I am personally pro-machine, both out of filial piety (my Irish grandparents owed their livelihoods to Tammany Hall) and because the known alternatives are so much worse. Perhaps the concept is due for revival, as the retro vintage artisanal alternative to the kleptocrats of our Second Gilded Age? Are we sophisticated enough, technologically or socially, to harness the machines’ benefits without the corruption for which they were infamous?
Kevin Baker, in TNR — “Political machines were corrupt to the core–but they were also incredibly effective. If Democrats want to survive in the modern age, they need to take a page from their past”:
… How is it possible for Democrats—seemingly the natural “majority party,” on the right side of every significant demographic trend—to suffer such catastrophic losses? Explanations abound, most of which revolve around the money advantage Republicans derived from the Citizens United decision. Or the hoary, self-congratulatory fable of how Democrats martyred themselves to goodness, forsaking the white working class forever because it passed the landmark civil rights bills of 1964 and 1965. Or how the party must move to the left, or the right, or someplace closer to the center—Peoria, maybe, or Pasadena.
But there’s a more likely explanation for these Democratic disasters. While 61.6 percent of all eligible voters went to the polls in the historic presidential year of 2008, only 40.9 percent bothered to get there in 2010, and just 36.4 percent showed up in 2014, the worst midterm showing since 1942. What the Democrats are missing is not substance, but a system to enact and enforce that substance: a professional, efficient political organization consistently capable of turning out the vote, every year, in every precinct.
What they lack is a machine.
New York’s Tammany Hall, the first, mightiest, and most feared of the political machines, went online on May 12, 1789—less than two weeks after George Washington took the oath as president in the same city…. [T]he man who turned Tammany into a full-fledged political machine never actually joined the society: that murky intriguer, Aaron Burr. By 1799, Alexander Hamilton and his Federalists held a virtual monopoly on banking in New York, frustrating smaller businessmen who wanted to start their own banks and “tontines”—investment companies that would not only make them money, but also get around property requirements that kept even most white men from qualifying for the franchise. Burr marched a bill through the state legislature that created the Manhattan Company, which promised to slake the island’s thirst for a dependable water supply. But Burr slipped a provision into the bill that allowed the company to invest any excess funds however it desired—which was the legislation’s main purpose all along.
The upshot was that the Manhattan Company laid down a lot of water pipes that were little more than hollowed-out logs. They leaked badly and absorbed sewage, thus contributing to the city’s constant, deadly epidemics of cholera and yellow fever. But Burr’s company used the money it made from the scheme to found the Manhattan Bank (later to become Chase Manhattan, later to become JPMorgan Chase). The Hamilton banking monopoly was thus broken, and new banks and tontines proliferated, allowing financial speculation to run wild, and untold numbers of middle and working-class New Yorkers to gain the franchise for the first time. In this one coup, Burr established the defining characteristics of political machines for all the years to come: They would be first and foremost about making money, no matter the cost to the general good; they would supply significant public works, no matter how shabbily or corruptly; and they would expand the boundaries of American democracy in the face of all attempts by conservatives or reformers to contain it…
… Republicans have always been, for better and for worse, the truly radical party in this country, from the abolitionists and Lincoln’s “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men” platform, to Progressivism and Teddy Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism,” to the right-wing conservatism of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, to the Ayn Rand utopianism of Paul Ryan. By contrast, machines made Democrats—again, for better and for worse—the party of compromise and inclusion…
***********
By the 1960s, even the mightiest machines were grinding to a halt. The Tammany tiger finally ran out of lives in 1961, put down for good by a coalition of Greenwich Village rebels, whose ranks included Eleanor Roosevelt, Jane Jacobs, and Ed Koch. Even Daley’s notorious Chicago organization, the last one standing, was no longer a machine in the old sense, surviving only on a combination of ruthless efficiency and ethnic resentment. The turmoil at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago completely unhinged Daley, who was caught by the cameras screaming “you fucking kike!” at Senator Abe Ribicoff on the convention floor, a previously unimaginable violation of machine etiquette.Its death, however, did not stop politicians from continuing to rage against the machine. The silliest example of all is the fervent Republican contention that Barack Obama brought “Chicago politics” into the White House, as if the president learned his trade at Dick Daley’s knee. What they really mean by “the machine” is whatever clique of state legislators or local pols have figured out some new means of boodling public funds or soliciting bribes. But that’s simple theft. Today our politicians don’t steal because the machine helps them, but because we have ceded them the entire political system—as reflected in our miserable voter turnouts.
So the machines died, their demise hastened by the sweeping social revolutions of the 1960s and ’70s, which made them look reactionary and ludicrous—pudgy gray men in gray suits and hats, holding back the future. Good riddance. But what was to replace them? For a short time, it was constituent groups: disparate organizations fighting for civil rights and liberties, environmental causes, the poor and the dispossessed, community empowerment, and above all labor, which provided the bulk of the party’s funding and its ground troops. But this new arrangement soon began to unravel as well. As Thomas Frank points out, “Big Labor” was viewed as suspiciously by the Democratic left as the machines were, scourged for its cultural conservatism and support for the Vietnam War, caricatured as hopelessly mobbed-up and resistant to progress…
With the traditional pillars of their party crumbling, the Democrats turned to that balm for all political wounds in America: big money. In the process, they further abandoned their traditional populism, as well as their appeals to working people—appeals that, however imperfectly, stretched all the way back to the start of the machines. And those few leaders in the party who weren’t pandering to corporate and financial interests began to think in idealistic terms that have nothing to do with “practical politics,” habits that prevail to this day. For many years now, liberal/left campaigns have rarely revolved around specific bills or policies, but instead around broader and more abstract demands: climate change, say, or racial equality. The Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements have proven to be balky, fitful vehicles for social change. They lack the ruthless practicality and organization of their right-wing counterparts. Occupy invented the human microphone. The Tea Party took Congress.
