The most powerful Irish political machine was not in Mayo or Belfast or Cork. It was in Chicago. And it has just broken down. Rahm Emmanuel, of whom his friend and former boss Barack Obama once said that when he lost his middle finger in an accident it rendered him practically mute, was re-elected as mayor of Chicago last week. But only narrowly and only after being forced into a runoff. It is a development that should be watched carefully in Ireland because it just may mark the death of the Irish machine.
Ireland’s main contribution to world politics, for good and ill, was the system of transactional politics – the creation of parties that could hold power by trading votes for favours on a massive scale – you give me your vote, I get you a public job or a house or access to health care.
This is the proposition that built, not just a party like Fianna Fáil, but the great Democratic Party machines of New York, Boston, Chicago and other US cities. It wasn’t all bad – it helped to integrate successive waves of immigrants into American society and it gave those who had nothing else to sell an asset (the vote) that was worth something. But it favoured patronage and corruption at the expense of ideas and policies.
Candidate
The most long-lasting of these machines was Chicago’s. It was embodied by Boss Richard J Daley, whose parents were from Dungarvan, and who was mayor for 21 years from 1955 to 1976. He was eventually succeeded by his son Richard Michael Daley, who lasted even longer, being mayor for 22 years until his retirement in 2011. Rahm Emmanuel, who had been Obama’s chief of staff, then moved back to Chicago to take over the Daley machine. (In a neat move, Boss Daley’s other son William – do keep up –then replaced Emmanuel at the White House.) Emmanuel was then easily elected as the machine candidate for mayor.
But when it came to get re-elected this year, it turned out the machine no longer worked. Emmanuel couldn’t get elected on his first attempt and just got through last week with 56 per cent in a runoff.
This kind of thing has never happened before. A New York Times report on the contest last week helps to explain why: "For decades, this city's elections were dominated by a Democratic political machine – armies of patronage government workers who could be counted on to get their neighbors out to vote. But a series of legal decrees and anticorruption investigations as recently as a decade ago have dismantled that reliable political muscle in many wards, raising a question that rarely had to be asked around here: How exactly do you win an election in Chicago anymore?"
Much of the analysis of the election talked of a “post-machine world” in Chicago. Which raises the question – if the Irish political machine is dying in Chicago, is it moribund in its place of ultimate origin on the old sod? Is Ireland, too, about to enter a post-machine world?
If you look at it from the point of view of the voter, machine politics is about your frame of reference. The machine is local: the benefits it is supposed to produce are not for the State or the nation. They’re for you and your family in your own place. So a good way of measuring the health of the machine is to find out if voters prioritise “local issues”.
And in this regard, the last general election gives us somewhat ambivalent evidence. The authoritative How Ireland Voted study tells us that in 2007 a remarkable 40 per cent of people said they voted primarily not for a Taoiseach or a government or for party policies but for “a candidate to look after the needs of the constituency” – a nice euphemism for the machine. In 2011, the percentage of voters saying this dropped – to 38 per cent. This was fewer than the percentage who cited policies (43 per cent) but not much. On the face of it, this is pretty astonishing. The 2011 election was a crisis election, dominated by huge questions of economic collapse, debt and the loss of sovereignty. If the machine mentality survived even in that environment, it must be resilient.
Uncertainty
But maybe this is merely a case of clinging on to what is familiar in the face of deep uncertainty. The same forces that have killed the machine in Chicago – a move towards more transparency and fewer opportunities for patronage – are at work here. And in Ireland, unlike in old Chicago, patronage has long been more imaginary than real: the TD doesn’t actually get you a job or a house, he just pretends to. There is an even deeper problem – the absence of goodies to distribute. Even with gradual economic recovery, there is a long-term crisis of public resources. The one good side to that crisis is that it makes it harder to distribute those resources corruptly. The grease that oils the machine is in short supply. Eventually, politicians will have to discover some other way to win elections.
Twitter: @fotoole