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- [00:00]
Ian Coss
Support for Scratch and Win comes from Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. I feel like I've been hearing a lot of talk lately about patronage politics. Returning to Washington, a system based on loyalty, relationships, transactions. And if you listen to our series on the lottery, you know this kind of system is not new. Patronage was the beating heart of the Massachusetts lottery in its early days. And of course, the man at the center of that system was State Treasurer Bob Crane. As a politician, Crane was not all that ideological or focused on particular policy wins. Crane was focused on people. Relationships meant power, and Crane was a master at building them. He made unlikely alliances around the statehouse. He traded favors with business people. And as we discuss all through the series, he gave out jobs, lots of jobs. The essence of patronage. Crane used to be the norm in the Democratic Party. It was Democrats who were the party of patronage. So a question that's been nagging at me is why did the party change? Why did patronage become a dirty word? And what was lost when that happened? So just imagine my excitement when as I was starting to think about doing these interview episodes, I saw that one of my very favorite fellow history nerds has a new book out exploring this very question. From GBH News, this is Scratch and Win. I'm Ian Coss. Today my conversation with Lily Geismer, professor of history at Claremont McKenna College. Geismar's new book, which she co edited with Brent Siebel, is called Mastery and Professional class liberals since 1960. It's about a profound shift in the Democratic Party since the days of Bob Crane in how it operates and who is part of it. My question for Lily is should we be nostalgic for the days of patronage and machine politics? So tell me about the culture of the Democratic party in the 1960s and 70s. Who is part of it? What are the candidates like and what, I guess, like? What's the feel of it?
- [03:28]
Lily Geismer
So the Democratic party in the 1960s and 1970s was kind of at the end of what had been a very dominant place in American politics. Like the Democrats control what is known as the kind of longest and most stable political coalition of the New Deal coalition, which lasts from about 1932 to 1968. And this is the coalition that FDR puts together, which is at its core a very working class coalition with Its base sort of in union members, especially in the Northeast. You also have people of color, farmers, and then this kind of middle class intellectual group, but it's not a particularly stable coalition. These are groups that don't necessarily see eye to eye, but they do actually give the Democratic Party a lot of power and control. And the two people I think of as most kind of quintessential of the Democratic Party in that moment would be Hubert Humphrey, who is the senator of Minnesota and Lyndon Johnson's vice president. He was someone who was very pro civil rights, but also had a really, really close tie to organized labor. And then the other person is Tip O'Neill, who is a kind of from an older generation of Democrats. And one of the things about both of them, they actually show different sides of the New Deal in some ways. You know, Tip O'Neill was, you know, he first comes into political office during the New Deal and has this real vision that, like, it's the job of government to help people and takes that into the famous all politics is local. And someone like Hubert Humphrey also believes in this idea that it's the job of government to help you through, through labor and through civil rights. And so those are the kinds of key sort of figures in the Democratic Party at that, at that moment in terms of, like, leadership. And there's becomes a growing shift in the party after that.
- [05:09]
Ian Coss
Just to hold for a second on, I love that you brought up Tip O'Neill because, well, I'm from Massachusetts, but also I feel like he really connects. There are a lot of parallels between him and Bob Crane. And this idea of politics is about helping people in a very direct, local, immediate way. And so I'm curious, could you talk about how does Tip O'Neill get into politics? Or how does somebody like a tip O'Neill gets. Get in?
- [05:39]
Lily Geismer
Well, I think it's through a lot of connections. Tip O'Neill, like me, is a native of Cambridge, and I can't go exactly into every part of his biography, but he would have had connections growing up to members of the Democratic Party and in those kinds of neighborhoods. You would know your ward, your city council person, all of those people who have ties to Democratic Party. And so that's a kind of typical pathway for Democrats, like working within the party structure, having those sort of deep party relationships. But I think also through that forging close connections to your constituency. And I do think something that one thing the New Deal offered is you have this massive growth, the federal government, which gives a lot more opportunities for figures like that to be able to help their local constituencies, which then sort of solidifies this bond and relationship to the Democratic Party.
