Julian Zelizer & Sean Wilentz—In Defense of Partisanship

Name: Julian Zelizer & Sean Wilentz—In Defense of Partisanship
Start: 2025-02-04T18:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-02-04T19:30:00-05:00
Location: Labyrinth Books Princeton

Schedule

Tue Feb 04 2025 at 06:00 pm to 07:30 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

Labyrinth Books Princeton | Princeton, NJ

Partisanship is a dirty word in American politics. If there is one issue on which almost everyone in our divided country seems to agree, it’s the belief that the intense loyalty within the electorate toward Democrats and Republicans is the source of our democratic ills—division, dysfunction, distrust, and disinformation. But the possibilities that responsible partisanship can offer were at the heart of an important intellectual tradition that flourished in the 1950s and 1960s, one which was institutionalized through a sweeping set of congressional reforms in the 1970s and 1980s.
Julian Zelizer’s In Defense of Partisanship reimagines what partisanship might look like going forward from today. A new era of party-oriented reforms has the potential to pay respect to the deep differences that divide us—simultaneously creating a more functional path on which two responsible political parties compete to shape policy while still being able to govern.
Julian E. Zelizer is the author and editor of numerous books, including Our Nation at Risk: Election Integrity as a National Security Issue and Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich and the Rise of the New Republican Party. He is Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University, a CNN political analyst, and a contributor to NPR’s Here & Now. Sean Wilentz is the author of many books on American history and politics, including No Property in Man; The Rise of American Democracy; and The Politicians and the Egalitarians, chosen as Best History Book of the Year by Kirkus. He is Professor of American History at Princeton University. Together, Zelizer and Wilentz co-edited the book Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies about Our Past.
This event is cosponsored by The Princeton Public Library and Labyrinth Books.