The National Democratic Party,
The National Republican Party
excerpted from the book
Indispensible Enemies
The Politics of Misrule in America
by Walter Karp
Franklin Square Press, 1993, paper
[originally published - 1973]
The National Democratic Party
p52
... winning Presidential elections is no more the basic purpose
of the national parties than winning local elections is the basic
purpose of most state parties. Rather, it is control of the party.
From the point of view of national party leaders, the only alternative
to controlling the national party is total political disaster.
Any President of the United States can, if he chooses, virtually
destroy every state machine in his party. If every office is a
potential menace to party organizations, no office is more menacing
than the most powerful office of all. This is one of the most
important single facts about national party politics in America.
The would-be rulers of a national party, therefore, cannot afford
to take chances. They must control Presidential nominations so
tightly that no man they cannot trust in the Presidency has the
smallest chance of gaining it. They must also prevent serious
insurgent threats from arising, for even a serious, failed challenge
to a national party's rulers can damage their rule; it will expose,
if nothing else, that the purpose of a national party convention
is not to "pick a winner" but to pick a candidate who
serves party interests-even if he happens to be a loser.
National parties resemble state parties
in this, that the prevailing doctrine about parties describes
what party leaders are perpetually striving to avoid. Nominally,
each national party is a coalition of independent state parties
concerned with party success in state and local elections and
with enjoying an independent voice in choosing a Presidential
nominee. Were most state parties independent competitive parties,
the national syndicate of state parties would be exceedingly difficult
for any permanent ruling clique or oligarchy to control. In fact,
however, the majority of state parties-and those of most of the
largest states-are collusive, boss-controlled organizations, and
it is they who control the great majority of delegates at national
conventions. These boss-controlled units of the national party
are united by a powerful common bond of interest-they wish, at
the very least, to remain boss-controlled parties, and they share
a common need to ensure that no one will win the Presidential
nomination who will not protect their organization and its power.
The ruling bloc of the national Democratic
party has been called many things in its long history: "The
Dixie-Daley alliance"-James Reston of The New York Times;
the "Boston-Austin axis" Representative Richard Bolling,
Democrat of Missouri; "The bosses and the bollweevils"-Senator
Charles Goodell, Republican of New York. The various names point
to the same thing: a permanent alliance between Northern state
parties controlled by city machines and the Bourbon oligarchs
who predominate in the Southern states. Together they control
the national Democratic party, dictate the party's choice of Presidential
nominees, determine the party's policies, decide the party's national
issues. Under Democratic Presidents, their interests shape the
policies of national administrations. In Democratic-controlled
Congresses, they and their minions determine what legislation
will pass.
How, it will be asked, can the Bourbons
and the Northern city bosses be permanent allies when they are,
for the most part, determined ideological adversaries? The Bourbons
are obstructionists, apparently opposed to trade unions, to welfare
legislation, to civil rights, to Federal programs, to Federal
bureaucracies, to Federal infringement of the rights of states,
opposed, in short, to virtually everything that the liberal wing
of the party supports, and city machine politicians make up a
large proportion of the Democratic party's professed liberals.
In Congress it is notorious that big-city liberals propose precisely
the kind of legislation which Bourbon legislators perpetually
block. To all appearances the Northern city machines and the Southern
Bourbons are not allies but antagonistic wings of a national party
sharply divided along sectional and ideological lines.
The mutual enmity is taken for granted.
It is the staple of most political writing. Yet what, after all,
is the evidence of it? Chiefly this, that Southern Bourbons in
Congress block the reforms which Northern Democrats propose. There
is an obvious begged question, however, in this: the tacit assumption
that most Northern and big-city Democrats actually want their
reform proposals enacted and that the Bourbons by their independent
power frustrate these genuine desires. There is, however, an infallible
way to test this assumption: if we see the Northern liberal wing
of the party trying to increase its power at the expense of the
power of the Bourbons. Politically speaking, there is no other
evidence. To say you want something done without trying to gain
the power to do it is tantamount in politics to not wanting it
done. What then does the Northern wing of the Democratic party
do to increase its power at the expense of the Bourbon obstructionists?
