Crisis!

Cedric de Leon is Director of the Labor Center and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of The Origins of Right to Work (2015) and Party and Society (2014) and co-editor of Building Blocs: How Parties Organize Society (Stanford, 2015). Prior to becoming an academic, he was by turns an organizer and local union president in the American labor movement.

"Crisis! draws important parallels between the Civil War and our present moment: that the planter class of the 19th century initially resisted secession finds echoes today in actions of the superrich, many of whom once opposed Trump but have now come on board, setting in motion consequences that threaten their wealth and power. A fascinating book."—Stephen Lerner, Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, Georgetown University "Cedric de Leon offers a compelling narrative that sheds light on our present political moment and serves as a resource to anyone wishing to understand and end the crisis of confidence that has gripped American politics."—Jim McGovern, United States Congressman "Cedric de Leon makes a bold and convincing argument about the sources of political crises and popular disaffection with the major political parties: it is the dynamics of the parties themselves, rather than voters' economic self-interest or cultural goals, that create moments of political breakdown."—Ann Shola Orloff, coeditor of The Many Hands of the State: Theorizing Political Authority and Social Control "Cedric de Leon sees a crisis in contemporary American politics similar to the one leading up to the Civil War. His paths forward—led either by political party leaders or through a surge of political independence among voters—point toward very different futures for U.S. democracy. As argued in Crisis!, we are living in extraordinary political times."—John Aldrich, Why Parties? A Second Look "[De Leon offers] a sober analysis that centers its story on the relationships between a party and its base. If we are to find a way out of this 'time of monsters,' one way would be through movements that recognize these 'crisis points' and use them to break out of a system of political hegemony that has largely ignored climate change, allowed the growth of unsustainable levels of inequality and is actively disenfranchising people across the globe. The challenges for such movements are enormous, but the time has never been more ripe."—John Kincaid, Social Forces "In the end Crisis! is an important contribution to the new historical sociology of parties from one of the leading scholars in the field. It is a welcome correction to scholarly and public debates that elide the centrality of parties in the making of American political history and our current predicament... What Crisis! offers is a concise cross-case analysis of key periods of political dissolution with an eye to enhancing our understanding of the present, laying important groundwork on which the rest of us can (and should) build."—Stephanie L. Mudge, American Journal of Sociology

• 1. The Crisis Sequence2. The Appeal of Manifest Destiny.3. The Tug of Unionism.4. The End of the Slaveholding Republic.5. The Contradictions of the New Deal.6. The Miseducation of Barack Obama.7. The Election of Donald Trump.8. The Paths out of Crisis.