Democrats need a Tea Party—less delusional, less hell-bent on destruction—that can do what the machines did…
Baker argues — and I don’t think he’s wrong — that the oligarchs and kleptocrats have bankrolled the Republican “machine” because it’s been a good investment for them. If we’re going to compete with them, Democrats need an equivalent structure that can nuture activists starting at the lowest levels of government (school boards, county commissions). We’ve gotten into the habit of assuming that the “public service” of running for office will mostly be funded by the would-be office holders, which — barring corruption, or outside financial support — means relying on the independently wealthy or the voluntarily penurious. And while we have sometimes been extraordinarily lucky (as when a patrician like FDR or a once-in-a-generation leader like Barack Obama decides to compete) it’s demonstrably not working as a process to keep this messy nation on an even keel.
Old Broad in California
I grew up in Brooklyn, and I remember my dad explaining to me how things worked. A guy named Meade Esposito was the “Democratic boss of Brooklyn”. My dad said that approvingly. The big Democratic machine got things done- got streets repaired, got jobs for people.
There’s a lot of truth in that article.
CarolDuhart2
@Old Broad in California: Maybe some dues-paying component where being an official Dem brings some benefits, like discounts or even a few prizes? Small, but might be one way to go.
one_particular_harbour, fka Botsplainer
That’s a lot of words and a lot of analysis to state a simple point – machines deliver. They’re messy and not a little sordid, the participants not real attractive and kind of dumb in microcosm, but smart in the aggregate as a resource allocator. The fundamental concept is that everybody gets a taste. With the goo-goos on the left and the asshole shitheel dickface cocksucker conservatives, there is nothing approaching an equitable allocation of resources or largesse and everything flows toward existing power and money.
Miss Bianca
After everything I’ve seen this election cycle – Sanders, the Sandernistas, Jill Stein, Cornell West, Trump and the rest of the GOP’s Stalag 17 kommandants – I say, “HELL YES. BRING ON THE MACHINE. LET’S GET.SOME SHIT.DONE”.
Yeah, purity ponies. That thing about being a party political hack? I aspire.
geg6
I’m old enough to remember how the machine worked around here and it’s demise turned this county from solid Dem to Tea Party heaven. Loss of union strength and solidarity, especially during the demise of the massive local steel industry, was enough to kill the machine here, and that’s before we even discuss the fissures that were already there from race and the Vietnam War. Young people fled the area and there was no structure left to create any opportunity to keep them here. When the long time local Democratic congressman, Gene Atkinson, changed parties from Dem to GOP during the Reagan years, the remaining Dems in leadership here were (and still are) weak and centrist cowards. The local GOP just engineered a complete takeover of the county government, which is now acting like all GOP-led governments do, slashing services, cutting jobs, starving the programs that are left and the citizens are shocked and saddened but well…OMG, THE BROWN PEOPLE ARE COMING TO KILL US ALL!!!11!!!
Keith P.
So the Democrats need…this?
one_particular_harbour, fka Botsplainer
That’s a lot of words and a lot of analysis to state a simple point – machines deliver. They’re messy and not a little sordid, the participants not real attractive and kind of dumb in microcosm, but smart in the aggregate as a resource allocator. The fundamental concept is that everybody gets a taste. With the goo-goos on the left and the asshole shitheel dickface cocksucker conservatives, there is nothing approaching an equitable allocation of resources or largesse and everything flows toward existing power and money.
Aaron Morrow
I like to say we could use a DNC at least every two years to get out the vote, but yeah, a machine is necessary to keep people involved in Congressional, state, and local politics by doing stuff like conventions to remind people they need to vote.
Miss Bianca
@Keith P.: Works for me! : )
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
I haven’t read the original article – maybe he addresses the following:
This seems too simplistic to me.
It’s not just money and the lack of a machine, it’s also “true believers” who use their claimed religion to restrict the political power of their opposition. Look at the voting rights restrictions. Look at the lawsuits and impeachments and so forth (too often on trumped-up charges) against their opponents. Look at the out-of-cycle redistricting. Look at the reactionary court decisions that have rolled-back progress. Look at the destruction of the commonweal during the great recession (gutting public services, unemployment benefits, and the like rather than increased counter-cyclical spending). Look at the privatization of policing, incarceration, defense, and public schools.
Yeah, the Democrats need a mechanism to drive participation in off-year federal elections (and out-of-cycle state and local elections like those in Virginia and many other places). But much, much more is going on than the lack of a “machine” or lack of money on the Democrats’s side.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Steve Crickmore
“The Tweed ring at its height was an engineering marvel, strong and solid, strategically deployed to control key power points: the courts, the legislature, the treasury and the ballot box. Its frauds had a grandeur of scale and an elegance of structure: money-laundering, profit sharing and organization” By all means, this is what the country needs. Domesticate the Clinton Foundation..
JimL
The machine delivers a Christmas turkey to the homes of the reliable voters. Reformers deliver a pamphlet on why everyone deserves a turkey.
Politics is a fight in a dark alley over possession of the one knife that slices the pie.
No wonder Republicans hate class warfare. They much prefer class suicide. But if they can’t get that, they’ll perform class murder, if they can do it in the dark and from the back.
CarolDuhart2
I remember that in the 1980’s the DNC had mid-term conventions to discuss policy or whatever. I think they ended because some people felt they elevated Jesse Jackson too much or the crazies or something. But on the lower levels, something like that might work to at least keep activists and interested liberals and Dems in touch.
Humdog
Feels like this is saying that political power depends on some group using it to enrich themselves first. Republicans have power because wealthy interests invest in politics to increase their wealth. Democrats can have power if they use politics to enrich their supporters. Dueling grafters is the answer? Our shadowy mob is better than their shadowy mob? Does not feel like moving forward, just switching beneficiaries.
CONGRATULATIONS!
Republicans have a machine. You can find it in almost any church in America, open for business on Sundays.
Agree we need one. Also we need a quick return of earmarks. Without them, all you get is idealogues in office.
Mike J
@Miss Bianca: Have you seen the statement put out by the CPUSA?
This November we’re going into the polls like this.
Emma
@Steve Crickmore: From Charitywatch: The Clinton Foundation has an A rating. It spends 88% of its funds in programs and only 12% in overhead. What’s the problem with that?
catclub
Thanks for pointing out that great read.