The answer to that question is: less than nothing. Virtually all
the power which the Bourbons enjoy is freely given them by their
alleged "antagonists" within the Democratic party.
p55
To the obvious question, how does the Bourbon minority get its
power, the conventional answer is the seniority system, that curious
dispensation by which Bourbons always end up on top and Northern
reformers on the bottom of the legislative hierarchy.
p56
It is not seniority but its discretionary use which gives Bourbons
their power in the Senate. This discretionary power is in the
hands of the Democratic Steering Committee, which gives out the
committee assignments every two years. Since this committee is
controlled by Bourbons, the result, as Horn observes, "is
perpetuation of party control in the Senate by the most senior
members and especially the senior Southern conservatives."
According to Clark, the Steering Committee made its assignments
"in a manner which entrenched the control of the establishment
over the committee structure of the Senate." The real key
to Bourbon power in the Senate is Bourbon control of the Steering
Committee.
p57
In the House, the committee-assigning agency is the Democratic
membership of the House Ways and Means Committee. Like its Senate
counterpart it is controlled by Bourbons and chaired, at this
writing, by Wilbur Mills of Arkansas.
This brings us to the heart of the matter.
Bourbons do not control these assignment-making committees by
accident. In a Democratic Congress the members of the Democratic
Steering Committee are appointed by the Majority Leader of the
Senate; the Democratic members of the House Ways and Means Committee
by the Speaker of the House. Every two years, the Democratic Majority
Leader turns over this crucial committee-assigning power to Bourbons
and proBourbons. Every two years the Democratic House Speaker
has turned over the same power to Bourbon Congressmen, even when
the opportunity to do otherwise is great. In 1955, when there
were five Democratic vacancies on Ways and Means, Speaker Rayburn
gave three seats to Bourbons. Every Democratic Majority Leader,
every Democratic Speaker of the House acquiesces in and connives
at the biennial restoration of power to the Southern Bourbon minority.
And who elects the Majority Leader in a Democratic Senate? The
entire body of Democratic Senators, a caucus in which Bourbons
are outnumbered by more than two to one. Who elects the Speaker
in a Democratic Congress? Again, the Democratic caucus, in which
Bourbons are outnumbered by at least three to one. The Bourbons
do not "win" power. Every two years the Northern machine
wing of the Democratic party unfailingly votes in secret caucus
to bestow power on the Bourbon enemy. It is as simple as that.
p59
So far from being political antagonists, the Northern city machine
parties and the Southern Bourbons are the closest of political
allies, so close that no power has yet appeared in this Republic
strong enough to divide them. The bond between them is like the
bond between local chiefs within a state party: the survival of
each would be imperiled if they did not make common cause. United
they control the national Democratic party, united they control
Presidential nominations, united they can ensure that Democratic
administrations and Democratic Congresses do everything needed
to protect their interests. United their power is enormous. Since
1932 the destiny of the American Republic has largely been in
the hands of men who have earned their trust.
Any independent politician who seriously
threatens either wing is invariably the enemy of both. When Senator
Eugene McCarthy made his insurgent bid for the Democratic Presidential
nomination in 1968, the two wings of the party smoothly united
behind Hubert Humphrey. Northern liberals derided McCarthy for
calling for a "weak Presidency" and repudiating the
centralizing traditions of New Deal liberalism. Instead of supporting
McCarthy for precisely those ideological reasons, the Bourbons
supported Humphrey, the alleged epitome of that New Deal liberalism
they profess to abhor. Bourbon principles had nothing to do with
the matter, control of the party everything. McCarthy was a genuine
anti-boss candidate, Humphrey a party hack.
Party politics is invariably circular:
the ruling bloc of the national Democratic party must perpetually
use its power to protect that power. It is the abiding policy
of the wings of the national syndicate to help each other retain
local power... the Bourbons serve the interests of the Northern
bosses precisely by blocking their reform proposals. On the other
hand, it is the abiding policy of the Northern machine wing to
protect Bourbon rule in the South, for if that rule collapsed,
the Northern city machines would be doomed, hapless rumps of an
uncontrolled national party. Whatever the Bourbons need to maintain
their hegemony in Southern states, therefore, the Northern party
bosses provide them.
p61
... the permanent danger to the Northern Democratic party bosses
is that Southern voters will elect Senators, Congressmen and delegates
to national conventions who are accountable to the electorate.
Political men who are thus accountable cannot be reliable servants
of a party's interests, for politicians, like other men, cannot
readily serve two masters, in this instance their party and their
constituents. The Bourbons and their Northern allies must do all
they can to see that Bourbon officeholders are not subject to
continuous effective political opposition at home from the citizens
themselves. The task is far from easy.
The foundation of Bourbon power,(as V.
0. Key has shown) is the so-called black-belt counties-plantation
areas for the most part - where the black population is concentrated
and the whites form a local minority. The white leaders in these
counties have generally formed a compact obstructionist bloc,
whose power, privilege and prosperity have depended on the disenfranchisement,
suppression and exploitation of black people, on the economic
dependency of the poor whites, on general ignorance and illiteracy,
in a word, on securing a peculiarly wretched status quo. Their
vote forms the Bourbons' voting bloc, the only real equivalent
in America to a European class vote. The Bourbon voters in the
black-belt counties, however, are a minority of the population
in every Deep South state. Even apart from black people, they
are a minority serving a minority interest-their own. This is
why the conflict between the Bourbon whites and the whites of
the so-called white counties (where the black population is small)
has been the central political struggle in the history of every
Southern state.
Starting with a determined voting bloc
on their side, a bloc with financial resources to tap, with considerable
social influence and, usually, strong overrepresentation in the
state legislature, Bourbon politicians have considerable leverage
but no hegemony. Reasonably united, the non-Bourbon voters can
destroy Bourbon rule as they almost did between 1892 and 1896
under the leadership of the People's party, which, as C. Vann
Woodward observed in The New York Times Magazine in 1972, "struggled
hard to unite black and white voters in the South against the
racist propaganda of the old party;" namely the ruling Democrats.
The central policy of the Bourbons is to make sure that such a
union does not reoccur by splitting, suppressing and even terrorizing
the majority opposition.
... To prevent another Populist revolt
of poor white and black farmers after 1896, the Bourbons (with
the indispensable help of the Northern Democrats and the Republican
party) passed laws and constitutional amendments disenfranchising
black and poor white voters, which had the obvious advantage of
depriving their enemies of the ballot. After that, they were able
to pass, in the following decades, an elaborate legal system of
racial segregation that made cooperation between blacks and whites
a virtual crime. They did this not because the white majority
was virulently racist but because, politically speaking, it was
not racist enough. Without a formal, institutionalized racial
system, as the Bourbons well knew, racism in the white counties
would languish as it is doing today with the repeal of Jim Crow
laws and the reenfranchisement of black people. Woven by law into
the fabric of daily life, kept alive and perpetually incited,
however, racism has been used by the Bourbons as their chief instrument
of political control. It has enabled them to attack dangerous
anti-Bourbons as threats to "white supremacy" and the
"Southern way of life"; it has enabled them to pretend
that the only issue in state politics was whites versus blacks
rather than Bourbons versus everybody else. It has enabled them,
therefore, to split the anti-Bourbon ranks, to intimidate ambitious
men, to raise racist mobs against insurgents and in general to
render the majority of Southerners politically ineffectual for
long periods of time.
p63
Yet not even institutionalized racism has been sufficient to ensure]
Bourbon control, not even combined with disenfranchisement, control
of the electoral machinery, legislative overrepresentation and
a virtual monopoly of political money. To render themselves safe
from non-Bourbon opposition, the Southern oligarchs have had to
ensure, as far as they could, that the white farmers remained
in economic subjection as tenants and sharecroppers and thus open
to brutal economic coercion whenever they showed signs of political
independence. For years, too, the Bourbons had to keep out of
Southern states all but the most corrupt racist trade unions for
fear that Southern whites would transform their union locals from
mere collective bargaining agents into centers of political activity.
To minimize the conditions for free politics, the Bourbons have
made sure that local self-government is conspicuously lacking
in the South, where local control of schools and township government
is virtually nonexistent-the county being, for the most part,
the smallest unit of government in most Southern states. In short,
the Bourbon oligarchs have had to encourage all that corrupts,
divides and degrades, and to suppress all that might liberate
in order to maintain their hegemony. That and that alone is the
meaning of the Bourbons' so-called conservatism.
p64
The help which the Northern Democratic bosses provide is easily
summarized: it consists of whatever the Bourbons need to maintain
their hegemony. Take, for example, the Bourbons' use of racism
as an instrument of political control. 'What have the national
Democratic bosses done about eliminating it from the South? The
answer is they have done everything they dared to maintain it.
