Political Parties & Ideology

The Amateur Democrat.
by James Q. Wilson.
University of Chicago Press. 378 pp. $6.95.

What should we expect of our political parties? Would an ideal Democratic party be simply an enlargement to national size of New York City’s Village Independent Democrats or their reform neighbors farther uptown? Such a party would presumably combine the Manhattan reformer’s fierce passion for internal party democracy, public discussion of candidates, and reform of political machines, with his equally intent sympathy for liberal social and economic programs. The reformer is committed to the belief that both his party and his nation benefit from the engagement of large numbers of men and women in the affairs of their local organizations. In the minds of Manhattan’s reform Democrats and their analogues in California and Illinois both major parties will benefit also from a higher level of ideological commitment and we will elect better Congressmen, Senators, and Presidents when neither party can rely on personality and patronage to win elections. Thus, the political destruction of the De-Sapios and the Buckleys, and the dismantling of their machines, are properly viewed as instrumental rather than ultimate objectives. The ultimate objectives include a more alert public judgment of issues, a more committed set of public officials, and a genuine distinction of program between the two major parties. Presumably it is this sort of thing that New York’s reform Democrats have in mind when they snatch a moment’s thought between the almost incessant primary campaigns which have dominated their short history.

Now it has been only by the accident of catastrophe—Civil War or Great Depression—that actual American political parties have demonstrated any taste for ideology. The usual fate of the solemn platforms which the two parties construct for Presidential campaigns points to the preferred treatment by Democrats and Republicans alike of abstract national goals. Obviously the operators of such parties cherish a model of the political party which substantially differs from the reformer’s ideal. What the regular knows in his bones is that issues divide party workers and self-interest binds them to their leaders. In fact, the regular’s conception of the ideal political club echoes a military organization more nearly than it does a town meeting. During primaries and elections, the leaders of regular clubs can deploy squadrons of efficient captains, canvassers, and poll watchers, each one kept loyal to his leader by a well-articulated system of rewards and punishments. The party worker obeys his leader either out of hope of winning a patronage reward or out of fear of losing one that he already possesses. The patronage job is the indispensable cement of the political edifice. And, argues the regular and the political scientist, the cash nexus which links subordinates and leaders is much stronger than the joys of intellectual debate and the rewards of unpaid club office which are the reform substitutes for tangible cash. The regular club can work peacefully for all the party’s candidates because it cares nothing about the candidates’ opinions and a great deal about the patronage rewards which might flow from the election of the party’s slate.

What choice do such parties offer the voters in a general election? Basically, the citizen participates in a personality contest: the candidate with the more attractive personality and the more efficient machinery to project it will win the office. But, maintains the sophisticated regular, this result is all for the best. Once in office an official is comparatively free to adjust his policies to the emergencies which confront him and to the group interests which play upon him. He is hampered neither by allegiance to a coherent program nor by the consciousness that censorious groups of his fellow Democrats or his fellow Republicans are ceaselessly comparing his actions to his promises. A mass electorate is in fact equipped to do nothing more than select persons. It lacks the qualifications to judge the issues. Normal party politics operates on this implicit premise.

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James Wilson’s analysis of reform politics in Manhattan, California, and Illinois focuses upon these two rival theories of political organization. Unfortunately much of the argument’s interest is diminished because Mr. Wilson has chopped his story up into analytical segments and concealed under the cloak of anonymity the vivid personalities of his characters. Although the insider will enjoy guessing who said what, most readers will be puzzled rather than entertained. Both of Mr. Wilson’s decisions tend to undervalue the significance of personality in the comparative success of reform in New York. How did it happen, for example, that Manhattan’s first reform Congressman, William Fitts Ryan, is an Irish Catholic when Mr. Wilson’s analysis so conclusively proves that he actually ought to be a middle-class Jewish attorney? Nor is it easy to keep chronological sequences straight in Mr. Wilson’s story.

All the same there is much to be said for Mr. Wilson’s performance, not least admiration for his bravery in mounting his safari while the animals are still roaring in the political jungle. And, although he does maintain his standing among social scientists by occasional lapses into the jargon of organization theory, much of the time he writes neatly and in the concluding pages he approaches genuine eloquence. It is not anticlimactic to add that he appears to have got rather little wrong in his account of internal club rivalries and competing reform tactics, at least in Manhattan. No one should underestimate the magnitude of this achievement.

In fact, my major quarrel is less with Mr. Wilson than with a tendency in contemporary social science which his investigation illustrates. This is the propensity to search for equilibria among economic quantities and functional justifications for existing social and political institutions. Thus political patronage, authoritarian party leadership, and scorn of ideology may all offend in the abstract, but, the political scientist is prone to warn, haven’t American politics been a success? Will not the sudden injection of internal party democracy and militant programmatic liberalism derange the delicate chemical balances of institutional compromise which has made that success possible? Won’t we be worse off rather than better for tampering with our hallowed political arrangements?

Now the special danger of Mr. Wilson’s advocacy of this line of argument is the temptation to linger admiringly over intricate political devices and to ignore the larger fact that the politics of personality and self-interest are not serving contemporary America very well. The evidence is to be found at every governmental level. Like other large cities, New York has been unable to cope with the basic problems of housing and education, much less to offer its citizens a city suitable for human beings. What has Tammany ever done for Harlem? How have the regulars taken into account, as the mythology of interest politics insists they must, the interests of this deprived group of voters? As Adam Clayton Powell and J. Raymond Jones have repeatedly complained, Tammany has never given Harlem as much as its fair share of patronage. The politics of regularity have produced state legislatures in which Democratic oppositions deal with their Republican opposite numbers instead of attacking them. Alike in incidents such as the Lane-Carlino squabble and Congressional redistricting, regular Democrats covertly cooperate with Republicans in order to discipline the more aggressive of their own number. Nationally, a Congress which has been elected according to the rules of the political scientists, lovingly cherishes every special interest from A.T.&T. to the A.M.A. If it nerves itself to modernize our tariff policies, it will have surpassed itself.

No doubt the politics of ideology has many drawbacks and no man can sensibly say that an infusion of democracy into our parties and principle into our officials will resolve all our national, state, and local problems. But it is exceedingly difficult to envision how such a transformation could make our parties function less well or adjust more slowly to the necessities of their constituents.

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