I just got pointed to an article in Foreign Policy on ‘There at the creation” (of ISIS)
which looked interesting. But I am a cheapskate and it seems to require money. Anyone know how to access that article?
kindness
Go ahead and call me naive. I think there isn’t anything wrong with partnering with those that have money so long as everyone understands that things will go down fairly. Granted that is in the eye of the beholder, but I think it can happen and does. There are relatively/somewhat progressive companies out there. Certainly fight the fascists but let’s not call them all fascists.
Baud
Hmmm. At the national level, the Dems were dominant only in the antebellum era and in the post-FDR era. I think of the heydey of machine politics as occurring around the turn of the century.
That said, we do need intermediate organizing institutions. Not only have have machine organizations withered, so have unions and white churches.
Baud
@CarolDuhart2: I had this idea as well, after I learned that European parties did this.
Amir Khalid
@Baud:
The Democratic party is ascendant at the national level now. Perhaps what it needs to match that is an effective base of machine politics outside DC, especially in states where it is doesn’t match the Republican party in organisation and the capability to win office..
MattF
Note that there are various institutions where machine politics is actively practiced, although not very competently.
Baud
@Amir Khalid: I’ve heard some good noises from Hillary in that regard. But we’ll have to accept some ideological diversity if we want to be successful. I feel like everyone preaching the 50 state strategy would be the ones to lead the charge to purge the blue dogs.
enplaned
Don’t know if it is legal, but I’d prefer a $500 (indexed to inflation) rebate to every citizen who files a tax return and voted in the most recent Federal election, paid into your bank acct the first week of December.
That would jack voting rates into the 90s and eliminate GOTV as a concern ever again.
Basically like Aussie rules, but with an incentive rather than via punishment.
Doug R
The quid pro quo of machine politics makes me uncomfortable. I prefer the electoral ground game of OFA. We need something like that-something that brings out EVERYONE in every House election. Calling them “midterms” doesn’t help either.
Lizzy L
@Emma: Thanks for this. I just posted it on my FB page, hoping to reach friends who are sure that there is something hinky about The Clinton Foundation, even though they can’t give any reason why this should be so. The past 25 years of CDS have infected even otherwise sane people.
one_particular_harbour, fka Botsplainer
@Baud:
Ah, the Hamsher purity pony blue dog purges of 2010 mostly consisting of sniping from the left. Heady stuff, that was.
It’s what compels me to kick hippies in the face as often as I can.
Baud
@Lizzy L:
Maybe it instead revealed less than sane people for what they are.
Baud
@one_particular_harbour, fka Botsplainer: It’s the reason I’m here instead of still at dailykos.
Baud
Don’t know why but I find TV ads featuring fake focus groups annoying.
one_particular_harbour, fka Botsplainer
I am gonna sum up this great article by saying that machines deliver goods and services in a more equitable manner.
Googoos on the left, as someone stated above, only deliver a pamphlet stating what you should be entitled to. Shitface motherfucking cocksucker soulless conservative fucktards deliver nothing as a matter of ideology, and are fine with a broader populace living in abject misery in service of a filthy ideology and a theology of mewling apologies for the rape and plunder by those at the top, allowing only the succor of a pathetic shitstain of a deity for comfort.
Neither those goo goos on the left nor the fuckstains on the right deliver – that’s up to the machines.
MattF
There’s a few problems with machine politics. One is the see-no-evil attitude towards theft, thuggery and mediocrity. Seeing machine politicians go to prison every now and then isn’t merely bad publicity– there’s a problem there.
Another is that ideologically, political machines are very much status quo parties. If you’re in a disadvantaged group, the machine isn’t going to help you change things.
The basic machine ideology is that it’s really all about m-o-n-e-y.
Emma
@Lizzy L: What drives me nuts is the “OHMYGAWD someone from the Clinton Foundation called the State Department and suggested someone for a job.” It’s like they’ve never heard of the concept of networking. When I was running a major department in a large academic library it wasn’t all that unusual to get a call from a colleague in another state asking me about possible job openings and giving me the name of a recent graduate, friend, family, or co-worker, that would be looking for a job in my area. I met these people in conferences, in working on joint projects, all sorts of ways. And yes, once I hired someone; he was the best applicant for the job. But if the name is Clinton, it’s a crime.
Pogonip
@enplaned: Vote for Baud. He only pays $250, but it’s in cash.
one_particular_harbour, fka Botsplainer
@MattF:
Ain’t nothing that screams “mediocrity” like hiring twenty-something Liberty U and Regents grads to restart the Iraqi economy or serve in sensitive spots in the DOJ.
Give me a blue collar deal maker any day to actually get things done. It may not be pretty, and he might use coarse language, drink too much, gamble, whore around and refrain from bleating about Jesus in every third sentence, but he’ll get holes dug, abutments set and asphalt laid.
MattF
@one_particular_harbour, fka Botsplainer: If you’re lucky. If not, it’ll all be crap and will have to be done over. And the comparison with right-wing idiocy is a strawman.
Pogonip
I have mosquito bites. These are not acting like normal mosquito bites. They have itched and been red for a solid week and swelled up much more than usual. Could they be the bites of the new improved Zika-carrying mosquitoes?
I know they aren’t flea bites, before you ask–no burning, no tingling, and the itching is relatively mild, not the cut-your-arm-off-to-make-it-stop itching of flea bites. I am wondering if I should report to the health dept? I don’t want to look silly–I save that for the Internet, in hopes of passing unnoticed, a drop in the vasty deep of silliness that is the Intertubes–but I don’t want to let a true threat go unreported. So, when in doubt, ask Balloon Juice. Anyone here know anything about mosquitoes?
one_particular_harbour, fka Botsplainer
@MattF:
Not really. Googoos and right wingers both wind up in the same spot – ALL societal goods and services wind up in the hands of money and power. In contrast, the machine loses its effectiveness when it doesn’t strive for a more equitable distribution or fucks up massively, so they’re motivated.
To the RWNJ, the ideology is that you’re entitled to nothing, so failure of delivery doesn’t matter. To the googoo, they’d rather bitch about an inability to deliver rather than compromise, so nothing gets delivered.
one_particular_harbour, fka Botsplainer
@Pogonip:
There’s a product I get in the Caribbean that may be available online – it’s a combo of baking soda and ammonia, knocks the shit out of persistent itches from routine bug bites by bringing the pH toward base at the site.