In 1912, when the Jim Crow system was still so new the Bourbons
feared that the North would not tolerate it, Josephus Daniels,
a North Carolina editor and politician, announced publicly that
"the Southerners" (i.e., the Bourbon oligarchy) were
"seeking a national policy on the subject of the race question,
for they know that short of a national policy they will never
be secure." After appointing Daniels as his Secretary of
the Navy, President Woodrow Wilson helped give the Bourbons what
they sought: in 1913 his Administration instituted racial segregation
among Federal employees in Washington, thus making racism a Federal
institution as a first step toward making it that "national
policy" which the Bourbons rightly regarded as the basis
of their security. It remained a national policy under President
Franklin Roosevelt, who made sure that his huge legislative majorities
did nothing to impair Jim Crow in the South. To quote Basil Rauch's
History of the New Deal, 1933-1938, a friendly account: "The
President had never suggested or supported the numerous proposals
for repeal of the poll tax by Federal enactment or any other reform
which might reduce the supremacy of the Bourbons, Roosevelt, in
fact, twice blocked anti-lynching bills that had passed the House
with large majorities.
When the grass-roots civil-rights movement
began growing in strength in 1960, John F. Kennedy promised civil-rights
legislation but submitted none to Congress as long as he could
hold out. Instead he appointed segregationist judges. In the famous
confrontation with Governor George Wallace at the University of
Alabama in 1962, the whole scene was arranged so that Kennedy
would look "good" in the North and Wallace, the diehard
segregationist, would look "good" in the South. Why
make a segregationist look good? Why not humiliate him absolutely
and demonstrate to Southerners what they know today, that the
segregationist cause was dead and its leaders impotent? Because
that is exactly what Kennedy did not want to do, the beneficiaries
of segregation being the Bourbon oligarchs whose power Kennedy,
like every other organization Democrat, was dedicated to protect.
Only the 1965 Voting Rights Act stands
out as a genuine act in favor of political equality for Southern
black people, and that was forced out of President Johnson and
the Democrats by overwhelming, angry and popular demand. As Evans
and Novak point out in their biography of Johnson, the President
thought he had successfully put off civil-rights agitation for
years with the politically empty 1964 Civil Rights Act. He only
acted in 1965 because it became impossible not to. The Democrats
hardly deserve credit for a law which the citizenry forced from
their unwilling hands and which they have since done their best
not to enforce.
Apart from suppressing political equality
in the South as long as they could, the Democratic bosses contribute
to the oppression of Southern black people through the less visible
mechanism of the Federal bureaucracy. Agriculture Department programs
are routinely administered so that destitute black farmers can
get no benefits. According to a 1969 New York Times story, the
Farmers Home Administration deliberately "withheld from blacks"
information about obtaining home loans. When Congress in 1965
passed an agricultural law which had the unforeseen effect of
helping black farmers obtain crop support payments for the first
time, Johnson's Secretary of Agriculture, Orville Freeman, scuttled
the provision by administrative order. Such practices explain
why four million rural black people are destitute in the South.
It has been standard Federal policy since the beginning of the
New Deal farm program to keep black farmers impoverished. The
reason for doing so is not economic but political: the poor are
easy to control.
Since economic dependence is the second
key to Bourbon control, the national Democratic party has done
what it could to keep Southern whites poor as well. Federal minimum
wage rates are kept so low, for example, that they benefit few
people except sweated Southern laborers, whose employers, conveniently,
are given widespread exemptions from the minimum wage schedules.
During the New Deal era, when a few reformers in the Department
of Agriculture tried to help Southern sharecroppers, Roosevelt
had them fired at once. He had no intention of making what he
termed "a social revolution" in the South, by which
he meant weakening the Bourbon hegemony, which would be a political
revolution indeed.
The national Democratic party helps the
Bourbon oligarchs in innumerable ways, but its single most important
contribution to Bourbon rule in the South is granting Bourbons
power in Congress, for it allows them to take care of themselves-to
make sure the Federal bureaucracy acts in accordance with their
wishes, to distribute legislative favor to local Bourbons while
withholding it from antiBourbons and so on. Liberal Democratic
administrations assist here, too, since they usually pour Federal
patronage into Bourbon hands while withholding it from anti-Bourbons.
