In comments on Robin Marie’s recent response to Timothy Minella’s guest post on Tocqueville and Twitter, Cory mentioned Jill Lepore’s recent piece on the new populism and party realignment in The New Yorker.  I hadn’t read the Lepore article yet, but the conversation sparked my interest, so I did. Lepore attempts to put the rise of populism in this year’s presidential primaries into the history of changing party systems in the United States. And she sees party system change – including the unusual patterns we’re seeing in this primary season — as driven largely by changes in mass-media technologies. Let’s Read more