Glidwrith
@Baud: Unions have withered both because of Rethugs working to destroy them and whites refusing to share the goodies with minorities or women. White churches have withered by becoming grifting cults of personality or refusing to enlarge their dogma to recognize all the faces of humanity. Obviously there are exceptions, but the larger organizations are seriously compromised.
I do not know the answer on how to replace the holes but I think we shouldn’t start over with every election cycle. Why doesn’t the Party pay someone to keep and curate voter lists? One of the commenters here generated a list of every single local event to meet voters. Why is this not already standard procedure?
sigaba
@enplaned: How about we just start simple and make Election Day a national holiday?
Fair Economist
I really think a part of this is the ENDLESS river of emails I got from almost every Democratic organization saying “WE’RE DOOMED” and “DISASTER” and “REPUBLICANS ASCENDANT”. Sometimes I got so many it significantly clogged up my email list. If your putative allies send hundreds of messages saying it’s useless and there’s no hope, you’re not going to get very excited about voting.
BruceFromOhio
A splendid read, thank you for sharing this.
Glidwrith
@Pogonip: Go to the doc if you can and see what they say.
MattF
@one_particular_harbour, fka Botsplainer: I just don’t see why one has to admire the most dysfunctional ways of doing things.
FWIW, I live in the googoo capital of the known universe (Bethesda, MD)– and I don’t harbor illusions about it. The basic lesson here is that everything takes significantly longer and costs significantly more than you expected– and then doesn’t work as well as you’d hoped– but it’s a way of doing things that’s less bad than the alternatives. And no one goes to prison.
Adam L Silverman
@Pogonip:
http://www.cdc.gov/zika/about/index.html
J R in WV
@Pogonip:
Where are you? Because that’s a key to whether you were bitten by mosquitoes of a species that MAY carry the zika virus. Further, I’m pretty sure itching isn’t a symptom of zika. Mild flu like symptoms is what I’ve read.
Baud
@Pogonip: Take care of yourself. IF you do go to the doctor, have you tried benadryl in case it’s an allergic reaction?
Baud
@Fair Economist: They are annoying, but I doubt they are the cause of low turnout.
Baud
@Glidwrith: I don’t know how easy a task that is, but I doubt it’s a one person job.
one_particular_harbour, fka Botsplainer
@Glidwrith:
The LD captains used to do this routinely. They knew their party voters and actually sent out runners in my old city precinct when I was a kid – both parties.
wmd
It will be interesting to see how the ramp up of Our Revolution and Brand New Congress succeeds or fails. There were over 10 million people that are sympathetic that actually went to the polls for a Democratic primary that was supposed to be a cakewalk. 1% (ha – that’s ironic) would make 100,000 people working towards the same goals that energized them for a primary.
For even more irony, 0.01% is still a large organization that has power at the margins to get out or suppress the vote for specific candidates. A machine if you will, that is anti corruption, with strong fundraising and GoTV skills. I’d say successful if the 2 named organizations boast 50,000 people actively working at this time next year. It’s actually probably less than that.
Brachiator
No.
SATSQ
Prescott Cactus
R.J. Daley’s old machine employed 6 guys for each garbage truck. Two for the left side of the alley, two for the right, a foreman to overview and get little things and the driver.
The City that worked.
Mike E
@Pogonip: no see ums…bedbugs?
? Martin
In case people wonder why some of us continue to be amazed by SpaceX first stage landings. They’re taking a 15 story building traveling at Mach 10, turning it around and landing it in a specific, sometimes slightly moving/bobbing place with no human intervention, and they’re doing it reliably.
It is a piece of the story of the next few decades where we will see some really fundamental positive changes to how the world works.
Tripod
Things change. Maybe progressives should engage Democratic voters through the political, social and economic strata that exist today, rather than pining for the good old days.
Woodrowfan
Tammy won support because they delivered services, effectively. And both parties had machines. Philly was run by the republicans (who made Tammany under Tweed look like pikers when it came to stealing from the public purse) and Cincy by Boss Cox. (also a republican). They also produced good, and effective, and even (sometimes) honest pols. Yeah Tammany produced Tweed, but they also made Al Smith. The Kansas City machine turned out Harry Truman. We need organizations again. You want the greens to have a voice in the party? Then we need an organization that they can go to and say “we control X number of votes.” The Party Bosses then ask “OK, what do you want?” the hurdle is getting the Machine without all the boodle. Not an easy task. But right now we got the pols cashing in and we the people are not getting anything for it.
Brachiator
@Emma:
Thank you for this. The big lie going around on some of the media in Los Angeles is that huge amounts have gone for salaries and administration, and nothing to programs.
one_particular_harbour, fka Botsplainer
@MattF:
You have the luxury to live in a googoo city in a state that actually delivers. I live in a festering red pustule of an exurb outside my working machine city that supports the entirety of the economy of this very red state – there is a constant war by the conservatives against the very machine that makes it possible for them to operate.
I don’t have your luxury of googoo morality.
Suzanne
I wholeheartedly support this. I live in a red state, and I was just filling out my primary ballot yesterday, and I noticed that the Dems couldn’t even find enough candidates to run for each position. We need much more organization and unity and strong-arming, if need be.
frosty
@one_particular_harbour, fka Botsplainer: Wow, awesome rant! A+++!!!11!!. Now I need a cigarette.
frosty
@MattF:
I worked for Arlington County for awhile and I was sure it was the capital. They even had a name for how they did business: “The Arlington Way”. Just like you described, but maybe with even more outreach to stakeholders and residents.
Davis X. Machina
There’s a goodly slice of the left — big L and small l — that believes, for various reasons, that the way to fix politics is:
a.) get the parties out of politics
b) get the politicians out of politics
c.) get the politics out of politics
This more or less guarantees you vanity/celebrity campaigns that disappear for three years out of every four.
d. [special for Maine]) Vote for Elliot Cutler.
gene108
The modern Republican “machine” started in the late 1970’s, when the Fundies started to organize and Reagan gave them a seat at the Republican table.
