One of Marc Stier's recent blog entries deals with The Amateur Democrat, a book over 40 years old now that deals with intraparty Democratic insurgencies in the 1950's and 1960's. The Amateur Democrat was a major influence on him in forming Neighborhood Networks, he said. This statement struck a strong chord of recognition in me.

The book's author is James Q. Wilson, a young scholar when he wrote the book, who is now one of the conservative movement's venerable and thoughtful stars. Wilson's most recent major public impact has been as a promoter of the broken windows theory: that the way to fight major crime is to concentrate first on the small stuff to establish that crime will not be tolerated.

The Amateur Democrat was a major influence on me in my work as a Penn undergraduate to get The New Democratic Coalition off the ground as a Democratic reform organization from 1968 through the ward elections of 1970. Before the New Democratic Coalition, there had scattered efforts to reform individual wards, but never a broad-based effort in various wards across the city.

The Amateur Democrat certainly showed what was possible. New York and Detroit had elected a good number of reformers in Democratic primaries, and other cities had elected some.

In 1969, I taught a course as an undergraduate at The Free University at the University of Pennsylvania, and used The Amateur Democrat as a text. Like Stier more recently, I viewed the book as a series of inspiring examples as to how the Democratic Party could be reformed to take it back to its true roots and to take it away from being a party essentially based on the exchange of favors of one kind or another.

In both the Free University course and countless organization meetings that followed, I cited examples from The Amateur Democrat as to what was possible if liberal, reform-minded Democrats could get together to influence ward structures in Philadelphia and around the country. The New Democratic Coalition was a national organization, with leaders like Allard Lowenstein, Michael Harrington, and Julian Bond coupled with large numbers of grassroots folks known almost exclusively in their home areas.

But after The New Democratic Coalition ran its course in Philadelphia in 1977, and after various one-shot efforts organized by Americans for Democratic Action in the late 1970's and early to mid-1980's, based on the ward by ward model of the New Democratic Coalition, also ran their course, I reread The Amateur Democrat.

I was shocked by what I found. The case by case examples were still there. But Wilson was not acting as a cheerleader in promoting them. Wilson was a strong critic of these efforts.

He criticized the members of the reform organizations. They were not produces of scholarship; they were consumers of scholarship, he charged. As a consumer of public policy books, I did not understand the depth of his indignation on this point, but he was clearly outraged and viewed liberal political activists as intellectual inferiors.

The reform organizations could go nowhere, he said. Their members either would lose interest because their pure motivations gave them no stake in continued participation, or they would become professional politicians. What they were advocating, he warned, was an unattainable ideal of public policy that the activists would inevitably give up on.

This pessimism proved over time to have a core truth to it, although at least four of the best and most active members of Congress today--Jerry Nadler of New York City, John Conyers of Detroit, Barney Frank of suburban Boston, and Bernie Sanders of Vermont--have strong roots in the type of organizations that Wilson profiled.

One thing the reform movement of New York did prove to be was a harbringer of the dissolution of the Democratic Party at a municipal level.

The only reformer ever elected mayor there on the Democratic ticket was Ed Koch, who despite various strengths, proved over time to be a Frank Rizzo-like racial, and racially divisive, demagogue. After three terms, Koch lost the Democratic nomination to David Dinkins, New York's only black mayor. Dinkins, in turn, proved unable to exert solid leadership skills in racially divisive situations, and lost after one term to Rudy Giulani, now the public opinion poll frontrunner for the Republican Presidential nomination. With Michael Bloomberg now the Mayor, the Republicans have won four consecutive mayoral elections in an overwhelmingly Democratic city.

Perhaps Marc Stier, myself, and anyone else interested should reread The Amateur Democrat once again on the basis of what we now know and discuss it both privately with each other and on this site. As far as I know, despite the fact that the vast majority of the people profiled in it have to have to have passed away, it still remains the leading book on middle class grassroots urban reformers. One reason for this status is the flight of middle class people from cities all across America, and the consequent decline in significance they have appeared to have, thus discouraging scholars from pursuing them.