- [06:28]
Ian Coss
Yeah. There's this story I read once about Tip O'Neill that in his very first election, which he lost, he learned afterwards that his next door neighbor, there was an elderly woman who lived next door, didn't vote for him. And he. He went and asked her. I don't know if it was a confrontation, but he asked her directly. I was like, why didn't you vote for me? You know me. And she's like, you never asked. You never asked for my vote. And that was a lifelong lesson. He took that like, you gotta go out there and ask. You gotta talk to people. And that sort of informs that classic. All politics is local ethos.
- [07:01]
Lily Geismer
Yeah. And I think. I mean, I think that idea that you really have to. That is your duty as a politician. You're there to represent people, but you have to kind of build their trust. Does create this particular brand and version of politician, in a sense, I think, amongst constituents, is that these people are very much part of their lives, and they are the person you turn to if something is wrong or you need something.
- [07:23]
Ian Coss
So let's bring in the central figure in the lottery story, which is State Treasurer Bob Crane. And for him, it's all about relationships. All politics is about trading favors, helping people get jobs, and really just weaving this web of mutual support that extends both down to his constituents and also among other folks in state government. And as I understand it, Crane is pretty typical of his generation in this way. But by the 1980s, he starts to seem kind of out of step with his party. And I'm wondering what, on a high level, changed.
- [08:06]
Lily Geismer
Yeah, well, I think. I mean, this is something that's going on sort of both locally and nationally. And so I think that someone like Bob Cranes represents, especially in Massachusetts, what is this idea of an old guard and what shifts is a couple of different things. Some of it's a demographic shift that happens in the state where you have a new generation emerging, especially in the suburbs, which actually are Massachusetts population base, and they start to gain more dominance, both in terms of, like, their demographics, but also politically. That creates a shift in kind of the type of politician that they want. And so the person that I think is most representative of this is Mike Dukakis. He was from Brookline. He went to Swarthmore and Harvard Law School, but then he was on the city council and then becomes a state legislature. And he hated people like Bob Crane in the state legislature. Like, he believed that like that was the, you know, the problem with politics was this idea of an all relationship system of patronage. He really believed in this idea of reform the system to make it fairer and more meritocratic. And then within that was a different kind of vision of what should be the focus of politics. And that becomes a sh. He represents a larger generation of politicians who have that vision. They become iconically known in 1974 as the Watergate babies. And it's this whole group of kind of young representatives in Congress who represent kind of suburban districts and they explicitly want to shift the Democratic Party away from that older kind of model. And two, a new kind of politics that's much, much more based on meritocracy, that's not beholden to special interest groups like labor, that doesn't have that same kind of like horse trading dimension to it in terms of its politics.
- [09:51]
Ian Coss
I guess what I'm trying to tease apart is like beyond just as a way to keep themselves in power, why is patronage kind of important in shaping the identity of the Democratic Party and the way it governed? You know what I mean? Like, why does that practice get so bound up in a kind of politics?
- [10:12]
Lily Geismer
Yeah, and I don't think it's just about power. And in some ways it's also, I mean that's, that's also becomes like the Democratic Party's relationship to the labor movement at the national level, which is the idea that like, you support us, we support you. And so patronage is actually like a continuation of that idea that your government is creating programs to help people. But those programs actually like create and build jobs. That's the older model of the patronage system that you're like doing a highway program or like a roads program and that's going to help lots of people. That's good to get better roads, but it also is going to give people in someone's district jobs. And therefore it's a sign of government helping people. I think the modern version, so the version that would be the sort of Watergate baby version, still believe in a place that it's the job of government to help people, but they see it as unfair and unethical that you would give those jobs out to people that you know. And if you're someone who takes a much more kind of like meritocratic vision, which I think does become one of the dominant ideologies of the Democratic party from the 70s onward, if you believe in that, then the idea is that like the best person should get that job.
- [11:24]
Ian Coss
Right. Why do you think the idea of meritocracy and good governance become so core to modern liberalism as we know it.
- [11:35]
Lily Geismer
Well, I think it's also about this larger rise of a new kind of professional class or knowledge workers after World War II and then increasingly beyond in the 1970s, 1980s, as like professional school becomes more popular. And so you have this generation of people who've gone to college and the entire. If you are someone who has an. Sees college education as a pathway to success, you are deeply invested in the sort of vision of meritocracy. And I think one of the things that's challenging about the question of with good governance is that in the post war era, the federal government had gotten very big. And I don't mean to sound like Elon Musk right now, but you had this big government, and I think there was a sense that it was not always acting in the best interest of people. I think one of the things that really solidified that was Vietnam. And then Watergate becomes like the nail in the coffin on it. And that is really foundational to this new generation of Democrats who come in.
- [12:42]
Ian Coss
So in a way, like the Watergate babies and the good government types, which somebody told me that Crane used to call the good government types Goo Goos.
- [12:52]
Lily Geismer
Oh, it's so funny. My dad uses that term too. It's like I'd never heard it before, but he describes. That was how people talked about all those people in Massachusetts politics.
- [13:01]
Ian Coss
So the Goo Goos were like the ones who are willing to make hard cuts in government and make changes.
- [13:08]
Lily Geismer
Yeah, they believe that government should be more efficient. And I think they thought that things were getting really big. And I think there's an interesting question of. It's where you see sort of the left and the right meeting. And there's a suspicion of the kind of big bureaucracies coming out of the late 1960s and early 1970s. And within that gets pulled all of these kinds of. All of this kind of old style of Democratic party thinking. So I think the thing about the Watergate babies who then get known they have a great set of names because before they can kind of land on something that works, it's like. And then they're also called the Atari Democrats for their, like, love of tech. And then the New Democrats. I love that phrase, by the way.
- [13:44]
Ian Coss
Atari Democrats.
- [13:45]
Lily Geismer
Atari Democrats is the best. I wish that had, like, held on a little bit longer.
- [13:48]
Ian Coss
I actually mentioned this in a. I was part of a live event recently and this came up and then I got a lot of blank looks. But I only know it's in your book.
- [13:57]
Lily Geismer
Maybe I, like, need to bring it back more.
- [13:59]
Ian Coss
Bring it back, Bring it back.
- [14:00]
Lily Geismer
It's a great term, but the thing about with the terminology is, like, it was this idea with Watergate babies who they were upset with was Nixon and the Republicans, but it was actually like a critique of the Democratic Party. And like, another kind of key piece of that is like, seeing those kinds of relationships between the Democratic Party and the labor movement as, like. As somewhat corrupt. And that was that, like, you had certain groups having undue influence over the party. And so you wanted to make everything just kind of, like, equitable and fair. So you, like, run government like a business, which is a very different philosophy than someone like Bob Crane had for how to manage things.
- [14:40]
Ian Coss
One of the things I'm hearing, and please correct me if this is wrong, but it seems like patronage is almost like a symbol, maybe more meaningful than a symbol, but it represents the connection between the Democratic Party and the labor movement. The historic strength of that bond is somehow tied up in the. In a literal sense, in that patronage is about jobs and labor is about jobs. But there's something more there in the transactional, the explicitly transactional nature of that relationship. That is then in jettisoning patronage and making patronage kind of a dirty word associated with the old ways, the party was also shedding some of that historic tie with organized labor.
- [15:29]
Lily Geismer
Oh, yeah. And that was, I mean, part of their idea. I think there is. And I don't know if, I mean, they wouldn't have called it patronage. And I think patronage has this idea that it's outside of the labor movement, but those relationships graft on. I think it's one way that they like why the system works in various different capacities. And so there is actually like, a whole history of, like, the reason that people join unions has to do in some capacity with, like, knowing those existing relationships in their localized communities. So they do work together in various different ways. But I think there was an idea that patronage is a system that is actually like a drag. And the labor movements themselves are like a drag on the party. It's not fair. It's kind of like backroom dealings, you know, of like the cigar smoke. And all of these ideas were that this is not a fair system. I think the other piece is like, they. For the Atari Democrat or Watergate baby types is that they also believe that organized labor was actually like a drag on the economy too.
- [16:26]
Ian Coss
Right.
- [16:27]
Lily Geismer
And I think the similar thing is that, like, that a patronage system doesn't necessarily. If you believe in, like, the merit, meritocracy. That meritocracy leads to, like, better business because you're like the best people are doing the jobs, but in a patronage model, like, it's not necessarily that you're the best people are getting jobs. You're not getting the same kind of like profit or return. And that's also where it's a system that is kind of antithetical to this new vision.
- [16:54]
Ian Coss
I should point out that Bob Crane, despite being the consummate old guard backroom dealer, he neither drank nor smoked. He was a life.
- [17:03]
Lily Geismer
So he was just coughing in those back rooms. He was a lifelong tea totaler.
- [17:07]
Ian Coss
Yeah, he was the one person not smoking in the smoke filled room, but he was in the room for sure.
- [17:13]
Lily Geismer
Yeah, I probably got a lot of secondhand smoke from all of those that time in the room. But yeah, I mean, it is a different. And I think that image becomes so foundational to what so many figures are kind of running against.
- [17:25]
Ian Coss
So I think this is the moment to bring in this Supreme Court dissent by Antonin Scalia that I quote at one point in the podcast, but I just, I'm kind of fascinated by as a document. So in the 80s, the Supreme Court hears a series of cases about patronage. They're brought like by a sheriff's office or some district attorneys kind of picking away at different pieces of the practice. And at one point, Scalia issues this defense of patronage. And maybe I just want to read a clip from it. It's a little long, but I just love this. He says, as the merit principle has been extended and its effects increasingly felt, as the boss Tweeds, the Tammany halls, the Pendergast machines, the Byrd machines and the daily machines have faded into history, we find that political leaders at all levels increasingly complain of the helplessness of elected government unprotected by party discipline before the demands of small and cohesive interest groups, the choice between patronage and the merit principle, or to be more realistic about it, the choice between the desirable mix of merit and patronage principles in widely varying federal, state and local political contexts is not so clear that I would be prepared as an original matter to chisel a single inflexible prescription into the Constitution. And what I think Scalia is saying is that patronage has its place. And I'm wondering, for you, looking back decades later, is there a kernel of truth in what he was saying?
- [19:12]
Lily Geismer
Yeah, it's funny, I mean, I was thinking of this because he's actually saying that. I mean, if you think about Scalia as an originalist, like, that he's like, patronage is more kind of original to American principles than merit. And we think of the United States as, like, being this kind of meritocracy, and that's this kind of, like, foundational myth. But he's sort of saying the opposite. You know, I rarely find myself agreeing with Antonin Scalia, but I think there is a lot of truth to what he's saying, and I think it's something that we see very much playing out today since the actually 80s and 90s. There's a book by Daniel Schlossman and Sam Rosenfeld called Hollow Parties, which uses this idea of, like, the hollowing out of the parties, and particularly of the Democratic Party, on the idea that you lose these kinds of relationships. And I think one big thing that happens to the Democratic Party in particular in the 1980s is that they lost successive presidential races. And so they're very concerned about the kind of winning of the presidency. And so they really turn a lot of their attention to that. And you have this kind of national of American politics, which is also fed by the changes in the media landscape and a number of other things. What that ends up doing is this kind of, like, withering of state and local parties. And those parties played a really key role in people's lives, and they did build a kind of sense of loyalty and sense of identity that made party systems more robust, that you had these local literal parties or picnics and other kinds of things that, like, played a foundational role in many people's lives. And it did actually lead to this idea that government is there to help you. And I think that that concept has so fallen out of American society at this point that this is some of the costs of kind of losing a patronage model.
- [21:05]
Ian Coss
Yeah. And crucially, that loyalty was not based on the fact that everyone at the picnic is pro choice or name your political position, but that everyone there had a personal connection to the Democratic Party, that they knew somebody who got a job from somebody that always.
- [21:23]
Lily Geismer
Yeah, it was a very different litmus test as to what was. There weren't those same kind of ideological litmus tests. And you had much more kind of diverse. A different kind of diversity. I mean, a diversity of thought in some capacity, but that the tie was that you knew that person and you knew that that person was going to help you get a job or also help if you wanted to build a new playground structure or something like that.
- [21:48]
Ian Coss
Yeah. I guess what's confounding is that Scalia points at all these changes that in hindsight feel very prescient. He's talking about polarization. He's talking about the weakening of party, the strength of parties. He's talking about organized interest groups exerting a lot of power on parties. And it's just hard to know what you were saying about the nationalization of politics. And it's hard to know what's upstream of what's causing what. But it does kind of seem like these things are all of a piece.
- [22:23]
Lily Geismer
Yeah. In some ways I think it becomes probably mutually reinforcing. And I do think Massachusetts is a sort of important example of this process happening of kind of who becomes the kind of new representatives of the Democratic Party shifting a lot too. And so the kind of affluent suburban professionals who I've spent a lot of time studying are the people who kind of then come to dominate. The example I can give is like I was thinking about the national level, but like my understanding is like John Kerry was not doing a huge amount for like the people of Massachusetts. Like he was much more of a kind of national figure of a kind of new guard of a politician. But you have a lot of those kinds of people who kind of come in who just have a very different representation and don't do the same kind of horse trading that was going on previously.
- [23:12]
Ian Coss
Right. I'm curious, do you permit yourself some nostalgia for the days of patronage in smoke filled rooms?
- [23:21]
Lily Geismer
I don't know if this. I don't know if I've at the smoke filled rooms because I think that as a. I think the like white male dom of those rooms are a little bit. I mean that's the other part of like why you could do that kind of politics. That it was like a. It was a pretty homogenous group and I don't smoke cigars, so I feel like I would have felt out of. I like bought crane would have been kind of out of place in the room. But I think I am nostalgic for that idea of the deep connections that came from that vision of politics. And I do think the question of if you broaden out patronage to also think about labor unions, this idea, when you had a much more robust relationship to thinking about the needs of working class people and that is who dominates who's the priority of the Democratic Party that there was were important set of priorities.
- [24:14]
Ian Coss
Yeah. I guess part of what I wonder is, was the homogeneity, the like the white maleness of it an essential feature? Like is that the only way that a patronage system. Not the only way, but is that sort of Inherent that.
- [24:35]
Lily Geismer
Well, I wonder, I mean, if that's also sort of a chicken and egg question. Cause I was thinking about this when you. The thing of, like, this vision of, like, constituencies coming together who have, like, different views and like. And also this idea of, like, Tip O'Neill going to his neighbor, like, part of that also leads to having, like, certain kinds of, like, racially and economically integrated neighborhoods too. And so, like your constituent, you know, you build those relationships. Cause with the people that you live with. And oftentimes those are built on a kind of certain forms of segregation. So that, to me, is one place. I think it made it work better. And it's interesting with the ways in which everyone knowing each other and having different. These kinds of close relationships and close bonds, if that in of itself is part and parcel of this kind of homogeneity. But I wonder if. Not necessarily.
- [25:25]
Ian Coss
It almost reminds me of the way liberals will always fawn over Scandinavia and their fantastic social programs. And it's like, well, it is easier to have universal healthcare and everything when you have a very socially homogenous country.
- [25:42]
Lily Geismer
No, I make that point all the time in the second now, in all these countries that have had to deal with the questions of immigration, it's really. You've seen those tensions fray. And I think that is a sort of core question in the United States of what happens.
- [25:55]
Ian Coss
It seems easier to have a Democratic Party that's all based on relationships and ties and labor when the key people in those rooms all share a cultural background or an upbringing or what have you.
- [26:09]
Lily Geismer
Yeah, and I also think. I mean, I think about that too. I was actually just teaching my students about the kind of like the consensus politics, you know, the lack of polarization of the 19 in the 1950s, which there's a number of reasons for. But it was also like when all the. Like, I mean, the vast majority of members of Congress were white men, it was a lot easier to kind of have to create those kinds of, like, shared agreements and have like, collegiality than I think gets played out in the ways that political demographics have changed.
- [26:56]
Ian Coss
So I read your book, your first book, Don't Blame Us, while I was working on Scratch and Window, kind of as sort of like background reading, helped me understand the world and the time in which this story takes place. And then just as I was releasing the show, I saw you were putting out a new book, a collection of essays that you co edited that's all about the transformation of the Democratic Party and how we get to the Democratic Party of today. And it takes its title. So Mastery in Drift is based on the title of a book from 1914 called Drift and Mastery. Could you tell me about that connection and why a book from more than 100 years ago resonated for you at this moment?
- [27:43]
Lily Geismer
Well, it's a. The title comes from this book by Walter Lippman, critiquing in many ways the corruption of the machine politics and calling for a kind of like, technocratic vision. And so we were having a sort of play on that of what has happened when you now have too much technocracy dominating kind of the ideals of modern liberalism.
