When I see a story like this one in the NYTimes, I particularly regret that DennisG is too busy in the meatspace to explain it for us. All I can summon is Faulkner’s “The past isn’t dead — it isn’t even past”:
Secret Society Dips Toe in City Politics, Prompting Lawsuit
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — The college students began arriving a little before lunch at Calvary Baptist Church, far more than usual for a local election. The poll workers knew immediately: the Machine was here.The school year at the University of Alabama has barely gotten started, and already the campus has found itself in a charged self-examination on issues of politics, power and race, with the exposure of tenacious segregation among fraternities and sororities drawing national attention.
But the turmoil began some weeks earlier. It raised the specter of the Machine, a secret society representing a league of select and almost exclusively white fraternities and sororities, which has been around for a century or more. Once a breeding ground for state political leaders, the Machine (it has long been known by that nickname) today maintains a solid hold on student government through an effective, and critics say coercive, brand of old-fashioned organization politics.
But the Machine’s apparent involvement in an August school board election, a rare appearance in municipal politics, has prompted a lawsuit, accusations of voter fraud and an outcry that in many ways primed the campus for the larger storm over inclusion and tradition that is now taking place….
Accounts of intimidation tactics attributed to the Machine over the decades include cross burnings, threats and boycotts, although students these days speak mostly of social pressure, both implicit and overt and at times intense. Despite changes that the university has made to student government — like expanding polling days and switching to online voting — and despite the fact that Machine-affiliated organizations account for less than one-third of Alabama’s student population, its candidates have continued to win, if not as decisively as in the past…
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