Political Realism Quotes

“What the country faces is not a crisis of leadership but a crisis of followership.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy

“Transactional politics is not always appropriate or effective, but a political system which is not reliably capable of it is a system in a state of critical failure. Deal-making”
― Jonathan Rauch, Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy

“Realism in foreign affairs, besides being an attitude, also implies a theory about where peace comes from: not primarily from hegemonic power (as neocons and imperialists believe) or from international cooperation (as liberal internationalists believe), though those things are important. It comes, above all, from equilibrium. Equilibrium is not a good in itself, and sometimes it needs to be upset; but, for the realist, knocking things out of kilter sets off all kinds of unpredictable chain reactions, which can be hard to foresee and harder to control.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy

“If realists have one view in common, it is that parties play (or should play) a central role in governing but have been too often overlooked or marginalized by the reforms of recent decades. A”
― Jonathan Rauch, Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy

“In the midst of the declining governing capacity of the American democratic order, we ought to focus less on ‘participation’ as the magical solution and more on the real dynamics of how to facilitate the organization of effective political power.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy

“Instinctively, machine culture is skeptical of or hostile to freelancers and insurgents, though it may pay them lip service, and it is most friendly to loyalists and repeat players—the people who have skin in the game and will most reliably respond to incentives, people otherwise known as hacks.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy

“For many of the same reasons, machines tend to be a force for moderation. They must engage in transactional politics to survive, and that often requires them to put ideology aside, or at least to dial it back, in the interests of holding power.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy

“Show me a political system without machine politics, and I’ll show you confusion, fragmentation, and a drift toward ungovernable extremism.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy

“Amateurs and single-issue activists have their uses, but without hacks the machine fails, which is why it puts such a premium on people who pay their dues and work their way up the ranks.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy

“What, then, is political realism? Attitudinally, it shares many traits and premises with foreign policy realism. It sees governing as difficult and political peace and stability as treasures never to be taken for granted. It understands that power’s complex hydraulics make interventions unpredictable and risky. (Banning some ugly political practice, for instance, won’t necessarily make it go away.) It therefore values incrementalism and, especially, equilibrium—and, therefore, transactional politics. If most of the players in a political system are invested in dickering, the system is doing something right, not something wrong. Back-scratching and logrolling are signs of a healthy political system, not a corrupt one. Transactional politics is not always appropriate or effective, but a political system which is not reliably capable of it is a system in a state of critical failure.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy

“practically every political reformer in the country—and, for that matter, practically every schoolchild—will tell you that machines are rotten, that careerists are slimy, and that what politics needs is more popular participation, more attention to issues, more transparency, more disinterest, more fresh faces.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy

“Because legitimacy comes from fighting for what’s right, politicians who compromise for the sake of interest or power have sold their souls and lost their legitimacy. For amateurs, justice means not a transactional outcome but fidelity to an abstract ideal, like the public interest. They are suspicious of compromise, loyalty, insiders, inducements, deals. Being amateurs, they typically have jobs outside of politics or enter the political fray only temporarily, a fact which they will trumpet as a source of disinterest and political chastity. (In New York, Wilson notes, anti-Tammany reformers in the 1950s were heavily drawn from Protestant and Jewish middle-class young professionals.) Not being repeat players, they can afford to play single hands for high stakes, and they cannot easily be held accountable for losing.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy

“The amateur asserts that principles, rather than interest, ought to be both the end and the motive of political action,” Wilson writes. Far from taking a detached attitude, the amateur “sees each battle as a ‘crisis,’ and each victory as a triumph and each loss as a defeat for a cause.”10 The choice of candidates and leaders, for the amateur, should be based on their commitment to principles and policies rather than on personal loyalty or party label or parochial advantage. Parties, rather than being “neutral agents” to mobilize majorities and gain power, should be “the sources of program and the agents of social change.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy

“Wilson mapped conflicts between what he called amateurs (today we might call them activists) and political professionals (today’s “political class”) over control of local political organizations. The two groups despised each other, despite being nominally on the same side (all Democrats). “A keen antipathy inevitably develops between the new and the conventional politicians. The former accuse the latter of being at best ‘hacks’ and ‘organization men’ and at worst ‘bosses’ and ‘machine leaders.’ The latter retort by describing the former as ‘dilettantes,’ ‘crackpots,’ ‘outsiders,’ and ‘hypocritical do-gooders.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy

“The politicos of our grandparents’ generation did a pretty good job of governing the country, despite living in a world of bosses and back rooms and unlimited donations, and many of them understood some home truths which today’s political reformers have too often overlooked or suppressed. In particular, they understood that transactional politics—the everyday give-and-take of dickering and compromise—is the essential work of governing and that government, and thus democracy, won’t work if leaders can’t make deals and make them stick.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy

“the continuous and systematic onslaught against political machines and insiders by progressivism, populism, and libertarianism—three very different political reform movements which nonetheless all regard transactional politics as at best a necessary evil and more often as corrupt and illegitimate. This attack, though well intentioned, has badly damaged the country’s governability, a predictable result (and one accurately predicted more than fifty years ago).”
― Jonathan Rauch, Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy