I should start by noting that I’m a fan of Jonathan Rauch. Last year, I ran an event with him as a keynote speaker to talk about free expression. I haven’t written a personal review, but Kindly Inquisitors is one of the best modern day books I’ve read, and I generally think Rauch plays an important role as a provocative and interesting thinker that challenges people of every stripe to think better.
A fellow contrarian myself, I appreciate the goal of challenging common knowledge. He quotes Hannah Arendt in his “The Case For Hate Speech” to describe how “Truth carries within itself an element of coercion.” The prospect of being completely wrong about key aspects of my worldview is daunting and more than a little exciting.
Starting off his work, Rauch points out how progressives and Tea Partiers found common ground over reducing corruption. After all, a reduction in corruption seems to be one of the few ideas that most Americans are able to get behind. Although most Americans disapprove of machine or transactional politics, Rauch argues we should rediscover the virtues of “corruption”, or honest graft.
Rauch points out early on that realism seems to be challenged by three main ideologies, progressivism, populism, and libertarianism. These groups are wrong, because they fail to understand that graft and private deals are essential to providing political order.
From this he derives the meat of his essay.
- “Government cannot govern unless political machines or something like them exist and work, because machines are uniquely willing and able to negotiate compromises and make them stick.”
- “Progressive, populist, and libertarian reformers have joined forces to wage a decades-long war against machine politics by weakening political insiders’ control of money, nominations, negotiations, and other essential tools of political leadership.”
- “Reformer’s fixations on corruption and participation, although perhaps appropriate a long time ago, have become destabilizing and counterproductive, contributing to the rise of privatized pseudo-machines that make governing more difficult and politics less accountable.”
- “Although no one wants to or could bring back the likes of Tammany Hall, much can be done to restore a more sensible balance by removing impediments which reforms have placed in the way of transactional politics and machine-building.”
- “Political realism, while coming in many flavors, is emerging as a coherent school of analysis and offers new directions for a reform conversation which has run aground on outdated and unrealistic assumptions.”
I want to expand upon Rauch’s ideas in this review, and explain where I think it has accurately described the world, while also challenging some aspects I find personally weak.
Rauch describes Plunkitt, a Tammany Hall functionary who appeared to be a true believer in patronage politics. The concept of “honest graft” seemed possible, and his influence helps readers understand that governments rely on informal mechanisms to distribute power as well as informal mechanisms. The two main claims in this section are that governments are not merely legalistic entities and that these machines served purposes when it came to keeping order. Looking at the evolution of institutions, as Douglass North does in his paper about understanding history suggests a similar-ish story.
Following Plunkitt, the book delves into James Wilson who describes a framework for understanding political organizations. There’s a conflict between amateur politicking (think activists), and political professionals (think tanks, politicians, swamp) even within the same groups. Democrats, for instance, do not all like each other. The Bernie Sanders’ of the world hate those accepting PAC money, and vice versa (not part of his book, but perhaps it is illuminating that the progressive caucuses don’t seem to have stable and influential power).
The primary difference between the two groups is that professionals stay in the game a lot longer. This makes them mostly indifferent to policy, and instead it focuses on the long-term survival of the organizations they are a part of, which means emphasizing favors and patronage to get stuff done. Meanwhile, activists tend to have a specific goal in mind, and often do not emphasize longevity or careers. Both groups are important to keeping things running and moral, but it seems as though the amateurs are getting too powerful. The world is becoming partisan, and issue-free politics is a non-starter today.
Interestingly enough, Rauch seems to contradict himself by pointing out how interest groups have permanent status. Activists and ideologues are often able to make a career out of what they’re doing. This could be to imply we are both amateurs and professionals, but it would seem that the incentive structure of activists, by having this type of influence, are tempered in their behavior (how I see it).
The book goes on to describe realism as a school of thought. Realism is seeing the world “as it is”, informed by a struggle for power, and equilibrium (borrowing from economic game theory). This is more an attitude than a set of policy prescriptions. One conclusion from realism’s view on power is that if most are able to trade favors, it is able to function and adjust. In essence, there is a market for it. I’d say this book has convinced me that government function is greatly augmented by political machines working. On this specific subject, Garett Jones’ 10% Less Democracy provides a good primer on the topic area for why this is the case.
The next part of this book goes into explaining how machines work.
- Machines are hierarchical (but not necessarily centralized)
- Machines are able to reward insiders and punish outsiders
- Machines distinguish between insiders and outsiders
- Machines reward professionalism
- Machines act as middlemen
- Machines act as gatekeepers
- Machines are durable (long time horizons in American politics)
- Machines aim to monopolize
- Machines are transactional
- Machines are opaque
After explaining the characteristics, he goes onto explaining the pros. Primarily that they maintain order, avoid fragmentation, and avoid extremism. They act as a moderating power. The strength of a machine trades responsiveness for (hopefully) better, more coherent, more long-term policy.
