Opinion | What Has Happened to My Party Haunts Me - The New York Times - 0 views
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Jonathan Rauch, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and my sometime co-author, told me that to begin to understand what has happened, you have to understand the difference between a personal political machine and a traditional political machine.
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Personal machines are different from party machines, Mr. Rauch added, because they’re inconsistent with democratic politics
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Even a corrupt party machine maintains institutional interests separate from those of its leader. It rewards and punishes behavior based on the electoral interests of the party, prioritizing winning elections over personal loyalty to the boss. A party machine thus rewards followers by getting them elected and then sustaining them in office
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