Lingua Franca, The Review of Academic Life, asked five experts to pick the best recent books about American political parties. Phil Klinkner's The Losing Parties: Out-Party National Committees, 1956-1993 was chosen for the list by Rick Perlstein, author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (Hill and Wang, 2001).
Perlstein says,"In anthropology, they call it the 'betwixt-and-between': the telling liminal moment when one settled state begins passing into another and the architectures of social structure and social change are laid bare. In political science, the jargon is more simple: It's the 'off-year election.' Two excellent recent studies, Philip A. Klinkner's The Losing Parties: Out-Party National Committees, 1956-1993 (Yale, 1994) and Andrew E. Busch's Horses in Midstream: U.S. Midterm Elections and Their Consequences, 1894-1998 (Pittsburgh, 1999), give the 1958s, the 1962s, and the 1994s of U.S. history their due as social dramas in which, respectively, the forces of Southern Republicanism, Democratic liberalism, and anti-Clinton rage began gearing up to change the country for good. By showing how the most interesting things in politics often happen when most people aren't paying attention, both books succeed in knocking us out of our settled ways of thinking about politics."