- [28:09]
Ian Coss
So basically that pendulum has swung to the far extreme since 1914.
- [28:16]
Lily Geismer
Yeah. And I think government is complicated. Like, you want to have experts in positions, but one of the problems with a hyper technocratic and rational approach is that you sometimes lose out on a bigger sort of social vision. I can talk for hours about this because it's something I've written a lot about, but is the ways in which people like Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council really did sort of fundamentally try to deprioritize the importance of organized labor and really did sort of see the future of the Democratic Party lying within kind of these sort of more affluent suburbanites.
- [28:50]
Ian Coss
And is that, for you, the key pitfall of the sort of professional class liberalism is that it traded labor unions for the suburbs?
- [29:00]
Lily Geismer
Yes. And I think that there's a way of, like, it's not just labor unions and the suburbs, but it's like all the policy decisions that come from that shift, that when you see suburban knowledge workers as your base, it does change the kinds of policies that you produce. Those are the people who are calling you. Those are the people you see as, you know, whose votes you need. I mean, another thing that also makes a huge difference is the question around fundraising and donations. And the money in politics has changed dramatically since the 1970s. And I didn't hear that in Scalia's comment. But that has also changed the nature of politics in all kinds of ways, like who politicians are spending their time with, who they see as important, and instead of going door knocking to their neighbor, if that's the Tip O'Neill example, it's better for them to be on a call with a donor, and so that's whose voice they're listening to.
- [29:49]
Ian Coss
Yeah. I want to try to maybe temper my nostalgia, my patronage nostalgia a little bit here and offer a counterexample. I'm curious to hear your thoughts. I've been thinking about the contrast between Michelle Wu, mayor of Boston and Eric Adams in New York, Michelle Wu, I think she captures so much about the professional class Democratic Party. She is not from Massachusetts, she came here to go to Harvard. She's the first Asian woman to lead the city, maybe the first non Catholic, non Irish or Italian mayor in I don't know how many decades. So she totally represents that new version of the party. You look at Eric Adams, he's born and raised in New York, represents a much more kind of constituent neighborhood based politics and certainly a more patronage oriented style of politics. And I would much rather live in Woo's Boston than Eric Adams New York at the moment. Just looking at how their political regimes have unfolded. And so I'm curious what you make of that.
- [31:04]
Lily Geismer
I mean, I think absolutely that there's a way that Eric Adams is this kind of new iteration of this style of patronage. I mean, I think it's also really interesting because of the questions of Democratic Party. Where they're really dominant is actually like city politics. So, you know, most major cities right now are dominated by these kind of Democratic machines to some capacity. But the, you know, some of Michelle wu's policies have been, have fallen in line with some of this kind of like technocratic thinking of like new, of like these new ideas, new solutions, you know, that come from like certain level of expertise, but in lots of ways that are there to really try to help the city and to help the people who live there and not based on these kinds of like multi generational relationships and kind of back scratching and the pretty blatant versions of corruption that we have seen come out of New York right now.
- [31:59]
Ian Coss
I have to imagine this has been an interesting year to put out a new book about the state of the Democratic Party. Even though the book I'm sure was pieced together and written well before the election. But I guess so I'm wondering if there's anything from the last few months that revealed something new or maybe underlined something that you were already observing about the state of the Democratic Party.
- [32:29]
Lily Geismer
Yeah, and I would say that for this book and then probably all the things I've written about the Democratic Party in various different points who seem to be, I can't escape them, which is like, I think that the Kamala Harris campaign really came to personify some of the limitations with the kind of professional class approach. But I think one of the biggest things was this idea of like, first of all turning to like, you know, moderate suburbanites or the way that you win elections. And so going back to that idea of like the bringing out we saw this with the Harris campaign of like, bringing out Liz Cheney in this effort to like, win over suburbanites and kind of try and like not. Not really paying the same kind of attention to the, like, to your. Your base. And then I think the other key piece of it was the kind of ideas of like, really basing her economic vision on the idea of like the opportunity economy. And this whole idea of like, really promoting opportunity as opposed to like, in my mind, seeing the real economic pain that many people are in. And most people actually right now don't necessarily want opportunity. They want like economic security. So those are, to me, where some of the like, problematic dimensions that have been long standing issues with the Democratic Party coming into the forefront. But then I think the other thing, and this goes back to the patronage question because I think one of the things that's happened is a long standing disinvestment in state and local parties, but also in like actually doing like real organizing. And that doesn't mean like dropping in a month before an election and doing door knocking. It actually means building relations. And so through that kind of like empathy and mutuality, you build support and you build movements. And so that's. I think one thing that is like, is so missing right now from kind of the mainstream Democratic Party's approach.