Thus, politics needs the ability for leaders to punish non-followers. Without the tools like money, vote guarantees, etc., party leaders are unable to unify members around deals. Rauch gives an example of Richmond, a troubled city that simply needed a political machine to fix its problems. Even bad situations, like Tammany Hall, Rauch elaborates, have benefits that outweigh harms.
After showing us the benefits of machines, Rauch goes on to explain how reformers disregard how power works in their fight against corruption, and how realism has had trouble justifying itself in public.
At this point, I think Rauch is at his most contrarian. He argues that progressivism, populism, and libertarianism while maybe morally venerable, have made it extremely hard to govern.
He claims progressives have a pie-in-the-sky view of government that is meritocratic, perfectible, and focused merely on issues (I think he’s right). His example of progressives claiming the system is corrupt speaks to its absurdity as an unstable and uncontrollable doctrine. This results in seeing all transactional politics as corruption when it may not be so.
Similarly, populists mostly agree that issues are important, and that the primary problem of the government is corruption. Though, the goal of the populist is to have more people involved and have more democracy. Therefore, things like transparency and direct participation are what would solve the system.
When getting to libertarians, I think Rauch majorly misses the point however. He notes that libertarians don’t like populists and progressives (he’s right about that, I definitely don’t), but he claims that our reason for disliking machines is because we prefer market outcomes to political outcomes, and that politics mostly involve self-interested people. Libertarians seem to be twins to progressivism because we (apparently) see corruption everywhere, and view transactional politics as illegitimate.
Adding in libertarians as an influential group that act as social reformers is not completely accurate. Many libertarians are more upset by the way in which things continue to get regulated that appear to infringe upon human rights. Wanting politics in less spheres of life seems to be very different than focusing on the quality of those politics. I’m also not entirely sure how influential libertarians are. We make up a tiny group that pretends as if we can sway elections every four years by almost nominating lunatics. There is some truth that portions of the libertarian movement, especially Rothbardians fall prey to this, but more establishment Hayekians (such as Amash) seem to emphasize corruption less and instead see politics as ignorant of economics, and thus weakening in general. They may be agnostic to whether machines are important to begin with.
Continuing, Rauch points out how adding in direct voter nomination was a disaster, causing hyper-ideological candidates to win. Additionally, groups like the Tea Party and the Kochtopus (I previously worked for a Koch affiliate, I mean the term ironically if you’re reading this Charles) can change behavior by threatening to primary them. This created a situation where outsiders are able to destabilize parties and affect the issues they focus on. Predictably, this caused a massive increase in outside spending, but not by party officials.
I agree with Rauch that restricting coordination of campaign efforts is a mistake, and that it simply pushes influence outside a more established system. Some libertarians (yes, I’m back on this once more) argue for broad speech (including the right to donate money to campaigns) and association protections, which are seemingly compatible with reforms to allow machine-esque politics to succeed.
The final part of this work shows how the demise of machine politics has particularly bad results. There’s less sausage (which as an on-and-off vegetarian might be a good thing for me) made, but more visibility in how its made. Unaccountable groups like the Koch network are spending more than parties, with no clear coordination goal in sight. There does not appear to be an easy way of stopping these movements because the party bosses of yesteryear lack the strong hand to control what goes on.
This increasingly creates lone-wolf politicians (or as he puts it in his talk at Claremont McKenna “political sociopaths”) who have short time horizons, and are unable to create consensus. Predictably, this causes chaos which would be solved in large part if politicians were no longer demonized and transactional politics were formally allowed. By allowing parties to do more of the fundraising and spending, polarization will decrease and moderation will come about, as candidates become more insulated from ideological primary challengers or donors.
Rauch goes on to demolish claims about the importance of widespread donors (implicitly critiquing those who mainly care about participation) and competitive primary elections (implicitly coming after progressives who aim to become significantly more ideological).
Rauch finishes with a story of Mormons working with gay people to prevent discrimination, while preserving religious exemptions, leaving most people people happy. This happens behind closed doors, proving once again that being allowed privacy does work and may be worth advocating for.
There’s a lot to consider in this piece. It’s well-sourced and argues something most people today would not think of. Working at Brookings, it is no surprise that Rauch knows his way around Washington and I’m grateful for a chance to catch a glimpse inside. Overall, I think this was a challenging book for myself to read, and something that seemed to go against a lot of peoples’ intuitions about how government should work.
I’m not entirely convinced that groups like the Koch network and Americans for Prosperity are particularly big threats to governance. I’d think that as government is able to get more done by virtue of being more unified, that one would see more onerous and parasitic regulations on the American public. I’m also not convinced that an evolution away from corruption is necessarily a bad thing. European countries seem to have taken things outside of politics, by privatizing much of the welfare state, and gradually pruning problematic branches. I’m not sure of their situation, but if non-machines can achieve this results, it may speak to a way that the benefits of machines are more correlational than causal.
Overall, I’d recommend giving this a read. It’s definitely ripe with insights and worth spending an afternoon considering.
Isadore Johnson's Website 