Resurrecting the Machine

What can the city teach the state? In the early Twentieth Century, “progressive” reformers killed the political machines in American cities. Machine politics was based on a weak executive. A multitude of single-member wards each elected a councilman / alderman that represented the interests of his ward. Things got done by logrolling the interests of the wards together, and strong (and corrupt) parties were the only way to align all of the disparate actors together to produce a majority. Everybody got his narrow interest taken care of; everybody got his quota of patronage jobs to pass out to stay elected; everybody was taken care of by the party. Only coalition builders could get anything done at all, and the graft kings were coalition builders par excelance. Every ward was individually represented, and every voter was likely to have actually meant his alderman. (It’s worth noting that to this day Chicago persists under a “weak mayor” system. The irony.)

The reformers killed all of this. Their at-large districts and professional officials destroyed patronage and small-scale, and favor-based representation. Of course, they also destroyed the stranglehold that their numerical advantage had given the Irish immigrants on the levers of power. Large-scale representation guaranteed that only elites could be elected to office, as only they had the media and publicity capabilities that you need for a city-wide race. The small-scale immigrant ward boss that took care of his own was a thing of the past. Additionally, as the spoils system was replaced by a professional bureaucracy, the newly-elite officials only interacted with over-educated functionaries and eschewed the citizens of the neighborhoods. Out-of-towners with their fancy degrees, and their privileged masters, obviously knew better than the ignorant masses.

There’s a modern parallel here. What started in cities has reflected through larger scale governments in the last several decades. Federalization (under the neo-European idea of the “national,”) has transformed more and more local positions into the multi-state equivalent of at-large districts, successfully restricting the kind of person able to mount a successful campaign. Also, as the federal level becomes more and more drawn from specialist careerists, ties to individual communities, in lieu of financial loyalty to their nationally-elected masters, have weakened to the point of nonexistent.

Bring back the Machine?