Kadner offers up one of the classic defenses of corrupt machine politics. It’s not a horrible point in one sense. Individuals do get an efficient mechanism to solve their problems.

But weren’t these argument addressed back in Boss?

Why does the Machine act like it does?

Despite all those safeguards and its lopsided superiority over local opposition, the Machine never fails to run scared. For this reason, or maybe out of habit, it never misses a chance to steal a certain number of votes and trample all over the voting laws

The Machine isn’t the Machine of Royko’s Boss. The Machine has lost a lot, if not most of its power, but the remnants still exist and they still play the same games, just not as successfully. While everyone wants to point to Madigan’s effectiveness as a sign of the Machine, Madigan long ago evolved and created an actual sophisticated political operation and brought in new interests in his own area. One should remember his Ward is relatively well integrated because he’s found ways to make the whites feel comfortable with integration on an economic level.

Others, like Lipinski just kept on playing the same game–planting candidates, burying the opposition, and tricking voters into not having a choice.

Sure, the old man ran paranoid and provided lots of services, but those services come at a price.

20% of the 3rd District is Latino—why aren’t the Lipinski’s at the forefront of issues affecting the Latino community? Is the office that responsive if it ignores a growing base of citizens and voters in the District by clinging to politics of the past? The District is far more progressive than in the past, is a social conservative really the best way to represent them?

Machines put hacks into public positions–so those who don’t know to complain to the right person are stuck in substandard public housing. Or they get a toxic site next to their house, or they get bureaucrats in the proper office too busy with those who went to the Congressman.

Even if you accept Lipinski’s people help people out individually, the patronage and the corruption saps money away from legitimate governmental functions.

And Dan Lipinski understands of all this and that’s why I don’t give him a pass. He’s a good scholar who has done some good political science. To do that, he has to understand democratic theory, and yet he went along with this fundamentally anti-democratic move. He might not seem evil, but his actions undermine the integrity our electoral system and the legitimacy of the political system as a whole. And that hurts us all.