When John Lindsay was mayor of New York, a New Yorker returning from a visit to Chicago was met at the airport by friends eager to hear what he thought of the last of the big city machines. “I have seen the past, and it works.”Subscribe for free to receive new posts.
When my brother was in the Peace Corps in Lesotho, he observed that different political parties didn’t have different policies or platforms; the only reason to vote for one over another was which one had promised you a job.
Donald Kingsbury wrote a SF novel back in the early 8os "Courtship Rite" (later repackaged as "Geta") Where governance was based partly on the number of "followers" one had and partly on the accuracy of predictions about the effects of a policy implementation (and some other predictions). The predictions were logged and published for all to see. Non-specific predictions were ignored (as they trash they are).
So 'politicians' rose based on 1) their ability to reward and care for followers, and 2) the accuracy of their precise predictions (which included time-frames).
I have suggested in some of my classes a thought experiment wherein a 'leader' secures the votes of up to 500 eligible voters. That is, the register that the 'leader' may cast their vote. Any follower 'vote' can withdraw his vote and pledge it to someone else (or vote it himself as a 'single') at any time via a registering form. No one may have more than 500 votes he can cast at one time at this level. 300,000,000 eligible voters could thus have a minimum of 6000 such leaders, although in practice many may not have that many, so for argument, let's say 15,000 can cast votes for the lowest level followers.
But then you have another level. Each 'leader' may register and pledge his 500 votes to another leader at the second level. Each of those leaders may have only 500 of the leaders of 500 at any given time, and they, too, may de-pledge at any time. Given 15,000 lowest-level leaders, the minimum number of vote casters at this second level would be 30, but could easily be 300 or so. I'll use 300.
Those 2nd level leaders would constitute the legislature. The would elect/select a roster of no more than 10 candidates for the administrative leader. Those 10 would be 'ranked' by the legislature. The person rated at the top becomes the President/Prime Minister for a term of no more than 5 years. The legislature can end his term by a majority vote. If the term is ended, the 2nd ranked person ascends to the position. Every 2 years the rankings are redone. Thus you always know who is "Waiting in the wings" to be the next leader.
There's a lot more, but for one thing, this would mean everyone eligible truly does get a vote AND every vote is important. Leaders are "kept in line" by the ability of their followers to change their vote at any time, either to themselves or to a new and/or different leader. That should make the leaders very attentive to the desires and needs of their followers.
My students enjoyed trying to poke holes in this system (and did so), but it also got them to thinking about what "representative government" is really about.
I have suggested in the past a simpler version where each individual chooses a representative, the representative casts a number of votes equal to the number who have chosen him, and individuals are free to change their representative at any time. To actually sit in the legislature you need X votes, but a group of representatives can share a seat.
Also, 500 voters approximates the number of people one can know reasonably well. There are tricks to simply remembering enormous numbers of names and associating them with the correct person, but 'knowing' that many is impossible. I want to maintain the personal contact between voter and representative. Even the 60,000 in the first Congress was way too many, IMO.
The Mafia is just another form of machine. Every system that restricts humans from doing what they want will have a Mafia-type "shadow-system" machine.
Well, machines are just factions, at bottom, and those running the system tend, almost always, to make the things they don't like (or annoy them when done by the plebes) criminal. Then another faction comes into being (or already exists in opposition to the ruling machine/faction) to help those who want to do the criminal thing do so. Its really only a matter of who gets to make the legal rules.
I mean, why was alcohol manufacture/sale/consumption made illegal when obviously the ruling faction was going to continue to drink alcohol anyway? Or drugs? Or tobacco or vaping?
Then there's prostitution. Anything very many ordinary humans want that the ruling faction/machine makes a criminal act will find a (criminal) faction/mafia that will provide it. And in all likelihood members of the ruling faction get a cut of the illegal revenue.
So, you get the classic Baptist/Bootlegger situation where lots of people make money by making someone else's behavior criminal.
There's a movie from slightly later in time, made by Frank Capra and starring the dynamic duo of Hepburn and Tracy, called "State of the Union" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040834/ The movie's protagonist is an outsider, a rich self made "industrialist" who makes his move on the US presidency, but finds the process beset by the Plunkitt-like leaders of factions -- ethnic, union, other-industrialists -- all of whom demand pledges of future "plum". Squint, and in might remind you of Trump making pledges to appoint "Federalist Society"-approved SCOTUS judges, or pledging to end the federal tax deductible on State and Local taxes, or pledging to allow capital held overseas to be brought back to the US without tax penalty ... what "states' rights" anti-abortion judges have to do with repatriating capital is a question. Anyhow, once the initial laundry list of deals and pledges had been worked, what was left? On the other hand, having a political leader, or movement, where a list of pledges is out there in public is nice to think about. Otherwise -- like who chose a list including:to deplete the strategic oil reserve, or abruptify the withdrawal from Afghanistan, or continue to hold prisoners in Guantanamo ...