According to Tom Wicker, President Kennedy "channeled ample
patronage southward, provided defense contracts in profligate
supply ... and spread flattering attention on Southern leaders"
who returned the favor by blocking the legislative program which
Kennedy was allegedly trying to pass.
p73
the Roosevelt Administration made a massive effort to help losing
party bosses maintain control of their parties in the face of
unwanted electoral success. The results were soon felt at the
polls. In 1936, when Roosevelt and the national Democratic party
stood at the very peak of popular success, Democratic representation
in the ten Republican bastions fell off to 38 percent. Two years
later it was down to 20 percent or normal, and the local party
bosses were once more out of danger. Keeping party politics "normal"
in this way is one reason state parties have changed so I little
since the turn of the century.
p78
Just because they nominate a candidate does not mean that the
party bosses want him to win. Far from it. If the Democratic bosses
allowed McGovern the nomination because they urgently needed a
fake rebel to lead an ostensibly reformed party, they had compelling
reasons, nonetheless, to secure his election defeat. A victory,
even for a fake insurgent like McGovern, could only make genuine
insurgency more promising to many and encourage yet more newcomers
to enter active politics. On the other hand, a defeat, especially
a severe one, would strengthen the party oligarchy considerably.
Newcomers to active politics would be crushed with disappointment,
branded as losers and quickly returned to private life. The more
stubborn or high-ranking among them could be readily "purged"
in a post-election "search for scapegoats," a vindictive
activity that can be carried out quite openly, however, since
it confirms the myth that winning means everything to the party
professionals. In the aftermath of defeat, the Democratic bosses
would be able to claim that it is they, the loyal "regulars"
(whose true hallmark is disloyalty to the party label), and not
a band of "amateurs" and "ideologues," who
alone know how to win elections. By a defeat in 1972 the Democratic
party bosses would be able to efface from memory the all-important
fact that it was they, not the "amateurs," who courted
defeat four years before in order to stymie an uprising of "amateurs."
Of the soundness of these calculations the Democratic bosses had
ample evidence, most recently the fact that the national Republican
organization became more cohesive than it had been in some years
after it helped the Democrats crush Goldwater in 1964.
The Democrats' effort to defeat McGovern,
conspicuously absent in the contest for the Presidential nomination,
was obvious enough in the election campaign. From Bridgeport,
Connecticut, to Cook County, Illinois, and beyond, virtually every
urban machine "sat out the election" or "cut the
top of the ticket." This involved such standard organization
practices as not getting out the straight-ticket voters, diverting
Presidential campaign funds into local organization coffers, keeping
McGovern speakers off local platforms and McGovern's name off
local posters, confirming and amplifying whatever suspicions the
local electorate might harbor against the candidate. A Cook County
ward-heeler spoke for Democratic ward-heelers throughout the country
when he told an American Broadcasting Company interviewer during
the campaign that McGovern is "gonna lose because we're gonna
make sure he's gonna lose."
The elected servants of the party syndicate
played their part, too, in the dump. Democratic Senators and Congressmen
who had earned reputations as liberals, as reformers, as opponents
of the Vietnam War kept virtually silent throughout the campaign.
This was an essential part of the Democratic effort to isolate
McGovern and make him appear an extremist. As if to prove that
McGovern's attack on Pentagon expenditures was grossly irresponsible,
Democratic legislators who had themselves opposed Pentagon spending
from 1968 to 1971 suddenly switched sides and, in the middle of
the campaign, voted overwhelmingly and without debate for an enormous
defense appropriation. To show that McGovern's views on Vietnam
were extreme, a Mayor's Conference which had called for immediate
withdrawal in 1971 also switched sides in 1972 and voted, under
Mayor Daley's leadership, to endorse President Nixon's Vietnam
policies. Despite all this, the Nixon Administration was ridden
with enough scandals in 1972 to sink any incumbent, but here,
too, the Democratic minions in Congress came to Nixon's rescue.
When a journalist, jack Anderson, disclosed that the Administration
had taken an enormous bribe from the International Telephone and
Telegraph Corporation, Senate Democrats dropped the investigation
as fast as they could. When it was discovered that highranking
Republican officials had ordered the wiretapping of Democratic
headquarters in Washington, D.C., Congressional Democrats decided
not to investigate at all on the grounds that the issue was already
before the courts, thereby showing a nicety of legal scruple which
party politicians never manifest when they are trying to win elections.
An Administration wheat-sale scandal and a milk-pricing scandal
were similarly shunted out of sight by the obliging Democrats.