The Funsies were able to organize because every fucking Sunday, the Fundie foot soldiers would be in church and if the Movement got church leaders to agree to their agenda, you the have the ability of a few dozen church leaders to influence the thoughts of thousands of congregations.
I have no idea, what sort of unifying activity exists on the Left or in Democratic circles, where you can get enough people in one place to actually get them organized.
Brachiator
@Woodrowfan: Democrats love FDR, and yet he fought Tammany and worked to strip it of power over federal patronage.
Cartoonist Thomas Nast depicted Tammany as a ferocious tiger killing democracy.
Conservatives are yearning for a tyrant in Trump. And now some here are apparently yearning for the fetid oligarchy of the Machine. Because things will get done.
Democracy is tough to make work. On the other side,deals with the devil always look good at first, but quickly turn against you.
Feathers
The companion to the article must be the greatest film about machine politics, which happens to be a Preston Sturges comedy – The Great McGinty. It’s about a down on his luck man who impresses the party bosses with his enthusiastic multiple trips to the polls on election day, who eventually makes it all the way to the governor’s mansion, with the party even providing him a wife. It shows up frequently on TCM. Screamingly funny.
The film actually shows how the “rigged elections” the right are always screaming about were run. The issue was that they were an inside job. You have to have bad names on the list and give those names to the multi-voters. Really not an issue today with electronic databases of everything which can be crosschecked. I always quote this line when people start getting all purity pony:
One of the real issues that the article brings up is that there aren’t jobs for election running people in between elections, which is why they run around creating havoc all over the world. Which in turn means that only nasty characters are able to keep up a political career, especially on the left. It doesn’t bring up the Hatch Act, which prevents election workers from taking government jobs on the off cycle. One problem is that newspapers and the media (and most of the commenters above) are only looking out for the corruption we know about, not the new style that has grown on the right. Christ, do you think anybody asked if somebody knew about possible jobs for those Bob Jones U kids? Hell, no. Somebody was told who to hire. But IOKIYAR, so Clinton foundation to State Dept. phone calls that are made in every corporation every day are the real scandal.
The new machine can’t look like the old machine. I don’t have a problem with the Blue Dog purge, because now there is room to regrow with a fully progressive, pro-women’s health care, anti-racist cadre of political workers. The fight for a living wage is also a fight for low wage workers to have the ability to become more politically active.
mike in dc
If we can nudge midterm turnout into the low to mid 40s, we can start winning midterms. Even a 2 point bump would probably help protect holding a majority.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Mike J: Thanks for the pointer. It’s kinda funny when the CPUSA is more rational and sensible than the supposedly more “mainstream” Greens.
Those are some happy pooches, also too! :-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Tripod
@Davis X. Machina:
Goo-gooism has always had a nasty strain of racism and classism. Can’t let THOSE people run their own affairs.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Baud: The Chevy ads? I find them terribly distracting because they don’t have the same 4-5 people throughout the ad (e.g. the woman all in black at the start is gone after a few seconds (or changes outfits).
“Continuity – how does that work?”
Cheers,
Scott.
D58826
@Emma: The WORD Clinton
Brachiator
@enplaned:
Well, Australians at least have their “sausage sizzles,” barbecues at various polling stations. We should give this a try, along with making election day a holiday.
MomSense
@Baud:
I also find it interesting how the DCCC and DSCC roles in the 50 state strategy are ignored even though they were far more important than the DNC. Rahm may be an ass but he did a good job recruiting and funding candidates who won their house seats in 2006 and in a midterm no less. Of course that meant a lot of blue dogs but I’ll take a blue dog any day over a Republican.
The bottom line is that if you want more progressive elected officials you have to vote in every election. Our representatives will not go out on a limb if they can’t count on their voters to have their back in the next election. There is power in being a reliable voting bloc.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Emma: It has Clinton in it’s name, CDS is a tough habit to kick.
Baud
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: Yes! They aren’t the only ones who use that style though.
Tripod
One of the things that came out of the DNC Sanders kerfluffle is that because of Citizens United, no one gives shit about the party institutions.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Fair Economist: What are you doing in my InBox!!11
It seems to mostly be the DCCC in my case. I think the others that I get have gradually learned that doom-and-gloom doesn’t work on me.
Cheers,
Scott.
bluefish
In full agreement with your evaluation, AL. Biden for Party Boss.
gene108
@Amir Khalid:
Sometime in the 1990’s Democrats started losing control in the South. From what I read Republicans were ruthless, when they took power.
In the “old days”, a business that wanted to lobby maybe gave 60% to the party in power and 40% to the party out of power to cover their bases,
The Republicans basically said, if you give any money to the Democrats, we’ll screw you over.
Plus Bush & Co unleashed US Attorney’s, at the DoJ, to hound state level Democrats to further Republican control.
I’m not sure how to rebuild state Democratic parties. Money would help, but a message and messenger Democrats across the country can rally behind would be a bigger boost.
Democrats survived the 1980’s by disowning the national party.
Bill Clinton shoulda, woulda, coulda united the Democrats – he was charismatic enough, had a good life story and could connect with people – which is why Republicans went after him with hammer and tongs and mired him in “scandals”.
Their recent ascendency was based entirely on people distrusting government and here comes this young hotshot out of Arkansas looking to restore people’s faith in government working for them. By the end of his second term, Bill became toxic in the South. Southern politicians had to invent ways to distance themselves from him.
They did the same thing with Obama. Where Obama is popular, he is very popular. Where he is unpopular, he is very unpopular and not an asset for local politicians.
But I see one thing changing. The Democratic Party seems to be unifying on a message. They are the Party of gay-rights, inclusion, and trying to lift all boats.
I do not see politicians and running away from this like they did in the past. There’s a lot less doubt on where Democrats stand on issues than at any point that I can remember.
Now they just need a universally loved messenger to rally everyone else up.
Villago Delenda Est
@Fair Economist: THIS. I am SO fucking tired of “The sky is falling!” begging emails from Democrats. “Barack emailed you.” “Joe emailed you.” “Michelle emailed you.” “Socks the cat emailed you.” It never fucking ends.
Baud
@gene108: Here I am!
