Political Technicians, Corrupters of Democracy

The roots of Watergate, I would maintain, are to be found in an antidemocratic philosophy carried by a new political type I shall call the “political technicians.” Their emergence can be laid to the weaknesses and decline of the regular party machinery— a decline resulting from the effects of the Pendelton Act, which removed a source of patronage from the control of party bosses and added to the disruption of the big-city ethnic-labor coalitions that had provided the power base for the machines. The upsurge of the reform movements in the Democratic party after the candidacies of Adlai Stevenson revealed the growing potency of “amateur” involvement in politics, and this tendency has increased. In recent years the influx of ideologically motivated “amateurs” in political campaigns has emphasized the feebleness of the regular party machinery, which is caused in part by the altered conditions for electoral success in an age of mass politics dominate...