First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship by Richard Lachmann

Author:Richard Lachmann [Lachmann, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2020-01-13T16:00:00+00:00

subsequent reforms of federal social service and urban development funding transformed the large, discretionary transfers of the Keynesian era into a complex system of small, targeted, hyper-competitive grants controlled by a shifting mix of federal agencies, state agencies, and middle-men nonprofits.1

Party politicians representing long-standing but weakening local business or labor groups generally were incapable of creating the “broad-based, shifting, and flexible partnerships [that] could make the city appear as all things to all people,” or at least to outside grant bestowers.2 Instead, local planning entrepreneurs, whom Pacewicz labels “partners,” eschewed partisan politics, which they accurately saw as impediments to developing the plans that could win outside grants or entice national corporations to their locales. This left the field of politics to “partisans” who, Pacewicz argues, get most of their ideas about which issues to care about from national and increasingly ideological media rather than from interactions with citizens in their localities who are ever less likely to be organized into clear interest groups like unions or business networks.3

Pacewicz shows that partners’ local-level divorce from partisan politics, and partisans’ focus on externally generated social issues, undermines elected politicians’ abilities to develop programs at the national or state levels because at those higher levels politics remains a matter of allocating scarce resources, not winning grants from above. As Pacewicz reminds us, there is no higher level to which the federal government can appeal for resources. Therefore, attempts to replicate a post-political grant-getting consensus that works in a few successful localities at the national level are doomed to fail. Such failures will not be reversed unless local-level partners engage in partisan politics and are able to displace partisan ideologues. Thus,

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