Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in African American Studies
Episode: Adam Hilton, "True Blues: The Contentious Transformation of the Democratic Party" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)
Description: Who governs political parties? Recent insurgent campaigns, such as those of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, have thrust this critical question to the center of political debate for casual observers and scholars alike. Yet the dynamics of modern party politics remain poorly understood. Assertions of either elite control or interest group dominance both fail to explain the Trump victory and the surprise of the Sanders insurgency and their subsequent reverberations through the American political landscape.
In True Blues: The Contentious Transformation of the Democratic Party (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021), Adam Hilton tackles the question of who governs parties by examining the tr...