Consequences of Party Reform
Polsby, Nelson W.
CONSEQUENCES OF PARTY REFORM Nelson W. Polsby / Oxford University Press / $24.95; $8.95 pbk. Richard Jensen Nelson W. Polsby, a prominent political scientist at Berkeley, reacted to Watergate by...
...The bias may be there, but its impact can be questioned in view of the success conservative candidates have had in recent years...
...Consequences of Party Reform evolved from lectures given abroad during the Carter years, and the sense of malaise from that era is its dominant motif...
...The symptoms that worry Dr...
...Party organizations died years ago, save in a few intensive care wards in Chicago and a handful of other big cities...
...The parties were typically uninterested in comprehending the complexity of society...
...His prognosis is more trouble ahead- more Jimmy Carters...
...The Republican national and congressional committees not only raise vast sums of money, they also provide technical campaign assistance and training to candidates across the land...
...If the study of disease is the best way to understand health, perhaps an analysis of what went wrong under Carter will reveal the true workings of politics...
...No inoculation can prevent the body politic from infection by another Jimmy Carter-even genetic engineering remains too primitive for that...
...Polsby's strictures on the failings of the system tell us more about the doctor's mood than about patient America...
...Yet pathology is not all there is to medicine...
...If "John Q. Public" ever existed beyond cartoon images, that day is long gone...
...We might recall that most of the old pols were hardly fearless champions of the common good, as Polsby would have it...
...National parties, in fact, have never been stronger...
...as well as by the confusion in national affairs that resulted when a product of the new system took over the White House in 1977...
...The trouble began in 1968, when the last-ditch opposition of the McCarthy and Kennedy forces to Humphrey's nomination set the stage for the creation of new rules governing party structure and delegate selection at future conventions...
...McGovern in 1972 and Carter in 1976 and 1980 were both clever enough to use these new tricks to seize the nomination...
...Polsby fears that the leftist bias in the national news media is pushing the political system in dangerous directions...
...In the old days the parties were geared to providing offices for politicians, with policy matters of secondary importance...
...The American political system is not an organism suffering the distress of old age...
...In fact, the Reagan Administration is totally ignored...
...State and local party organizations, it is true, are less important in choosing presidential nominees than ever before...
...Polsby is too quick to dismiss the pollsters, election experts, and media consultants who have replaced old-line politicians in the management of campaigns...
...lurches to the left as power gravitates to ideologues and the national media...
...Polsby is mesmerized by the chaos within the Democratic party (as if that were something new...
...Their keen sense of the pulse of public opinion, together with the mass-base fund-raising that is now the foundation of politics, means that citizen participation in the selection of candidates and the shaping of issues and the agenda for public discussion is greater now than at any time in this century...
...Public opinion polls, which even the most biased media have been forced to acknowledge and publicize, guarantee that reporters, producers, and editors cannot always get away with claiming that their views reflect those of the people at large...
...The Democrats are desperately trying to catch up, though we can expect them to lag in fund-raising ability so long as most of their adherents expect money to flow from the government to them...
...But the post-1968 rules were hardly the cause...
...In the last twenty years the GOP has been so homogeneous in its social and economic composition that its internal squabbles have seemed tame compared to the tribal warfare practiced by the Democrats...
...Anyone watching Mondale's courtship of special-interest groups, or charting the remarkable growth of the lobby industry in Washington, would agree that business, labor, professional, religious, environmental, and single-issue groups carry unprecedented political weight...
...Like our economy, which resembles hardly at all the economy of 1940, it is a creature newly reborn...
...The McGovern commission did indeed impose quotas for minorities, youth, and women in the selection of delegates, stripping some power from the old pols, but this does not necessarily mean that the excesses of the early 1970s will soon be repeated...
...sclerosis in government as bureaucrats seize control from ineffective political leaders...
...They were spokesmen for older coalition elements (unions, city machines, and certain ethnic groups) that had declined in number but still clung to the reins of power until forcibly ejected...
...in 1969 and controlled by radicals utterly hostile to the traditions of their party, handed down "reforms" more amenable to chaos than to equitable participation...
...Strong leadership of the sort Reagan displayed in 1981 is quite impossible in the political system Polsby describes...
...But let's not forget that Carter-ism was easily cured after four years...
...The McGovern commission, established Richard Jensen is professor of history at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and author of Grass Roots Politics: 1854-1983, to be published this fall by Greenwood Press...
...It is well known, but not reported by Polsby, that conservatives have made much more effective use of the new technology, most notably in the area of direct mail appeals for ideological causes, and in mass-membership groups like the National Rifle Association...
...More than ever before, they are turning to the national parties for direct help...
...Though members of the House of Representatives have developed immunities of their own (devote heavy attention to constituency services, raise huge campaign treasuries, and denounce Congress...
...and an overall decline in accountability and democracy...
...Richard Jensen Nelson W. Polsby, a prominent political scientist at Berkeley, reacted to Watergate by dedicating himself to monitoring the vital signs of the American political system...
...Distressed by his discoveries, he now warns the nation that the party reforms of the last fifteen years gravely threaten the health of democracy...
...the voters will ignore the record), senators, with greater visibility and larger constituencies, have been less successful in isolating themselves from the public mood, as the defeat of most of the liberals from conservative states in 1978 and 1980 demonstrated...
...While the GOP did not undergo internal reform, it was affected by subsequent state and federal laws, such as government financing of presidential campaigns, and by irresistible pressure from the media...
...National politics has become nationalized...
...Polsby resemble adolescent growing pains more than senescence.e than senescence...
...Candidates for major office learned decades ago that they had to plan, finance, and conduct their campaigns without heavy reliance on local parties...
...The Republican party once had a similar problem with corrupt black politicians who controlled the "rotten boroughs" of the South, and it took a series of purges (1904, 1928, 1952, and 1964) before it was resolved...
...But this is so because we have evolved into a highly specialized society in which everyone belongs to numerous overlapping groups, each with its own needs for favors and protection...
Vol. 16 • November 1983 • No. 11