During the campaign Democratic legislators were so openly helpful
to the Republican President that the press began speaking of Nixon's
"mastery" of Congress, something which had hitherto
gone unnoticed for the plain reason that it never existed until
the Democrats in Congress conjured it up for the campaign.
Because the Democratic bosses were determined
to defeat their own candidate, their faithful allies, the AFL-CIO
chieftains, conspicuously refused to endorse Senator McGovern,
thereby denying him millions in money and manpower. Since McGovern
was the first Democratic Presidential candidate the AFL-CIO had
ever refused to endorse, it also played a vital part in making
the Democratic nominee appear an extremist, someone beyond the
bounds of responsible politics. Lastly, the Democratic oligarchy
employed the most venerable of all means for dumping elections:
charging "dissension" in their candidate's campaign
entourage. The merit of this charge is its self-proving nature.
Should a high-ranking traitor in the nominee's circle-in this
case former Democratic National Chairman Larry O'Brien-complain
of "dissension," the very complaint "proves"
that dissension exists, with the clear implication that the candidate
is an incompetent bumbler. This was something nobody had noticed
during McGovern's nomination campaign when the party bosses allegedly
cowered in fear of his "smooth-running" organization.
Without the party oligarchy to shield
him from the light, Senator McGovern was mercilessly exposed for
what he was-a poltroon, a hypocrite, a sheep in plastic wolf's
clothing. "A 'hack' himself," as his friend and biographer
Robert Sam Anson rightly observed, McGovern, when he saw the party
bosses run away from him, could think of nothing better than hot
pursuit. Were he a different kind of man, the bosses, of course,
would not have nominated him. On the organization level, McGovern
fired or sidetracked numerous followers whom local party bosses
deemed persona non grata. He routinely assigned followers from
one state to run his campaign in another, thereby preventing potential
insurgents from building a local power base during the course
of his campaign. Whatever the local Democratic satraps ordered,
McGovern carried out; whatever harmed them he remedied. Under
the slightest pressure from his fellow Democrats there was scarcely
a reform proposal he did not retract, a firm affirmation he did
not renege on from the moment when, after promising "1,000
percent" support of his running mate Senator Thomas Eagleton,
he cut the ground from under Eagleton's feet. Having laid claim
to unstained "sincerity," McGovern gave clear signs
of boundless hypocrisy which he proceeded to confirm day after
day. When he told the Governor's Conference in September 1972
not to worry about his program because Congress would dispose
of it anyway, he virtually announced in public that his program
was wind. Behind this suicidal expediency lay McGovern's sole
notion of election strategy: the effort to prove to the party
bosses that even if he, a fake insurgent, were elected President
he was willing and able to betray his followers, to scotch insurgency,
to jettison his reforms and to give the party machine every aid
and sustenance, in a word, that he would be a President whom the
oligarchy could trust and hence a nominee whom they could afford
to see elected. No other Presidential candidate was ever so willing
to destroy his own public reputation out of deference to the power
of the party bosses as the candidate whom the bosses had paraded
before the public as the man who had destroyed their power.
Blessed with an exposed poltroon for an
opponent, two national parties for allies and the inestimable
boon of four years of non-opposition (which made a mean-spirited
blackguard appear a "statesman," a man of uncertain
temper appear the coolest of helmsmen, a scandal-ridden Administration
appear the fount of law and order), President Nixon won a curious
kind of landslide victory. Generated neither by hope in the victor's
future deeds nor gratitude for his past ones, the landslide election
brought out the smallest percentage of Presidential voters since
1948. Since Democrats, despite the landslide, gained two Senate
seats, captured seven of eleven governorships and lost a negligible
thirteen seats in the House almost entirely through reapportionment
(i.e., collusion at the state level), the 1972 elections demonstrated
how efficiently a party oligarchy can "cut the top of the
ticket" and how much power it wields.
One final point: it might well be asked
why Taft and Nixon, Kennedy and Wilson intervened on the side
of the party regulars and oligarchs, why Roosevelt protected losing
Democratic bosses in so many states as well as Bourbon obstructionists
in the South, and, more generally, why any President of the United
States, once elected, does not turn against the party bosses who
nominated him. There is no theoretical answer to this question.
