Don’t Crash My Party!
Shirene Hansotia

 Rockford, Illinois: Helm Publishing, 2007. Paperback, 359 pages.

Growing up in Wisconsin, I was steeped in the political traditions of William Proxmire, Robert LaFollette and the Progressive reformers.  In Don’t Crash My Party!, it’s clear that Shirene Hansotia, who also grew up in Wisconsin, was very much influenced by them as well.  Hansotia’s book is billed as a road map for the Democratic Party’s future, and her suggested directions are clearly influenced by her heroes’ fear of concentrated power (especially corporate power) and emphasis upon procedural reform, efficiency and honesty in government. At the same time, however, Hansotia looks backward in a harsh and extensive critique of the Bush Administration (particularly in foreign policy) as well as what she sees as the failure of the Democratic Party to offer an effective and cogent alternative.

Hansotia emphasizes her political heroes in many places in the book, and her selections are very telling.  The Democratic Party she wants would place much more emphasis upon pragmatism and centrism than on ideology–in fact, her central critique of the Bush Administration is that it has been too rigidly ideological and that this has led it astray again and again. She is critical of what she terms extremism in the Republican Party of today, but also fears that current Democrats are too frequently seen as extremists in Middle America on social issues. Many of the traditional heroes of the Democratic Party like Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Hubert Humphrey who argued for clearly liberal national government policies get relatively little mention (and FDR’s Social Security, one of the traditional Democratic signature programs, is singled out as an area where tighter fiscal discipline is needed). Her heroes are those who  worked for relatively center-left or centrist policies like John Kennedy and Bill Clinton, or government watchdogs and procedural reformers like Bill Proxmire and (especially) Russ Feingold, and she wants the Democrats to follow their examples.  A sense of shared sacrifice and love of country is central to her arguments.

Her exaltation of the pre-2004 John McCain is particularly telling, and his efforts to curry favor with conservative forces in the Republican Party clearly were very disillusioning for her. One gets the sense that she would have found much common ground with the old pragmatic, moderate Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller, Margaret Chase Smith and Warren Knowles  whose views have been supplanted by more conservative and more ideological leaders like James Inhofe, Newt Gingrich and others over the past two decades. Many Wisconsin progressives were very fond of John Anderson’s brand of centrist Republicanism in 1980; one suspects that Hansotia would be much  more comfortable with this sort of direction(and that of current moderate Republicans such as Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Arlen Specter and Christopher Shays) than she would be with the less-pragmatic Cindy Sheehans and Dennis Kucinichs of today’s left wing.

Shirene Hansotia demonstrates an interesting combination of knowledge, expertise and passion in Don’t Crash My Party!  However, at times these traits need a bit of moderation themselves. She is repetitive in places and at times dwells on too much detail–particularly details about the George W. Bush Administration’s handling of foreign policy  in a book that is seemingly supposed to be forward looking. Yet. in all this detail, there is very little social science–a curious omission from a former CIA analyst with a master’s in public policy analysis. Instead, she prefers to cite particular newspaper and magazine columnists repeatedly (particularly Thomas Friedman and Fareed Zakaria).  Further, there are some troubling sloppy errors and typographical mistakes in a book with such a serious intent written by someone so knowledgeable. For a few examples, she lists Samuel Alito as being a member of the Federalist Party rather than the Federalist Society (Alito is surely conservative, but I don’t think he’s a member of a party that died in the early 19^th century), confuses the Astrodome with the Superdome and mistakenly refers to the 3/5s Compromise of the Constitutional Convention as a 2/5s Compromise.  A more aggressive editing of this book would have reduced these errors and would have made this book more tightly argued and focused, and more accurate.  (She has a list of footnotes as well, but a full index would have been a good addition).

Shirene Hansotia is at times a bit unfocused and rambling in this book, but her passion and intelligence are also very evident here. Her work offers both a thorough critique of what she sees as the problems of contemporary American politics and some interesting thoughts for future directions for the Democratic Party.  Don’t Crash My Party! fits in well with the Progressive reform tradition, and I suspect that if “Fighting Bob” La Follette were alive today, he’d want to pick up a copy.

—Jim Melcher, July2007