The system that works? In defense of the party machine

As I have argued in The Pillar and elsewhere, our politics is now dominated by those who treat their partisanship as a fundamentalist pseudo-religious identity. The result is our two major political parties now constitute an existential threat to the American republic because they make the democracy of our Constitution totally dysfunctional.

It was not long ago that parties and politics operated in a very different – and arguably better – manner. That is, before “reformers” sought to destroy the “party machines.”

I became active in politics at a very early age. When I was eight years old, I campaigned door-to-door to support my father as he ran for alderman. He was part of the legendary Chicago Democratic Party machine.

Whenever I refer to it as a “machine,” however, my father admonishes me and says it was an “organization.” That’s because the term machine is usually used as an epithet by those who said it was irredeemably corrupt.

I do not deny, nor do I defend, the corruption. But there are plenty of reasons to prefer those parties and the political world they created to what we have today.

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