Dartmouth Events

Steven Teles of Johns Hopkins is our first guest in the Sociology 2021 Colloquium.

The Future is Faction
Almost every other democratic political system in the world features a large number of parties. Despite America’s enormous diversity, we have only two. For most of American history, our substitute for multiple parties has been internal party factionalism—strong, organized groups within the parties that both contest for power over the party, while also cooperating with co-partisans for control of government. But over the last quarter-century, that factionalism has almost disappeared. This talk will argue that we are already seeing the first signs of a flowering of intra-party factions among both the Democrats and Republicans. This will change nearly everything about how American politics works, and may be the only effective route out of the cycle of toxic polarization.