Administrations
engaged in the old-fashioned political corruption of appointing people to
government jobs because of donations or connections rather than expertise,
accepting illegal campaign contributions, and using the power of office to
solicit contributions are machines, like the old machine of Tammany Hall. The
history of every big city in America is partly a history of machine politics,
with big men in loose party organizations bestowing favors including jobs to do
themselves good, bringing in nephews and in-laws, family friends and neighbors,
dishing out jobs where the dishing was doable and sometimes inventing positions
not previously available or heard of. Almost every ethnic community except
people like the Mennonites made every effort to cover its own bases and to
extend the umbrella over its own as much as possible, not only the Irish-Americans
who went into law enforcement, but also Americans of Italian, Polish, and
Jewish descent. Even Tammany had to negotiate with the machine in
It would be a
misperception to gloss over the days of pure ward politics with nostalgia. Almost
every new immigrant population did to the next what had been done to them,
their tactics often dishonest, the results horrible, and the elections a joke. And
those were the elections with living voters. Politics reeked of the
insularity, prejudice, and crime as flamboyant as in the famous 1991
Today the
smart money or anyway the big money, the biggest in world history, is on
keeping people out. This situation has a number of causes, including a consolidation
in media outlets that tends to keep the entrenched mediocre and the mediocre
entrenched, but the results are unequivocally destructive.
However bad
the old machine politics were, they were at least understandable. Their
principle, such as it was, was simple: you take care of us; we'll take care of
you. It was understood that each bunch of politicos, jobholders and ‘volunteers’
would try to get what it could and keep what it had, each group scrambling for
itself, and neighborhoods, schools and businesses survived under the
arrangement. They were fighting over turf, but it was turf developed by the
people who worked, prayed, and sent their children to school on it, on which
they built grocery stores, ran fire departments, and got law degrees by
attending night classes.
What turf are
today’s neocons and actual foreign policy experts fighting over? Whose
neighborhood or small town is Clinton or Romney or Giuliani scrambling to protect, or the biggest political contributors,
mostly GOP, in the insurance, pharma and tobacco industries? All these parties
have a vested interest in globalization, which means latching onto large
corporations that cross national lines; whose community are they working for?
This suggestion is not chosen entirely at random. Among the worst excesses of the traditional machines was and is their collusion with gangs and gangsters. Northern Virginia, a ring of suburban D.C. and the epicenter of yuppiedom, is as I write this also the hub of some strikingly aggressive Asian gangs. This topic is not one on which the White House and the First Lady, in her campaign for at-risk male youth, have touched publicly.
The flavor of
American politics has changed with the economy, over the past thirty years; fire
department, police and post office jobs aren't handed out the way they used to
be; the manufacturing sector and the rest of America’s basic industries –
copper, steel, maritime, rails – have declined; and most people are dependent
on a white-collar job or a pink-collar job or a no-collar job. And as typical
white-collar jobs go, political appointments are fairly plummy; not everyone
can get in. But it's not the government jobs that are political plums,
it's the behind-the-scenes contracting in consulting, producing and handling campaigns,
and contracting itself – contractors handle government and other procurement,
and handle employment decisions for both public and private entities. Until the
Internet opened up campaigns somewhat, campaigning became well-paid turf to be
protected from the common gaze, even more than some government positions, and a
committed citizen who went to a campaign headquarters to volunteer, full of
zeal and enthusiasm, was at least as likely to be shunted off as brought in.
As said, the
nature of campaigning has become more inclusive again, partly because of the
Net roots. But the politically-influenced sector of the job market, and that is
a huge sector, has not become more inclusive. These days, someone who applies
for a job writing for the Postal Service, for example, is liable to be vetted
by a subcontractor working – not for our government – but for one of the huge
military contractors such as Lockheed Martin. And with 68 percent of American college
faculty now teaching in part-time or non-tenure-track positions, virtually any former
CIA director or other government official has a better avenue to one
of the few ‘good’ academic jobs than virtually any longtime professor.
In other
words, it’s not just security-clearance, high-tech, defense-oriented positions
that are increasingly controlled or influenced by our expanding
military-industrial-surveillance complex, with damage to our foreign policy now
abundantly documented. It is our intellectual infrastructure. No candidate has
fully voiced the damage done to our reading and writing realm in the
Stumble It!