- [34:14]
Ian Coss
It's just interesting to me. I mean, I know I keep asking about patronage, so it keeps coming up, but it's interesting to me how it. You can look at it from all these different angles and on one level it's just giving people who, you know jobs, but then seen another way, it's like this historic connection with the labor movement. Seen another way, it's. That's just another word for like party infrastructure apparatus that doesn't just show up a month before the election, but is a constant presence in a community.
- [34:49]
Lily Geismer
Yeah, I think that's what it is. It's like having this sense of the party is there and that's what the patronage system did, that these are constant presences in people's lives that you know to go and you have an identity that's wrapped up in it in various different ways.
- [35:04]
Ian Coss
Yeah. And I think, you know, to bring it back to Crane, towards the end of his career, he would face all these tough questions about his hiring. And he was absolutely unapologetic and made. No, he didn't make any attempt to hide it or call it by a different name. To him, it was about relationships. And what is politics if not relationships? And how else would you build a political party and a political candidacy.
- [35:37]
Lily Geismer
Yeah, I think that's an important thing of understanding it actually as in some ways a worldview and that something that is believed and also seeing the ways in that system has worked. I think part of the problem has been just the corruption that then comes with it. So that goes to your question of when you asked it could happen without white if it wasn't just white men, could patronage happen without corruption? Could you have a completely clean patronage system? And I can't think of one historically at the ready that gives an example.
- [36:08]
Ian Coss
That's the problem. It seems like the gifts of patronage are all bound up in the flaws, the corruption, the exclusion, all of that.
- [36:16]
Lily Geismer
Yeah. I mean, I think because Tip O'Neill is probably the gold standard and I'm sure there must have been rampant corruption going on too, probably by today's standards.
- [36:24]
Ian Coss
Yes.
- [36:25]
Lily Geismer
I mean that's the thing. It was like so I think the way you just encapsulated a perfect perfectly.
- [36:35]
Brent Siebel
You made me love you I didn't want to do it, I didn't want to do it you made me want you and all the time you knew it I guess you always knew it you made me happy sometimes you made me sad but there were times, dear, you made me feel so bad.
- [37:13]
Ian Coss
The new book once again is called Mastery and Drift Professional Class Liberals since the 1960s. It's a collection of essays co edited by my guest Lily Geismer and Brent Siebel. Geismer's first book, which I also recommend, is called Don't Blame Us Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party. I'll be back with one more of these interview episodes next week about why some parts of the government, like the lottery, run so much more smoothly than other parts. Finally, in the spirit of Tip O'Neill, I would like to formally ask for your vote, by which I mean your support rate, review, subscribe, follow and most importantly, tell one friend about this show. That is how podcasts survive and grow, and we are no exception. This episode was edited by Lacey Roberts, Mei Lei is the project manager, and the executive producer is Devin Maverick Robbins. Scratch and Win is a production of GBH News and distributed by prx.
- [38:26]
Brent Siebel
You made me feel so bad.
- [38:32]
Lily Geismer
You.
- [38:32]
Brent Siebel
Made me cry for I didn't want to tell you, I didn't want to tell you I need some love, that's true, yes I do indeed I do, you know I do. So gimme, gimme, gimme gimme what I cry for? You know you got the brand of kisses that I die for. You know you made me you know you made me? You know you made me love you. And all the time you knew it. Thank you.
- [39:35]
Ian Coss
Hey, I want to make sure that you know this series you're listening to right now is part of an ongoing feed telling stories from the past to help us understand our present. Our first season is all about infrastructure. The second season is about gambling. And we've got more seasons planned. So if you want to stay on top of what the team and I are doing, go ahead and follow or subscribe to this podcast. Wherever you listen, listen. We've got some really exciting stories coming up, and I hope you'll stay with us. Thanks.
- [40:09]
Lily Geismer
From prx.