Ultraviolet Thunder
Deb Stabenow was my county commissioner and I met her in 1975 when I was in high school. 25 years later she became my Senator. I don’t think our machine works that well recently.
Brachiator
@Fair Economist:
There was a PEW research study in 2014 noting that midterm voter turnout has been lower than presidential voting since the 1840s. Voting has been below 50 percent in midterms since 1910.
This is a hard tendency to overcome.
one_particular_harbour, fka Botsplainer
@Tripod:
Whenever I think about googoos, I think about the bullshit painting by Norman Rockwell of the earnest white guy standing up and talking at the town meeting of white guys, all sitting in rapt attention of whatever horseshit he’s spewing.
Given the timeframe, he’s probably talking Cleon Skousen…
Ruckus
Machine politics worked because for the most part the people in charge understood that to get something you had to give something. Conservatives only understand that to get what they want they have to take everything. There is a difference. It’s not that the machine was good, only better than the overall system we have now. The machine ended because it was also corrupt, messy and not actually representative of the people. Conservative politics is representative of a part of the population, at a huge cost to the majority.
We need organization that works for us, not for the machine and not for just a minority whose ideals are that everyone else must suffer. This is what President Obama showed with his organization that he built to win and the way he was trying to govern. It may not have gone far enough for many of us but in the face of much opposition, it worked.
Edit for clarity.
Fair Economist
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
I agree, they’ve gotten better this cycle. None of them work on me, because I donate based on what I see on blogs or my own research (except one “dinner with Hillary” lottery), so it’s not just responding to your donation choices. Hopefully they’re learning that doom-and-gloom is just a bad strategy, period.
MattF
@Villago Delenda Est: Just unsubscribe.
Fair Economist
@Villago Delenda Est:
THIS to you to.
Really, I’d respond much better to “our hardworking volunteers deserve donuts” than to stuff like that. Or “Help me raise the minimum wage” from a Congressional candidate.
Ruckus
@MattF:
Everything is about the money. EVERYTHING. Always was, is and will be. Money is what makes it work. Fairness is what makes it work better. Machine politics was about making it fair enough that a lot of the money could be stolen, but not all of it. Conservative politics is about – all the money can be stolen, as long as the loudest fringe gets to think it has it’s way.
OK now that that is out of the way, making it work is about a bit of equality of the money, not some with and everyone else without. It’s a society, not a gated community. That requires that we spread it around, not hoard it. And yes that sounds like Sanders premise that it’s all about the money. It’s about fairness with the money and fairness about everyone. That second part, that’s the one he left out.
Anne Laurie
@Fair Economist: Well, the research says that the doom-and-gloom emails work best when it comes to raising money — even if, as you say, they depress people into not voting. Thus, the need to fund electioneering by some method other than begging the already politically committed in a never-ending cycle.
We understand that the Repubs had their own agenda for destroying the FEC and public media. But “we” haven’t made the connection that they also fought very hard to destroy those evil, corrupt machines (that gave civil service jobs with pensions to Those People, right up through the last generation of African American city workers in big cities like NY, Baltimore & Chicago) so the oligarchs and fundamentalists could steal metropolitan & state resources unimpeded. Amateurs are great for specific projects, but for the long term you need professional political workers!
Brachiator
@Anne Laurie:
If they suppress voting, then it ain’t working. Isn’t the end goal to get people out to vote, not just to fill the campaign coffers?
“We lost, but at least we got money” is not a worthy goal to shoot for.
Ruckus
@Villago Delenda Est:
I replied back to the OMG emails that I didn’t plan to support this type of fear generation. I didn’t say it as clearly and I used a few swear words but they have stopped sending me the guilt generators. I still get a lot of emails from several democratic sources but not the OMG you must give $1 or $5 NOW or the world will end as you know it.
It’s bad when our side thinks it has to adopt the stupid, hoping it will work because it does with the rabid right.
Brachiator
@Fair Economist:
You raise a good point. Even though the research supposedly shows that hard hitting mailers are more successful, maybe there is value in a less optimal approach that eased up on the doom and gloom.
Would you really respond positively to a mailer that showed smiling volunteers, thanked you for past contributions, and then asked you for donut money?
one_particular_harbour, fka Botsplainer
@Anne Laurie:
“Those People” have clearly been paid a lot of the resources that could otherwise be diverted to the exclusive use (or might come from taxes paid) of Hard-Working White People who happen to already have inherited great wealth and connections.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
Probably depends on your position to start with. But I do agree with you that to make things work you have to win.
Cheryl from Maryland
@frosty: Rocket City, MD here. You both have obviously never dealt with the People’s Republic of Takoma Park. That being said, I’m proud and happy to live in MD.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
I respond much better to mailers or email that explain what the candidate or group is about and what they have done in the past and intend to try to do in the future rather than trying to guilt me into giving them my hard earned money for something to be determined at a later date. But then I have an attention span that is slightly longer than a gnat’s and can actually understand some things, most of the time.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
So far, those have been the messages that I personally respond to. I never respond to the doom-and-gloom ones, only the optimistic ones.
ETA: And by “respond,” I mean “send money.”
MattF
@Cheryl from Maryland: Ha. So, how does it happen that all the at-large County Council members come from Takoma Park? Are people just larger there?
gene108
From the OP.
Democrats are not struggling to win in urban areas. Democrats are crushing Republicans in urban areas.
The Democrats do not need Tammany Hall to deliver them Manhattan.
Also, the old Democratic urban machines welcomed / used immigrants:
The Democrats are becoming the Party immigrants want to vote for now, thanks in large part to Republicans embracing xenophobia.
Plus given how brutally complex, long and hard it is to get a Green Card these days, if the rules applied back then all the Irish trying to flee the potato famine would have starved to death waiting to get visas to come here; sort of like Syrian refugees stuck in camps or Afghani or Iraqi translators, being promised visas because of fear of reprisal, but are still waiting because of red-tape.
What Democrats need is not a renewed urban political machine, but a rural and suburban political machine and such a thing has not existed.
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
@Mnemosyne:
Makes sense. Sometimes the conventional wisdom that “hard hitting” works best for many misses the point that it may actually be repellent to an important core of other potential donors.
