Bertrand de Jouvenel was a French political philosopher active in the middle two-thirds of the 20th century. He was considered to be an expert on the American political system, which at least means he didn’t just naively take American leaders and academicians on their word that the United States is a liberal democracy. The United States is run by political machines and isn’t anything like a liberal democracy, let alone the morally well-ordered republic envisioned by perhaps most of the Founding Fathers. We were told this by de Jouvenel and probably others. (See Liberty Fund for affordable, good-quality reprints of some of de Jouvenel’s most important works and for reprints of many other worthwhile books.)
As de Jouvenel quite reasonably saw matters, political machines exist to deliver the goods. As a consequence, they do their best—sometimes apparently quite good indeed—to screen out any potential political candidates who have much in the way of moral character. When Wall Street or the weapons manufacturers have paid you to deliver in the form of more tanks and aircraft carriers, you don’t want Senators or Representatives or a President who tries to honestly determine if that is the right use of American taxpayer money at that time. No one with moral character need apply to the Republican and Democratic parties. Some with a little or even much of moral character or integrity do slip through but the parties seem awfully efficient at screening them out in recent years and have even driven out some seemingly well-established honest politicians of the left and right. Others have simply retired or left when young to be replaced by types more acceptable to the political machines, moral invertebrates.
The classic ethnic political machine was the `Irish-American Bostonian’ machine as depicted in the novel, The Last Hurrah by Edwin O’Connor; the protagonist was likely modeled on James Michael Curley who served in various elected positions in Massachusetts, including Governor and Mayor of Boston. Curley was always a powerful decision-maker and not just a front man. (My great-aunt, Mary Gordon Thompson, was a labor-union leader and feminist and campaigner for child-labor laws; she was a political enemy and a personal friend and admirer of Curley—she was very impressed by the man.) You can also see this sort of ethnic machine politician in action in comedy scenes—the meetings with the judge—in Miracle on 34th Street; this setting was New York City and perhaps it was an Irish-American machine again.
Obviously, power was also exercised by the wealthy members of the establishment, call them `Wall Street interests’ or the `Eastern Establishment’ if you will. The national Republican Party, and perhaps many of the local Republican parties, were influenced greatly by Rockefellers and other bankers and their allies. The Morgans exercised great power within the Democratic party until the collapse of their banking empire, circa 1950; a Mayor Curley wasn’t about to do their bidding but his power was mostly local or statewide. Let me mostly ignore the past forms of political power exercised by Wall Street and its allies. I’m making a simple point by telling a part of a complex story of centralization by destruction of local power, but a centralization which seems to have merely created two nationwide, technocratic political machines where we once had a multitude of machines which would at least partly respond to real human needs beyond those of the investors and executives of JP Morgan and General Dynamics.
Let’s go back to the 1970s when Eugene McCarthy, a rather independent-minded Democratic Party politician, joined with James L. Buckley, an equally independent-minded Republican Party politician, to oppose some proposed campaign finance laws. (Libertarians and civil rights advocates also joined McCarthy and Buckley in their fight against those laws.) Usually presented as an effort to prevent public financing and limits on contributions to at least some sorts of campaigns, both McCarthy and Buckley said over succeeding decades that they were concerned that the laws were intended to destroy the (partially) independent political parties (such as the Progressive Party prominent in the Midwest and the Conservative Party of New York) and to outlaw any campaign corruption only if it were not under the control of the national committees of the Democratic and Republican parties.
I’ll go out on a limb to claim that the political campaign `reforms’ which began in the 1970s, partially failing at first because of McCarthy and Buckley and others, were the first stage of an ultimately successful destruction of the ethnic (and perhaps other) local or statewide political machines and the centralization of political machine power in the two national parties, Democrats and Republicans.
The ethnic political machines no longer exist, at least not as independent power-centers. But power continues to exist in the form of political machines, those run by the national committees of the Republican and Democratic parties, run in a similar way to General Motors or Citigroup or McNamara’s Defense Department. In other words, corruption controlled at the level of states and municipalities was simply replaced by corruption controlled by highly centralized and technocratic political parties, the national organizations of the Democrats and Republicans.
Political machines have greater control of the United States than before and they are machines allied to the American Warfare State; they are machines participating in the attempt by the Western, mostly American, power elite or 1% to steal all that doesn’t already belong to them, in the Middle East or in Des Moines or in Moscow.