It is a fact that they have not done so and the practical reason
is obvious. Had any of these Presidents ever shown antagonism
to party power, or favor to the kinds of reforms and policies
that would weaken party power, the party bosses would not have
nominated them in the first place. The whole purpose of party
organizations at every political level is to sift out, sidetrack
and eliminate men of independent political ambition, men whom
the party bosses cannot trust. Every act of every party organization
is taken in order to secure this very capacity to eliminate the
unreliable and to reward the faithful. It should hardly be surprising,
therefore, that, given party organization control over politics,
independent men rarely sit in the higher seats of public trust,
least of all in the Presidency.
What the private thoughts of party politicians
are is open only to speculation. Doubtless every loyal party servant
believes to some degree or other in the virtues of the party system.
Absolute cynicism is rare, and men are inclined to overlook the
failings of that which has raised them to eminence. Mayor Daley,
who knows as much about the corruptions of party politics as any
man alive, reportedly defends the party system because it allows
poor boys such as he was to achieve power and prominence. Other
party politicians doubtless invent other spurious apologia for
the party system they serve, but whether they believe them or
not is susceptible to no proof. We can judge the character of
public men only by what they actually do; we do not judge their
actions by presumptions about their character. It is true, nonetheless,
that any American President might betray the party organizations.
This is exactly why party bosses must try ceaselessly to control
Presidential nominations and party nominations all the way down
the line.
The National Republican Party
p85
The Democrats, for the most part, can turn issues on and off like
tap water according to changing organization needs. Between 1896
and 1900, as I said, the Democratic party, forced to save the
Southern Bourbons from the Populist party, transformed itself
overnight into the party of William Jennings Bryan and "agrarian
radicalism." In 1904 the same leaders who had nominated Bryan
for the Presidency turned around and nominated a New York corporation
lawyer, the antithesis of agrarian radicalism. In 1924, to take
another example of a Democratic volte-face, agrarian Democrats-Protestant,
anti-Tammany, anti-city-appeared to be making, according to conventional
history books, a "last-ditch stand" against the Northern
urban wing of the party at a "strife-torn" national
convention. Yet a mere two years later, the word was out that
the Tammany Catholic Al Smith would be the nominee for 1928, a
nomination which he won without a contest. The "bitter"
representatives of agrarian unrest, seemingly so potent in 1924,
had disappeared without a trace in 1928. That is because agrarian
interests had not attended the national convention in 1924, a
Democratic convention being chiefly-1972 excepted-a conclave of
party bosses and their henchmen representing themselves.
... Outside the South and the Border states,
the Democratic party, as a winning party, appears on the map as
a series of pinpoints. Its bastions are, for the most part, concentrated
urban masses. Republican state parties, in contrast, are spread
out over most Northern states. The political significance of this
is great. Republican state parties must encompass the citizens
of scores of counties and hundreds of townships, each with its
own local politics and civic leaders, political activists and
officeholders.
p87
Forced by its geographical extension to accommodate these active
local citizens, Republican state parties in the North are saddled
with party members other than workers and boodlers, namely a rank
and file of active, influential citizens interested in the Republican
party for reasons other than favors. Confined to city bastions,
on the other hand, the Democrats in the North have no substantial
rank and file of citizens permanently attached to the organization.
Senator McCarthy's 1968 insurgency was dangerous, even in defeat,
precisely because it turned so many liberal voters into local
party activists. With some important local exceptions-certain
New York City districts, for one; several university towns, for
another-the chief permanent outriggers of the Democratic party
organization are not citizens, but trade-union officials, "ethnic
spokesmen" virtually appointed by the party organization,
and, frequently, the Catholic Church hierarchy. This, as 'White
has rightly pointed out in his account of the 1960 elections,
is why the "Republican party is completely different from
the Democratic party." 'Whereas the Democrats are chiefly
party "professionals," the Republican party, in his
words, consists of "an organization wing" and a restive
citizens wing.
Burdened with an extensive rank and file
of citizens external to the party organization, Republican regulars
have been forced to provide them with something equally external
to organization politics: some satisfying, unifying and more or
less permanent political principle. This is because the only thing
that can coalesce a plurality of citizens, in contrast to mere
clubhouse boodlers, is a principle which they all agree to share.