But back to the 1940's -- the Capra movie portrays union and ethnicity and business factions as more or less comparable power players. It seems at the current moment ethnicity and (modern)-sexuality trump (so to speak) all other factional coalitions. If so, the Hamiltonian notions of faction-vs-faction securing a middle course policy will no hold in our century.
Ah, the good old days chieftaincy and patronage, the Trump voter's wet dream. Find me a few votes, wouldya? Real existing democracy and its rule of law, what a pain in the neck...
Why Trump voters in particular? Trump has some similarity to a machine boss but he isn't in office so can't use government jobs to buy votes. As best I recall, when he was in office he didn't actually use patronage as a source of power. He depends on his popularity with much of the Republican base to control primaries and the party, not on the classic machine system.
Trump voters in particular because it is understood by them that he operates like a Mafia boss to the extent he can. He is significantly different from all presidents who want to increase their executive powers. I'm not sure where to begin when it comes to patronage in the Trump orbit. All he demands is absolute loyalty. There are hardly any other considerations. The goal is to establish a kleptocracy. The model is the crime family. But as always with the rise of autocrats, the fans ignore the psychopathy and the crimes in plain view.
The administrative state is meant to be independent politically except for top level appointees who change. The opposite of that political independence is Trump's goal. Both Democrats and Republicans have at times run government agencies in a manner inconsistent with their proper mandates. But nobody before Trump made it his goal to appoint a fox to guard every henhouse.
I am grateful to our host for reviewing Kent's book.
In later books, collections of his columns, 'Without Gloves' and 'Without Grease'. he describes how D-FDR ran as a states-rights D, fired 200k R-Hoover hacks, and then switched to big government D, hiring 500k hacks all in his first year.
As I understand it, D Wilson hired a lot for WWI, then R Harding fired them to end a slump. Good governance- the slump did end. Bad politics- the hacks he fired hated him and ratted on him, and history books record Harding as a scandal-plagued president, not as a president who ended a slump. Then Hoover hired 200k, extending the 29 crash into a depression, but Hoover, like Trump, had no bench of loyalists to hire from so he hired his enemies, like Trump. Also like Trump, journalists loved to hate Hoover. After D-FDR fired 200k R and hired a million plus, the federal bureaucracy was maybe 90% D. After D-LBJ made the civil service 'independent', maybe 99% D party patronage. Also Affirmative Action requires every business with more than fifty employees to hire D patronage. Now DEI requires businesses to put D patronage in charge. And D party government disinformation is extending censorship from mass media to social media.
I think we were better off with a genuine two party system and patronage. We are worse off with the D party monopolizing federal patronage, mass media, and censoring social media. I don't know how to get back to a two party system, and if we did, one party would probably stomp the other and we'd be back to a controlled clownish opposition and youth wings in the streets backed by party courts, like now.
You might be right-- I saw 'wheat' instead of 'whet' when I went and read the whole story -- but, I didn't check any page views -- it was just an on-line site I found by doing a search on Damon Runyon and the title:
If I got a dollar credit for every typo I spot in Kindle editions - not just the OCR stuff - I’d be rolling in free books. I’ve given up on reporting them.
Also kinda weird. I was doing a deep dive into Tammany Hall just last night.
No just the Plunkitt book. it was one of those extended Wikipedia link chase things. It began with recalling Walt Kelly’s old Pogo comic. There was a character ‘Tammananny Tiger’ that would show up and try to get Pogo to run for president which of course led to Tammany Hall and downloading the free George Washington Plunkitt book.
The initial John Lindsey quote in your post, “I have seen the past, and it works.” kind of reminds me of the famous, ‘We have met the enemy and he is is.” Pogo line.
When my brother was in the Peace Corps in Lesotho, he observed that different political parties didn’t have different policies or platforms; the only reason to vote for one over another was which one had promised you a job.
Why do I get the impression something like this is still happening in the inner cities.
It's probably worse. Most inner city pols don't seem to deliver much but "feelings" to their constituents.
Donald Kingsbury wrote a SF novel back in the early 8os "Courtship Rite" (later repackaged as "Geta") Where governance was based partly on the number of "followers" one had and partly on the accuracy of predictions about the effects of a policy implementation (and some other predictions). The predictions were logged and published for all to see. Non-specific predictions were ignored (as they trash they are).
