Cedric de Leon’s Crisis! contextualizes contemporary American party politics by drawing parallels between the breakup of the antebellum party system and the present-day splintering of the Republican and Democratic Parties that produced the Trump presidency. He argues that in each case the election of an unexpected president—James K. Polk and Barack Obama, respectively—initiated a “crisis of hegemony” (p. 3) that led political elites to lose control of the party apparatus. In antebellum America this initiated the collapse of the Whig Party and its replacement by the Republicans. In the modern era, this produced the Tea Party on the Right and the Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements on the Left. The splintering of the Democrats resulted in the 2016 unenthusiastic nomination of Hillary Clinton and opened a space on the Right for the nomination of Donald Trump.

The book proposes a “crisis sequence” (p. 5) to explain the emergence and timing of party system breakdown. It consists of four phases: “(1) unexpected challenge, (2) defection, (3) failed re-absorption, and (4) crisis” (p. 6). To illustrate (and greatly simplify), the Great Recession of 2007–9 initiated the current sequence. It produced the presidential election of the previously unknown Barack Obama. President Obama won nomination by appealing to New Deal ideals. This contrasted with Hillary Clinton’s more conservative economic philosophy and prompted the defection of numerous Democratic primary voters to Obama. In the general election, Obama highlighted John McCain’s ties to Wall Street, which provided the necessary margin of victory. Once in office, however, President Obama pursued a neoliberal economic agenda and studiously avoided contentious discussions of race. This alienated supporters of Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and moveon.org and precluded their reabsorption into the ranks of mainstream Democrats. In doing so, it strengthened more peripheral Democrats such as Bernie Sanders. President Obama’s election also splintered the Republican Party by providing a platform for more extreme groups such as “birthers,” which mainstream Republican leaders were unable to control or manage. This came to a head in 2016 when Hilary Clinton won a hard-fought nomination against Sanders, and the Republicans were unable to coalesce around an alternative to Donald Trump. The abandonment of Clinton by moveon.org and similar groups provided the edge that produced the Trump presidency and further fractured American parties.

De Leon is a sociologist and brings a sociologist’s eye to party politics. This presents both advantages and challenges for a political science audience. The advantages are considerable. For example, de Leon describes the contours of racial politics in shaping the American party systems in a manner that is nuanced and perceptive and is likely to enrich our understanding of how race beyond nineteenth-century slavery and twentieth- and twenty-first-century civil rights influenced party politics. Likewise, de Leon’s discussion of New Deal labor politics and the labor movement sheds useful light on how parties seek to co-opt and absorb potential elements of their coalitions. More generally, de Leon is interested in the relationship between social movements and party politics, a subject sometimes neglected to ill effect by party scholars.

Crisis! however, presents noticeable gaps for political scientists. Most importantly, the thesis is not placed in the context of realignment scholarship. Neither V. O. Key Jr. nor Walter Dean Burnham nor James L. Sundquist appears in the book, even though the narrative presents several points of tangency with the works of these pioneering scholars. The neglect of Sundquist is especially noticeable because de Leon’s argument parallels his realignment theory. For example, de Leon observes, “Every once in a while…politicians and social movement activists insist on debating issues that the major parties want to avoid. This unanticipated challenge to the status quo convinces politicians and voters alike to defect from the mainstream parties” (p. 6). The raising of new, cross-cutting issues as the catalyst for party system reorganization, and the subsequent efforts of political elites to suppress these to preserve the existing order, is in the same spirit as Sundquist’s realignment discussion in Dynamics of the Party System (1983).

Other aspects of Crisis! that might trouble political scientists include its relatively superficial treatment of the party eras. Crisis! places its thesis in the grand sweep of history from the founding of the Republican Party through the election of Donald Trump. Given that the book clocks in at a modest 165 pages, it cannot engage party development and evolution in a manner that will satisfy scholars with deep historical interests or even those with primary interest in contemporary American politics. In addition, as the title suggests, the book is more prescriptive and polemical than is common in political science. This is especially true in its concluding chapter. Indeed, the concluding chapter is something of a manifesto for creating a new party system. To quote: “If we are serious about moving beyond neoliberalism and stopping ethnic nationalism in its tracks, then we have no choice but to build another mass movement” (p. 164). Professor de Leon has a political agenda and, to his credit, makes no effort to disguise it. This type of polemic certainly has a place, although it may come at the cost of detracting from its author’s scholarly message.

On balance, Crisis! is a useful addition to any library on political parties. Scholars without deep background in party eras and development will find insights useful for understanding party politics in various periods of American political history. Those more focused on the evolution of American party politics will appreciate the book’s interesting perspective while recognizing its deficiencies in theoretical and historical grounding. The book’s sociological foundation in economic organization and race, although hardly novel, provides a different language that informs relevant scholarship. That said, Crisis! is unlikely to influence political science scholarship. It speaks to few of the key questions that interest party scholars such as why parties emerge, how party systems become nationalized, how parties structure political agendas, how parties link like-minded citizens and political elites, and other long-standing concerns of party scholars. Instead, it is a book that challenges readers to view party politics from an unaccustomed perspective. From that comes a useful contribution to scholarship and pedagogy.