Scholars live for the kind of careful and constructive engagement with their work that Dan Wood and Soren Jordan have provided here. In delineating the core analytical task of The Polarizers—to identify the actors who carried out the ideological reconstruction of the party system in the later twentieth century and the mechanisms by which they did it—they also point to what gets underemphasized in such an account. I see activists and organized groups working in sustained fashion across and between elections as the central drivers of party development. The effort to recover the historical lineages and the often thankless labor of such actors, which lays the groundwork for better-known political events, means foregrounding origins more than turning points and the processes of factional struggle more than outcomes in governance.

Such emphases, however, are not intended to suggest that the developmental story I am telling lacks critical junctures. The New Deal instigated not only a new national political cleavage over regulation and social provision, but also the initial forging of a coalitional and ideological alliance for economic and racial liberalism. The Democratic crack-up of 1968 set in motion both a fateful reshuffling of factional power and a reform process with long-term repercussions for both parties. New Right brokerage in the late 1970s secured an alliance of evangelical activists and the GOP while arming resurgent capital with a potent cultural populism. Such developments rendered the parties permeable to ideological activism and, ultimately, they were sorted and polarized by it.

What about the prospects for depolarization anytime soon? As Wood and Jordan note, my skepticism on this question exists in tension with my insistence on the capacity of historical actors to remake party politics through deliberate action. Although I hardly think we have reached an “end of history” for the party system, I emphasize skepticism for a few reasons. Macro developments in the polity make a retreat from programmatically defined parties unlikely. The long unwinding of the nineteenth-century model of party organization and the rise of an expansive national state help ensure that issue-based and ideological motivations will continue to drive those comprising the activist strata of American politics. That makes me dubious of reforms intended to force substantively sorted parties to find common ground and compromise, along with those aiming to close the parties’ ideological divisions by targeting by-products like incivility and declining sociability.

If goo-goo reformism will not reduce polarization, realignment driven by the emergence of new cross-cutting issues could. Conflict extension may have defined the last several decades of party politics, but Trump’s capture of the GOP nomination in 2016 while espousing several unorthodox positions offered a reminder of the electoral potential for alternatives to existing party cleavages. The all-too-orthodox Republican policy approach we have seen during Trump’s presidency, by contrast, is a reminder that electoral potential only takes us so far toward realignment. The real work, conspicuously absent from the Trumpist tendency thus far, comes from sustained effort by activists, organized groups, and political elites who are willing to work over years and decades to build sufficient intraparty clout to restructure party conflict. The polarizers’ story highlights not only the transformative potential of such work but also the difficulty of the undertaking.