It’s a myopic “if this one thing works, we don’t need to do anything else” view that I see often in marketing.
Villago Delenda Est
@MattF: You can unsubscribe many times. Unfortunately, the ones I do want to get (my senators, my congressman) share back with the other guys and you wind up on them as well. Why should someone in Oregon get Elizabeth Warren or Al Franken emails? I unsubscribe to those, and explain, politely, that yes, I wish all the best to (fill in Dem’s name here) and would vote for them IF I LIVED IN THEIR DISTRICT!
I do understand that they try to get people from outside the district with unused cash to send them some, but I have very little in the way of unused cash (I give a buck a month to the DCCC, for example) but I’ve volunteered and I also vote in every single election. Have since my 18th birthday (Jimmy Carter, BTW). Even when I was stationed overseas in exotic foreign lands.
Major Major Major Major
@gene108: Not every urban area.
And let’s not forget that running up the score with increased turnout in statewide races still counts.
Aleta
@Davis X. Machina:
For once was not enough.
MattF
@Villago Delenda Est: I can see that once you get on enough donor lists– and then the lists all interact and trade names with one another– it’s like getting on an infinite number of lists. Haven’t gotten to that point myself, fortunately.
MattF
An interesting little Kevin Drum post about liberals vs. conservatives. So seriously, what is the difference between Pro-Trump and Anti-Trump conservatives, anyhow?
Rugosa
@one_particular_harbour, fka Botsplainer: In Rockwell’s defense, the picture, one of the Four Freedoms, shows a working man – plaid shirt, leather jacket, gnarled hands – surrounded by men in suits and ties. He’s looking up and speaking fearlessly as they watch. That is Freedom of Speech.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
People with limited project time, limited skills in the art and limited money frequently make the easy choice rather than take the more unsure road. But it’s why many marketing campaigns fail to get the volume they may deserve. Notice I didn’t say lazy. I worked for a subsidiary of a non profit for a few years and we had to attend meetings about mass mailings and how to do them, even though we didn’t do any, we had a rather fixed client list, which the parent didn’t. The were uniformly bad. The ideas they expressed were decades old and worked only on a very narrow group of possible clients. Not one of us got a positive view of the presenting companies or the director of the division or wondered why most of the primaries clients fit into a certain grouping, which made up a small portion of the total potential clients.
IOW it was all crap, repeated over and over and got results. Ineffective results as was shown later when the director left and some one not nearly so out of touch took over. This person wanted better results, the director who got crappy results didn’t want to risk getting a lot more clients if there was any chance that changing might result in the loss of even one of the small group. Loyalty was better than numbers. But numbers is what wins.
gene108
@Major Major Major Major:
I think most on the east and west coasts are. I guess Texas probably has some Republican big cities, like Dallas maybe. Maybe some Midwestern states too.
Getting voter turnout up is a good overall goal. It may help some statewide races.
But if Democrats are going to bounce back at the state and local levels, Democrats need to be able to win the suburbs and rural areas, which never had the equivalent of an urban political machine.
Omnes Omnibus
Sorry, the political machines were corrupt. I may be biased since I come from the upper Midwest, but I associate goo-goos with people like Milwaukee’s Sewer Socialists – people who prioritized honesty and getting things done over ideology and/or profit. I’d take them over machine politicians any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
Frank Wilhoit
It is not “corrupt versus not-corrupt”, although Something knows that even that would be intractable enough.
It is Old Corruption versus New Corruption, or materialistic corruption versus ideological corruption.
Formerly loyalty was bought with tangibles; today it is bought with intangibles. Material rewards cannot displace emotional rewards, even among populations in material want. This is the political analogue of Gresham’s Law. Once the currency has been debased, it canot be incrementally restored; there has to be a clean break and a fresh start.
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
Some great examples. I am going to clip this and keep it in a little file I have on stupid marketing and business decisions.
But I also see marketers and strategists taking the conventional choice because it is the safe choice. If they fail, they blame the voters or the consumers.
I see this big time, for example, in movie marketing. There was a California election in which a candidate employed a strategist who insisted that dirty campaigns worked. But some of the stuff that he pulled was so offensive that it made voters had the strategist’s candidate, who didn’t get out of the primary. But this guy continues to get work because he keeps selling the same old soap and insisting that it works, and people keep buying it.
A company I worked for years and years ago had a huge marketing department. They would deliberately skew the questions in an annual customer survey to support decisions that had already been made about new products and changes to existing products.
And then, swear to all the gods of commerce, the bosses would be shocked when customers complained about the changes.
workworkwork
@Prescott Cactus: Yeah, but the garbage got picked up.
And the streets got cleaned.
And when you needed a stop sign on your street where your kids played, you told your ward heeler and it got done.
I can live with some corruption as long as shit gets done.
My problem with current Republican governance is not the corruption but the sheer incompetence.
Matt McIrvin
I guess calling an argument “hoary” is an automatic refutation.
Chris
@Ruckus:
Reposted because this is probably the post I’ve seen that I agree with the most on this topic. I’d certainly agree that the old machines were better than the right wing’s brand of corruption. OTOH, pining for the old machines seems to ignore that machines come with their own in-built problems that did as much to contribute to their downfall as any attacks by ruthless right wingers or negligence by “goo-goo” (did I just learn a new word, or do we just keep inventing terms like this?) lefties. Also that opposition to machines goes back well beyond the modern political scene and that plenty of those opponents were neither one nor the other – as noted above, am I supposed to be appalled that Roosevelt and LaGuardia, the two faces of the New Deal in NY, took on Tammany Hall as well as Wall Street? Was their legacy so much worse than the old machine’s? Eighty years after the event, NYC doesn’t seem to have turned into a right wing wasteland. Certainly by modern standards of what various U.S. states and cities look like, it’s not doing too bad.
Could also be that there’s some fuzziness in what we define as “machines.” What a lot of people here seem to be saying is “I wish we had more strong local and regional party organizations, and people who were willing to play political hardball.” Which is fine, but the old things we call “machines” were about a lot more than that – ballot-stuffing and croynism and blatant corruption that went well beyond quid pro quo politics.
