I should like to spend a little time on this Monday morning
reflecting on the current political situation with the aid of Max Weber,
arguably the greatest sociologist who has ever lived. In his magnum
opus, Economy and Society [Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft], Weber
presents the classic analysis of the phenomenon that was then coming to characterize
German society and has since become the dominant phenomenon of the modern era, bureaucracy. I think we can gain some insight into, and
perspective on, the current struggle for control of the Democratic Party by
thinking about the Party not as a conspiracy or as a movement or as a betrayal
or as a cop out, but quite simply as a bureaucracy. This will take me a while, so settle down.
Bureaucracies are social organizations consisting of defined
roles with associated functions and duties determined by objective rules – that
is to say, by rules that are to a considerable extent independent of the
individuals who occupy the roles at any moment.
In contrast with some other systems of social organization, in a
bureaucracy the roles define the individuals who occupy them, not the other way
around. The roles have rights, powers, duties,
and titles associated with them, which the individual takes when he or she assumes
the role and puts off when he or she steps out of the role. Sometimes, but not always, occupants of roles
wear special clothing or carry special symbols to identify them as
role-bearers.
Modern armies are bureaucracies. Corporations are bureaucracies. The Catholic Church is a bureaucracy. Universities are bureaucracies. Charities are bureaucracies. The Boy Scouts of America is a
bureaucracy. And political parties are
bureaucracies.
For the individuals who occupy the roles defined by the
rules of the bureaucracy, their occupation of those roles is a job. It is the way they earn their living, and
with very few exceptions, the individuals need those jobs to live. They are not independently wealthy amateurs
who agree to perform the functions of the role out of love or ideological
commitment or on a lark. Modern
political parties depend on these bureaucratic role-occupiers for their
regular, continuous functioning.
Think about it.
Suppose someone is the Registrar of Voters in a county in which such
positions are political appointments or else partisan elective offices. That person goes to work every day, five days
a week, all year round, registering voters, certifying election results,
maintaining files, writing periodic reports, and doing all the other
bureaucratic tasks specified by the rules that define the office. If this is a political position, the Party
counts on him or her to show up and perform these tasks, whether it is an
exciting October day weeks before a crucial election or a lazy March day when
nobody in town is paying attention to anything but the performance of the local
college basketball team in the NCAA tournament.
Such jobs do not pay a great deal, so politically engagé upper middle class doctors and
lawyers and college professors may have no interest in competing for them. Sixty thousand a year does not seem like much
to them, even though it is a bit more than the median household income for an
American family, but you can bet that it means a good deal to the Registrar of
Voters. That job is his or her meal
ticket.
The Registrar probably got her job [let us assume the
Registrar is a woman] by going to local Party meetings several times a week for
years, volunteering during elections, ringing doorbells, serving as one of
those folks who check you in when you go to vote. For her, the job is not a sacrifice she is making
out of deep ideological conviction [though of course she may have that, as
anyone might]. It is a paycheck and a title
she is proud of, a positon that gives her status in the community, and maybe,
if she sticks with it and is seen to be doing a good job, a step up a ladder to
an even better job with a bigger paycheck.
There is nothing reprehensible about this. Quite to the contrary. It is the norm in a society dominated by
large bureaucratic organizations. Her behavior,
viewed objectively and functionally, is little different from the behavior of
an Army Captain bucking for Major or an Intern trying to get a Residency or a
Law Associate angling for a Partnership or an Assistant Professor trying to get
tenure.
Political professionals, or pols as they are sometimes
called disparagingly, rely on the party’s coffers for their jobs. Not surprisingly, they tend to view with
favor big donors who, in return for preferment or maybe just access, provide
large donations that keep the organization going. They may welcome enthusiastic small donors,
but long experience has taught then that small donors are fair weather friends
[or maybe foul weather friends, as the case may be.] Their enthusiasm waxes and wanes, because for
them – but not for the party professionals – politics is a sometime thing. A protest candidate like Bernie Sanders may
fund an entire run for a presidential nomination with donations averaging $27,
but those $27 donations have a way of drying up when the election is over, and
for someone whose full-time employment depends on party funds, that is a very
nerve-wracking way to live. I think of
Immanuel Kant, who until 1770, when he was awarded a professorship at the
University of Königsberg, earned his living as a privatdozent, being paid by those students who chose to attend his
lectures.
These facts may be offensive to those of us for whom
politics is a grand calling, but they are a way of life for the people for whom
politics is their daily bread. Do we
need such people? Well, in a country of
three hundred thirty million souls, with fifty states and innumerable counties
and municipalities, the answer is yes.
These are the folks whose daily work determines whether voter
suppression laws are passed or blocked.
They are the people who decide whether Creationism is taught alongside
Evolution in the local high schools.
They are the people who decide whether laws are passed making it hard to
form a labor union.
But, someone protests, Why couldn’t we dispense with pols,
with paid professional pollsters and fund raisers and ward captains and media
massagers and the crowd of people who make a living out of what ought to be a
civic duty? We could, of course, if we
could count on civic-minded or ideologically driven volunteers to do all the
work that the working stiffs in the political parties now do. But as Oscar Wilde famously observed, “The
trouble with socialism is that it takes too many evenings.” Which is to say, in a large, modern bureaucratic
society, even one like America which exhibits a remarkably high level of ground
level volunteer activity, it is going to require an organized political party staffed
by paid men and women and funded in a regular and reliable fashion to have a
continuing and sustainable effect on the public life of the nation.
So, we have a choice to make, and like all serious and
important choices, it is neither easy nor unambiguously clear: Do we on the left try to take over the
existing Democratic Party, with its vast and well-established cadre of local,
state, and national professionals? Or do
we wash our hands of the Democratic Party and try to build a new party pretty much
from scratch?
Let us be clear: That
is the choice. If you are not willing to
do the work of building a new party, hoping to rely instead on what Mao in
another context called a Permanent Revolution, then you are on a fool’s errand. You may succeed in getting your candidate
nominated for the Presidency, but you will not win back the 1000 state
legislative seats lost to the Republicans during the Obama years, and you will
not therefore re-establish the right to vote, or to have an abortion, or even
to use the bathroom of your gender, in all the locations where those rights
have been effectively taken away.
Now, on rare occasions, new parties have succeeded in the
United States. Rarely, but they
have. My personal judgment is that we
have a better chance of advancing our goals by trying a hostile takeover of the
Democratic Party, but I do not know that for a fact, and I respect those like
Chris who have clearly made a different judgment. All I ask is that we recognize the
bureaucratic reality of modern American politics and make our decision with
that recognition before us.
Howard said...