By Paul Frymer
I do not frequently write on-line publication studies, yet after examining the seven overwhelmingly optimistic Amazon reports of "Uneasy Alliances" I felt that somebody had to offer a fact cost. i want to preface my very own very unfavorable overview via announcing that i love a few of Frymer's different scholarship, in particular at the tensions inherent within the New Deal coalition. i believe very in a different way approximately "Uneasy Alliances." here's a direct citation from an electronic mail I wrote to a graduate college classmate presently after studying it for the 1st time:
"But talking of Frymer, have you ever learn the ebook of his assigned for [Professor X's] classification? i presumed it used to be lovely poor. It starts off with a believable theoretical suggestion -- that of curiosity staff 'capture' -- after which makes a multitude of heritage in attempting to use it on American politics. My response to it used to be so opposed from the instant i began interpreting that I worry i could have overlooked out on its redeeming characteristics, which it should have due to the fact [Professor X] assigned a lot of it."
This quote nonetheless essentially sums up my response to the publication. Frymer desires to blame the two-party process for the oppression of African americans within the united states, yet his argument is absolutely not convincing. he's taking an attractive notion ("capture") and attempts to shoe-horn race family members in the US into his theoretical framework. It does not healthy. Blacks were not oppressed as the events colluded to close out their political calls for; they have been oppressed simply because their calls for for political and social equality weren't supported through nearly all of white american citizens till good into the twentieth century. it's the distribution of personal tastes within the American citizens that was once guilty, no longer the constitution of the celebration method. And it wasn't blacks' "capture" through the Republican occasion that allowed their renewed oppression after Reconstruction; it was once the truth that blacks have been violently disfranchised within the South -- a end result that was once not on time till the tip of the nineteenth century due to Republicans' partisan curiosity in safeguarding the balloting rights of blacks, their most powerful supporters within the zone. There are related logical (not to say authentic -- the ebook is stuffed with authentic mistakes) issues of Frymer's account of the civil rights period and past. briefly, "Uneasy Alliances" makes a glib and superficially attractive argument, however it is essentially unconvincing to somebody with a radical grab of the heritage of race and politics within the usa. For a extra convincing if a little bit much less sweeping account of this subject, learn Richard Valelly's the 2 Reconstructions: The fight for Black Enfranchisement (American Politics and Political economic climate sequence) as a substitute.
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Extra resources for Uneasy Alliances
Sample text
Parties, then, are not just umbrella organizations that take voters and, more broadly, society’s hierarchies as they see them. They also shape people’s ideas about politics, their level of involvement, and the kind of policies that are pursued in government. Even when parties simply gather up groups of already existing political interests, they nonetheless communicate a message and shape the politiFor further discussion on this, see Walters, Black Presidential Politics, chap. 1. See Stephen Elkin, “Political Structure, Political Organization, and Race,” Politics and Society 8 (1978).
33 See Jaenicke, “Jacksonian Integration,” 100–101. 34 See Donald B. Cole, Martin Van Buren and the American Political System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 274, 376. 32 PARTIES AND CAPTURED GROUPS 39 threatened to take in the 1844 presidential election) that Van Buren opposed the South on Texas annexation and the Mexican War. In 1844, a distrustful southern wing of the party, using the two-thirds rule, helped prevent Van Buren from once again attaining the party nomination for president (the party instead went with a perceived moderate on the slave issue, James Polk).
Carmines and James A. Stimson, Issue Evolution: Race and the Transformation of American Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 4 Dianne M. Pinderhughes, Race and Ethnicity in Chicago Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 261. PARTIES AND CAPTURED GROUPS 29 competitive party leaders. This cleavage was a central factor in the initial design and development of the nation’s two-party system, as I will show in this chapter. ” Political elites at the time understood that parties could effectively develop, and in fact had a great incentive to develop, majority coalitions that would ignore the problem of slavery.