And also, finally, this:
@Baud:
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
Yeah. Electoral machines are all well and good, but one of the things that successful coalitions tend to have is allied institutions in civil society, outside the sphere of governmental politics proper. For the New Deal coalition the biggest one of these was unions, for the Reagan coalition it was right wing churches. Something that’s not part of government or party structures per se, but reaches a ton of people, and plays a huge role in reminding its members to get to the ballot box. It’s that that we need more of today, at least as much as party organizations.
Matt McIrvin
@gene108:
Democrats have that too, but only with African-Americans.
Matt McIrvin
@gene108:
No such person can exist. Any messenger who identifies as a Democrat will be automatically hated by at least 45% of the population.
Chris
Other points of interest –
@Woodrowfan:
Oh yeah. This is something that can’t be said enough when it comes to the golden age of political machines. IOKIYAR was just as much in force in those days and today when discussing those days, which is why Tammany Hall and the Daley machine are infamous to this day, but their Republican equivalents in Philadelphia or upstate New York are virtually unknown.
(And it was heavily racialized in those days as well: Northern Democrats carried a reputation for crime and corruption in part because the stereotypical Dem machine in those days was still urban and heavily reliant on immigrant voters – the Irish at first, Italians and Poles and Greeks and others later on – i.e. Those People. Meanwhile, Republican organizations that behaved the exact same way but were more likely to be rooted in small-town Anglo-Protestant communities got a pass. They were the Right Sort).
@gene108:
Your whole post, but especially this part:
Seems to me like you could make a pretty good case that the Republican Party of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century was, itself, a political machine, a nationwide one rather than city or county level and adapted to a different world. They had their bosses, their quid pro quo alliances with various power centers, certainly the corruption, and even the ethnically defined constituencies (white Christian tribalists rather than immigrant communities), and worked hard to lock up a monopoly or as close to it as they could manage on national-level politics. (Hence the phrase, “Washington DC is wired for Republicans”). There were major differences of course, notably the fact that, as mentioned by someone else, their constituents were less interested in material goods than emotional ones – the good feeling they’d get from watching Those People get screwed.
That machine’s basically been broken since 2008 – first because its latest administration was so staggeringly inept that it couldn’t help but break, then that gave the crazy ideologues in the machine an opening to grab at the power, and then Citizens United happened, which was intended to give the power brokers even more direct control of the machine, but instead only dealt another blow to the unity and party discipline that these kinds of machines need in order to work. So now we’ve got the current shitshow.
BellyCat
@Ruckus: Well said!
Procopius
@Humdog: Just switching beneficiaries. I’d say that’s moving forward, if the new beneficiaries are the poor and unemployed. One of the things the machines used to do was help people find jobs. If there was a big pothole they might get it filled for you. If your landlord wouldn’t fix the steam pipes they might give you blankets, and they might put pressure on him to fix the pipes. Who does that now?
Procopius
@sigaba: Making election day a national holiday wouldn’t help much. We already have lots of jobs where people have to work on national holidays. Election day would just be another obstacle to get around and make people work. They’d probably be cheated out of their overtime pay, too. Ever heard of people who have to work on Thanksgiving Day?
Procopius
@Suzanne:
Well, one of the things Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Steve Israel and Chuck Schumer and Tim Kaine and other “leaders” did was to cut off funding for Democrats candidates in places where the “leaders” thought they didn’t have a sure thing, and so the “leaders” sent the money instead to right-leaning Blue Dogs and New Democrats who didn’t really stand a chance either but were “friends” of the “leaders.”
earl-d
A provocative article with some good observations. But overall I think one that substitutes personal political disappointments for a real understanding of the dynamics at hand. It’s like someone who correctly points out that today’s music industry is in shambles and that only a tiny fraction of people are making a living in the industry compared to 20 years ago. But then states that the reason is because there are no bands that can hold a candle to Iron Maiden and Scorpion.
The music industry is indeed in shambles and the fact that it’s in shamble has negatively impacted its diversity, which is perhaps why there are fewer bands these days that you like. But the later is not the cause of the former. Instead the industry’s inability to adapt to the digital age is the problem.
100 years ago individual candidates were scarcely important in either party. They were selected in back-rooms deals and candidates performance rose and fell in relation to the health of the party. Clinton is a classic party-machine candidate. The fact that Sanders, someone who until recently wasn’t even a member of the party and was baldly antagonistic to it, could give her such a run for her money shows how weak the party is.
The party’s purpose is to maintain ideological coherence and organizational continuity. Clinton was the obvious choice for that, yet the party wasn’t strong enough to impose that decision.
The situation in the Republican party is worse, not better. Romney was the party’s choice from the outset of 2012 and it was only by waging a bitter war of attrition that he finally prevailed. In this cycle Bush was the party’s choice and he barely got out of the starting gate. The party then decided (correctly) that Trump must not, under any condition, be the candidate. And yet he won, decisively.
The reason Republicans win is because the over-all decline in their target demographic, white male, has been off-set by the increase in proportion that older Americans make up the electorate, especially in off-election years.
The reason for the decline of political party strength and coherence probably stems from the roll mass media increasing played in elections starting with radio and extending to TV. I think it’s still unclear what the ultimate impact of the Internet (and especially social media) is on politics, but it’s a safe bet that todays current political situation is a result of that seismic shift.
Chemdad
How did Howard Dean do this? Just a thought.
Sebastain Dangerfield
Having grown up in Chicago during the ’68-and-after Daley years, I find it very difficult to wax nostalgic about the efficiency of machine politics. The Daley machine most definitely did not “work” or “deliver” for, say, African-Americans. Daley’s machine ensured their disenfranchisement, and — in open defiance of federal law — contributed to their concentrated in the the ghettos of the historical “black belt.” Daley’s machine also countenanced immense brutality by mostly white-ethnic Chicago police. Golden years of the Democratic Party? I don’t think so.
And more broadly, anyone who thinks that a kinder, gentler form of machine politics could “deliver” in an equitable manner has not aid careful attention to the history and misses the basic point that a system riven with graft is never going to result in efficient or fair distribution of tax revenue, if only for the simple reason that too many “public servants” are skimming off the top.