So 'politicians' rose based on 1) their ability to reward and care for followers, and 2) the accuracy of their precise predictions (which included time-frames).
I have suggested in some of my classes a thought experiment wherein a 'leader' secures the votes of up to 500 eligible voters. That is, the register that the 'leader' may cast their vote. Any follower 'vote' can withdraw his vote and pledge it to someone else (or vote it himself as a 'single') at any time via a registering form. No one may have more than 500 votes he can cast at one time at this level. 300,000,000 eligible voters could thus have a minimum of 6000 such leaders, although in practice many may not have that many, so for argument, let's say 15,000 can cast votes for the lowest level followers.
But then you have another level. Each 'leader' may register and pledge his 500 votes to another leader at the second level. Each of those leaders may have only 500 of the leaders of 500 at any given time, and they, too, may de-pledge at any time. Given 15,000 lowest-level leaders, the minimum number of vote casters at this second level would be 30, but could easily be 300 or so. I'll use 300.
Those 2nd level leaders would constitute the legislature. The would elect/select a roster of no more than 10 candidates for the administrative leader. Those 10 would be 'ranked' by the legislature. The person rated at the top becomes the President/Prime Minister for a term of no more than 5 years. The legislature can end his term by a majority vote. If the term is ended, the 2nd ranked person ascends to the position. Every 2 years the rankings are redone. Thus you always know who is "Waiting in the wings" to be the next leader.
There's a lot more, but for one thing, this would mean everyone eligible truly does get a vote AND every vote is important. Leaders are "kept in line" by the ability of their followers to change their vote at any time, either to themselves or to a new and/or different leader. That should make the leaders very attentive to the desires and needs of their followers.
My students enjoyed trying to poke holes in this system (and did so), but it also got them to thinking about what "representative government" is really about.
I have suggested in the past a simpler version where each individual chooses a representative, the representative casts a number of votes equal to the number who have chosen him, and individuals are free to change their representative at any time. To actually sit in the legislature you need X votes, but a group of representatives can share a seat.
Also, 500 voters approximates the number of people one can know reasonably well. There are tricks to simply remembering enormous numbers of names and associating them with the correct person, but 'knowing' that many is impossible. I want to maintain the personal contact between voter and representative. Even the 60,000 in the first Congress was way too many, IMO.
My version is an effort to prevent large, coordinated voting blocs. And Men on White Horses.
Didn't these machines allow the mafia to operate?
The Mafia is just another form of machine. Every system that restricts humans from doing what they want will have a Mafia-type "shadow-system" machine.
So these machines just made criminality legal
Well, machines are just factions, at bottom, and those running the system tend, almost always, to make the things they don't like (or annoy them when done by the plebes) criminal. Then another faction comes into being (or already exists in opposition to the ruling machine/faction) to help those who want to do the criminal thing do so. Its really only a matter of who gets to make the legal rules.
I mean, why was alcohol manufacture/sale/consumption made illegal when obviously the ruling faction was going to continue to drink alcohol anyway? Or drugs? Or tobacco or vaping?
Then there's prostitution. Anything very many ordinary humans want that the ruling faction/machine makes a criminal act will find a (criminal) faction/mafia that will provide it. And in all likelihood members of the ruling faction get a cut of the illegal revenue.
So, you get the classic Baptist/Bootlegger situation where lots of people make money by making someone else's behavior criminal.
There's a movie from slightly later in time, made by Frank Capra and starring the dynamic duo of Hepburn and Tracy, called "State of the Union" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040834/ The movie's protagonist is an outsider, a rich self made "industrialist" who makes his move on the US presidency, but finds the process beset by the Plunkitt-like leaders of factions -- ethnic, union, other-industrialists -- all of whom demand pledges of future "plum". Squint, and in might remind you of Trump making pledges to appoint "Federalist Society"-approved SCOTUS judges, or pledging to end the federal tax deductible on State and Local taxes, or pledging to allow capital held overseas to be brought back to the US without tax penalty ... what "states' rights" anti-abortion judges have to do with repatriating capital is a question. Anyhow, once the initial laundry list of deals and pledges had been worked, what was left? On the other hand, having a political leader, or movement, where a list of pledges is out there in public is nice to think about. Otherwise -- like who chose a list including:to deplete the strategic oil reserve, or abruptify the withdrawal from Afghanistan, or continue to hold prisoners in Guantanamo ...
But back to the 1940's -- the Capra movie portrays union and ethnicity and business factions as more or less comparable power players. It seems at the current moment ethnicity and (modern)-sexuality trump (so to speak) all other factional coalitions. If so, the Hamiltonian notions of faction-vs-faction securing a middle course policy will no hold in our century.
