they would have needed—but was certainly sponsored by (party) governments, on all levels. Neither Republican nor Democratic elites welcomed the working classes with open arms.

None of this undermines Kuo’s argument that the hard-won achievement of incorporating working-class people into party political life, so far as it went, now seems lost to history. Parties have, indeed, become professionalized, uprooted, and unrepresentative, especially relative to the early postwar period—even if the story of representation lost really applies only to the limited subset of constituencies that enjoyed full political and economic rights (that is: not women, people who immigrated from non-European places, indigenous people, Black or African American people, Puerto Ricans, etc.). If Kuo and her colleagues manage to spark a serious conversation about party-building, questions about how parties that mediated between (some) citizens and governments emerged historically, what forces made them responsive, and who they represented (and on what terms) will need to be asked.

These questions arose most sharply, for this reader, in response to The Great Retreat’s account of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century urban machines, which Kuo presents as consummate mediators. Indeed, the book’s second chapter opens with a narrative of how the bosses of New York City’s (in)famous Democratic political machine, Tammany Hall, used “patronage, persuasion, graft, flattery, and threats to reward loyal supporters, dissuade challengers, appeal to constituents, and build their base of political power.”

When Kuo describes machine patronage as “a common method of engaging voters,” she has a point. In a sense political representation and patronage are one and the same—which is to say, both consist of gift exchange. Voters get what they want, and politicians get to stay in office. Yet mediation has some dirty secrets. Sometimes, what voters want is not consistent with egalitarianism and civic republicanism. Sometimes politicians orchestrate what they want voters to want, not by incorporating us into civic culture, but by cultivating our fears, anxieties, and worst instincts.

As I alternated between reading The Great Retreat and following the news of Southern California on fire, Kuo’s stories of Tammany bosses who spent their days bailing out saloonkeepers, helping fire victims, and paying poor families’ rent sounded like a kind of politics we sorely need. But Kuo leaves out the context. It just so happens that I’d also been reading Adam Hochschild’s American Midnight (2022), which sheds light on the torrid state of early twentieth-century party political life. Some features of that period are jarringly familiar—for instance, 1920 promises of mass deportation by Democratic and Republican politicians alike. Others are both familiar and grotesque, like horrific acts of violence under the auspices of Democratic machine bosses against Black American migrants from the Jim Crow South that were duly ignored by President Wilson, despite protesters’ demand that Black Americans fall under the umbrella of his wartime pledge to make the world “safe for democracy.” Democratic machines most certainly cultivated tight relationships between white working-class constituencies, white labor unions, police, judges, and government. But machine bosses operated in, and were arguably symbiotic with, a broader politics patterned by nativism, racism, jingoism, violence, repressive policing, and corrupt legal systems. Party mediation, all by itself, doesn’t bend toward justice.

Ultimately, two uncomfortable facts confront Kuo and the scholars on whose works Kuo draws (including myself) who see party-building as critical to healthy democracy. The first is that, in this Gilded Age of Neo-American Empire, the political party is arguably back with a vengeance, but asymmetrically—that is, it exists now mainly on the far right. American labor unions continue their numerical decline; prospects for a meaningful reconnection between the Democratic Party and a broad coalition of working people seem dim. The forty-seventh American President remains, meanwhile, a duly elected politician who, with the support and adoration of his constituents, promises to fundamentally change our antidemocratic, nonresponsive neoliberal order in ways his opponents dislike or fear or both, but that appear entirely responsive to the desires of his “base.” Maybe the question we need to ask is why party-building is going well for them, but not so great for everyone else.

The second uncomfortable fact is that it’s not clearly true that effective party mediation staves off antidemocratic politics or politicians. Here I’m going to ask the reader to indulge me in a sociological digression. The forty-seventh President has, by some reports, rendered the Republican Party a cauldron of what the French sociologist Émile Durkheim called “collective effervescence”: that special, transformative feeling, heightened and sustained through collective rituals (think sports events, religious gatherings, live concerts, social media frenzies, and yes, political inaugurations), of transcending the ordinary. Collective effervescence not only affirms but also constitutes social (political) reality: what is true and false, right and wrong, good and evil, and who stands on what side. It attaches specific meanings to things social scientists tend to treat as if they are always only one thing—things like “democracy.” Imparting the feeling that we are part of something larger and connected to each other, collective effervescence attracts the alienated, the underrepresented, and the historically marginalized—say, perhaps, those younger-generation voters, Latinos, and Black men who swung Republican in November 2024. In short, collective effervescence forges that magical thing that is the building block of all politics, the group—people who regard each other as more alike than different, even if they started off with little in common. In 2008, collective effervescence could be seen among Barack Obama supporters; in 2025, it is most visible among the supporters of Obama’s ostensibly antidemocratic antithesis.

One might also note that the above-mentioned panoply of right-wing inauguration invitees are party-builders who, with the possible exception of Orbán (whose constitutional reforms prompted a Freedom House rating of Hungary as only “partly free”), have moved in and out of power via elections in countries that are still democratically governed. We can call them antidemocratic all we want, but we should face up to the possibility that theirs is, in fact, a variety of party-led, connective, mediating politics—a form of democratic politics that is symbiotic, just like the machine politics of the Tammany bosses, with a larger political and economic order.

Kuo is surely correct that we need to lean in to party-building, not turn up our noses. What she wants, I suspect, is a stable, deliberative, civil democratic sphere in which parties incorporate, educate, and mediate, fostering the politics that small-d democrats and small-l liberals want: a broadly participatory politics grounded in the concerns and needs of citizens and communities, organized by informed and reasoned debate, and populated by politicians who are self-interested but also principled in the sense that they play according to democratic norms. I want that too. The question, I suppose, is whether we can build parties that foster the democracy we want, rather than the democracy we have.