The Death of the Bosses

Only Biden can decide what to do with Biden

I promise I don’t want to keep writing about Joe Biden and the 2024 election. There are several literary essays I want to get cracking on, question-and-answer pieces with authors I’d like to begin, and other musings, disconnected from the sludge of national politics, that I’d rather belch out. I finished a piece about British politics that I hope, soon, to run here. There is little more exhausting in this life than Biden v. Trump. We did it in 2020 and we’re doing it again. Donald Trump is old and unhinged, Joe Biden is older and visibly senile. The June televised debate crystallized all of this for those who hadn’t paid much attention to national politics of late. And the debate, more disconcertingly, made evident the ignorance and outright deception of the Democratic political class, sympathetic pundits, and various left-of-center media organizations. We live in extraordinary times. Even Matt Yglesias is admitting he was wrong.

Now the waiting begins. Will Biden drop out? Will Kamala Harris replace him? Democrats have until the end of August, when they hold their convention and formally choose a nominee. Until the 1970s, this was how both parties elevated their standard bearers, but it’s a process that is, with good reason, alienating to the modern voter. Americans, for roughly two centuries, didn’t get much of a choice. Party insiders huddled together and decided on the Democrats and Republicans to face the electorate. Open presidential primaries in the individual states were relatively rare and mostly nonbinding. Estes Kefauver, a senator from Tennesse, could run well enough in New Hampshire to convince Harry Truman, the sitting president, to not seek another term, but winning the most votes across America wasn’t any way to capture the nomination. Kefauver won twelve of the fifteen primaries he competed in, and about three million more votes than Adlai Stevenson, the governor of Illinois. But Stevenson, at the 1952 convention in Chicago, was nominated anyway.

The boss system could be anti-democratic and hostile, at least initially, to outsiders. Corporate and business interests preferred predictable power brokers to unbought insurgents. Corruption flourished, of the like that isn’t really witnessed today: entire police departments on the take, municipal agencies in big cities stuffed with the pals of local councilmen and aldermen, graft and waste more the norm than the exception. If certain white ethnics took control of the political machines, that could mean fewer resources for poor Blacks or immigrant groups unaligned with those in charge. Politicians could bend far more to the will of a powerful party boss than any mass of voters. Tammany Hall, in New York, routinely minted mayors and governors, and unless they were uniquely ambitious, like Al Smith, they ended up as cogs and patsies, dutifully taking orders in those smoke-filled backrooms.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the boss system faded. This was inevitable. Political machines thrived on filling gaps in the social safety net that, with enough time, modern governments wouldn’t permit to open up in the first place. Food stamps replaced free turkeys on Thanksgiving. As patronage declined and the municipal governments accepted qualified applicants, political bosses lost their carrots and sticks—allies couldn’t be readily hired and apostates couldn’t be readily fired. The era of mass communication and multimillion dollar campaigns made the door-to-door turnout machines of the tough-talking bosses and ward heelers seem quaint. Whatever pot of cash a local Democratic organization might control, a large PAC—and, eventually, super PAC—could dwarf it. Cultural changes damaged the machines further. The storefront political clubhouse, in many neighborhoods, was the hub of social activity. American civic infrastructure, over the last forty years, has steadily eroded, and the clubhouse has gone with it. For the working class and new immigrants, joining a political club was once a regular ritual, a way to get near power and, in time, uplift their families. That is no longer true. Americans, these days, do not identify with their political parties all that much; rather, they know what they hate, and who they will never vote for. It’s rare to find the proud Democrat or proud Republican.

And what did the boss system do well?