Ah, the good old days chieftaincy and patronage, the Trump voter's wet dream. Find me a few votes, wouldya? Real existing democracy and its rule of law, what a pain in the neck...
Why Trump voters in particular? Trump has some similarity to a machine boss but he isn't in office so can't use government jobs to buy votes. As best I recall, when he was in office he didn't actually use patronage as a source of power. He depends on his popularity with much of the Republican base to control primaries and the party, not on the classic machine system.
Trump voters in particular because it is understood by them that he operates like a Mafia boss to the extent he can. He is significantly different from all presidents who want to increase their executive powers. I'm not sure where to begin when it comes to patronage in the Trump orbit. All he demands is absolute loyalty. There are hardly any other considerations. The goal is to establish a kleptocracy. The model is the crime family. But as always with the rise of autocrats, the fans ignore the psychopathy and the crimes in plain view.
Trump was trying to get the administrative sate back under the control of the elected president.
The administrative state is meant to be independent politically except for top level appointees who change. The opposite of that political independence is Trump's goal. Both Democrats and Republicans have at times run government agencies in a manner inconsistent with their proper mandates. But nobody before Trump made it his goal to appoint a fox to guard every henhouse.
> The administrative state is meant to be independent politically except for top level appointees who change.
In other words, it's meant to be unaccountable to anyone.
And frankly it was never really independent politically. It was always leftist since it was created in its modern from by FDR.
I am grateful to our host for reviewing Kent's book.
In later books, collections of his columns, 'Without Gloves' and 'Without Grease'. he describes how D-FDR ran as a states-rights D, fired 200k R-Hoover hacks, and then switched to big government D, hiring 500k hacks all in his first year.
As I understand it, D Wilson hired a lot for WWI, then R Harding fired them to end a slump. Good governance- the slump did end. Bad politics- the hacks he fired hated him and ratted on him, and history books record Harding as a scandal-plagued president, not as a president who ended a slump. Then Hoover hired 200k, extending the 29 crash into a depression, but Hoover, like Trump, had no bench of loyalists to hire from so he hired his enemies, like Trump. Also like Trump, journalists loved to hate Hoover. After D-FDR fired 200k R and hired a million plus, the federal bureaucracy was maybe 90% D. After D-LBJ made the civil service 'independent', maybe 99% D party patronage. Also Affirmative Action requires every business with more than fifty employees to hire D patronage. Now DEI requires businesses to put D patronage in charge. And D party government disinformation is extending censorship from mass media to social media.
I think we were better off with a genuine two party system and patronage. We are worse off with the D party monopolizing federal patronage, mass media, and censoring social media. I don't know how to get back to a two party system, and if we did, one party would probably stomp the other and we'd be back to a controlled clownish opposition and youth wings in the streets backed by party courts, like now.
You have Trump derangement syndrome.
The problem was Biden received too many fraudulent votes. 81 million for Biden was and is implausible
another typo -- 'whet' should be 'wheat' --- 'Joe Turp’s word is as good as whet in the bin.'
That's not a typo, it's the author's representation of how the character speaks. There are lots of other deliberate misspellings.
You might be right-- I saw 'wheat' instead of 'whet' when I went and read the whole story -- but, I didn't check any page views -- it was just an on-line site I found by doing a search on Damon Runyon and the title:
https://damonrunyon.neocities.org/The_Turps/Nothing_Happens_in_Brooklyn
excellent -- not only true, but funny.
Here is a typo I saw - 'hook' for 'book' -- 'Did I get up a hook on municipal government'
Probably true. I expect the free kindle I am working from was produced by OCR, so h for b isn't surprising.
If I got a dollar credit for every typo I spot in Kindle editions - not just the OCR stuff - I’d be rolling in free books. I’ve given up on reporting them.
Also kinda weird. I was doing a deep dive into Tammany Hall just last night.
Any more sources you found and want to share?
No just the Plunkitt book. it was one of those extended Wikipedia link chase things. It began with recalling Walt Kelly’s old Pogo comic. There was a character ‘Tammananny Tiger’ that would show up and try to get Pogo to run for president which of course led to Tammany Hall and downloading the free George Washington Plunkitt book.
The initial John Lindsey quote in your post, “I have seen the past, and it works.” kind of reminds me of the famous, ‘We have met the enemy and he is is.” Pogo line.
https://library.osu.edu/site/40stories/2020/01/05/we-have-met-the-enemy/
Like many limousine liberals, Lindsey wasn't as great as he thought we was. Just my opinion.