PROGRAM
Roosevelt House is pleased to host a discussion with renowned political historian Julian E. Zelizer about his new book, In Defense of Partisanship, published by Columbia Global Reports. Chronicling the long, fascinating histories of the Democratic and Republican Parties from their inceptions to today, Zelizer delivers a timely and spirited defense of what he calls “responsible partisanship.” The author will be in conversation with author, filmmaker, and Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, Jelani Cobb.
If there is one issue on which almost everyone in our divided country seems to agree, writes Zelizer, it’s the belief that the intense loyalty within the electorate toward Democrats or Republicans is the source of all our political ills. Resulting in widening divisions, dysfunction, distrust, and the spread of disinformation—partisanship, says Zelizer, has become a dirty word in American politics.
In Defense of Partisanship illuminates the possibilities that responsible partisanship can offer. In particular, the book explores the importance of partisanship to an influential 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. Reimagining what partisanship might look like going forward from today, Zelizer explains how a new era of party-oriented reforms has the potential to create a more functional path on which two responsible political parties can compete to shape policy—while still being able to govern.
Julian E. Zelizer is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University and a columnist for Foreign Policy. He is also a regular guest on NPR’s Here and Now, and a popular analyst on multiple television and radio networks including CNN. He is the award-winning author and editor of 27 books, including: The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society, winner of the D.B. Hardeman Prize for the Best Book on Congress; Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974; Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party; Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement; and the edited volumes The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment; Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Lies and Legends About Our Past, co-edited with Kevin Kruse; and, with Karen Greenberg, Our Nation at Risk: Election Security as a National Security Issue. He is currently working on a new book about the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the 1964 Democratic Convention entitled Is this America?: Reckoning with Racism at the 1964 Atlantic City Democratic Convention and The Presidency of Joseph Biden Jr: A First Historical Assessment, an edited volume. Zelizer has published over 1300 op-eds and received fellowships from the Brookings Institution, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the New York Historical Society, Penn Washington, and New America.
Jelani Cobb joined the Columbia Journalism School faculty in 2016 and became Dean in 2022. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2015. He received a Peabody Award for his 2020 PBS Frontline film Whose Vote Counts? and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary in 2018. He has also been a political analyst for MSNBC since 2019. He is the author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress and To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic. He is the editor or co-editor of several additional volumes including The Matter of Black Lives, a collection of The New Yorker’s writings on race, and The Essential Kerner Commission Report. Cobb is producer or co-producer on a number of documentaries including Lincoln’s Dilemma; Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union; Policing the Police; and The Riot Report.