Moreover, the more varied and independent are the members of a
state party's rank and file-the more they begin to approximate
a coalition of free citizens-the more basic the unifying principles
must be. Historically, the only political principles that have
successfully united an extensive and varied plurality of citizens
in this Republic have derived from the Republic itself. They have
been, and perhaps must be, principles which appear, at least,
to square with the preservation and enhancement of self-government,
with equality of privilege and equality of right. This has certainly
been the case with the Republican party's principles. Republican
bosses, however, have no more interest in acting upon republican
principle than the Democratic machine does. They may support the
principle of equal privilege and equal opportunity, but it is
the interest of party organizations, as will be seen, to dispense
special privilege; they may speak for representative institutions,
but party power consists precisely in controlling the representatives
whom the citizenry elects.
p96
By fiat [Nixon] declared that the Silent Majority had only one
issue on its mind, namely "law and order." By fiat he
declared that the country was "turning to the right."
By fiat he declared that a "conservative majority" was
"emerging." Since the Democratic machine was saying
the same thing at the time, the party bosses were in perfect unison
for two years.
p97
... law and order was a fake issue raised by Nixon for the sole
purpose of drowning out other issues, and this it certainly accomplished.
Whether Nixon truly believed it would win elections for Republicans
can never be known,
p102
National party collusion means that neither national party will
raise issues or initiate policies or launch partisan attacks which
would weaken the other party's organization. It means that if
either party raises issues or institutes policies that protect
its own organization, the other party will not seriously oppose
it, for what strengthens one party machine will probably strengthen
the other. This is why both national parties will unite to snuff
out a grass-roots movement even if, like the Townsend movement,
it appears to be a threat to only one of them. This is the reason
the Democrats let Nixon foist the law and order issue on the American
people for two years while helping him "take the Vietnam
War out of politics." Without such collusion between the
two national parties, real issues could not be removed from the
public arena or fake issues imposed upon it. Indeed there is no
successful abuse of power carried out by either party's national
administration, no betrayal of the common interest to a special
interest, which does not depend for its success on the nonopposition
of the other national party. The Democrats could not have taken
steps to expel small farmers from the land had the national Republican
party spoken in the farmers' behalf, or to launch a war had the
national Republican party spoken for peace. Collusion between
the two national party organizations means that, for all practical
purposes, this Republic is now ruled by a single political oligarchy.
Yet that collusion requires neither conspiratorial meetings nor
constant plotting. It arises solely from the fact that neither
party organization could survive without the other; that is the
heart of the matter.
The political implications of national
party collusion are vast, but let one example of it suffice here
to suggest its scope and significance. That example is the oppression
and degradation of black people carried out in the years after
1896. In the aftermath of the Populist revolt ... Bourbon Democrats
disenfranchised black voters and then instituted a legal system
of racial segregation in order to protect their fragile hegemony.
These measures grossly violated the Constitution, the Fourteenth
Amendment, and the Republicans' own Voting Rights Act of 1869.
The Bourbons could not have enacted these measures, would not
have dared enact these measures, had the ruling Republican party
protested, had the Bourbons even expected the Republican party
to protest. Republican bosses and Republican Presidents did not
protest. They saw their own Republican voters decimated by disenfranchisement,
they saw their own winning party in North Carolina ruined by disenfranchisement,
yet they let this unconstitutional degradation of American citizens
pass unopposed. They even went further. They appointed judges
who upheld those unconstitutional measures; they turned their
Southern parties into "white-only" parties to give themselves
an alibi for not defending the constitutional rights of black
people in the South. They were as silent on the race question
for fifty years as the Democrats were. Why did the Republican
party bosses do this in defiance of every party principle and
every party memory? Because, quite simply, if the Bourbon hegemony
had fallen in the South, the Democratic machine would have fallen
in the North, and without the national Democratic oligarchy there
could be no national Republican oligarchy.
The historic degradation of black people
in this century was the direct consequence of the collusive politics
of two national party organizations united in their common interest
in remaining party organizations. The invisibility of black people
from the turn of the century until after 1954 was not due to white
racism but to the bipartisan exclusion of black people from the
public light and the public arena. The Bourbons needed a national
policy on the race question and they got that policy, they could
only have gotten that policy, through the connivance of the national
Republican party. To suppose that the degradation of black people
is but the reflection of white racism is to swallow one more time
the mendacious presumption which I believe I have now laid to
rest-that the party organizations, bent exclusively on winning
elections, are the "translators of public opinion" and
the "handmaidens of democracy."
The abiding principle of action of the
party organizations, the principle which necessitates their collusion,
is their constant and unremitting effort to remain party organizations
and thereby control elected officials.
Indispensible
Enemies
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