Philadelphia Transit Notes

Rail approach to 30th St. Station in Philadelphia

I was in Philadelphia this weekend. It’s a great city whose downtown is booming. And I got to ride transit there for the first time in my various visits.

The picture above is one of the rail corridors approaching 30th St. Station, the station used by Amtrak. Because there’s a rail yard next to the station, this is a pretty wide example, but it shows that it isn’t just interstate highways that create barriers between neighborhoods in cities. Major rail corridors do the same thing.

People might argue that there’s a difference in that many rail lines were built prior to development, whereas the highways were plowed through existing neighborhoods in a highly destructive process of demolition and construction. No argument there. But now that they are built, they both operate as barriers nevertheless. I might also point out that many urban freeways, such as those in Chicago, were built closely parallel to existing rail lines that were already dividing walls.

I also rode the Market-Frankford Line subway, which is one of two rapid transit lines in Philly. The cars were modern and clean, though appear to be fairly low capacity (54 according to one web site compared to ~200 in NYC depending on the car in question). The platforms felt 30 degrees cooler than NYC’s saunas.  They still use tokens.

I also unexpectedly needed to take a train out to the suburb of Paoli. It just so happens that’s also an Amtrak stop, so I generally take a one seat ride there on the Keystone train from Penn Station. This time I did some museuming in Philly first and decided to just train out instead of having my Paoli friend come join me in the city.

I’m glad I did this because I made the remarkable discovery that Philadelphia has amazingly good weekend train frequencies by US standards. The Paoli/Thorndale line (the Pennsylvania Railroad “Main Line”) runs half-hourly on Saturdays. It has 32 outbound trains on Saturdays, departing as late as 1:45am from Suburban Station.

The other lines seem to have hourly departures. There are 17 outbound trains on the Landsdale/Doylestown Line.  The Manyunk/Norristown Line has 19 outbound trains.

This level of service crushes Boston, where the Providence Line has 9 trains, with as much as three hours between trains midday. The Framingham/Worcester Line also has 9 trains.

Chicago’s Metra Electric has good frequencies (it operates with separate service segments and multiple branches like say the Metro North New Haven Line so I can’t really describe it adequately as I’ve never ridden it enough to get a feel). But the rest of them have lower weekend frequenices than Philly. The Burlington Northern Santa Fe Line has 14 trains on Saturday, with two hour frequencies morning and evening.  There are 13 on the UP-North Line.

Philadelphia is having some commuter rail problems. It had to take its entire fleet of new Silverliner V out of service this summer because of a structural defect in their trucks. But given that it has an entirely electrified system (much better acceleration than Boston and Chicago’s diesel fleets), a through-running system (albeit no longer marketed as such) and a good base of frequencies already, it would seem like the sky is the limit in terms of what they can do with it.

 

from Aaron M. Renn
http://www.urbanophile.com/2016/08/31/philadelphia-transit-notes/

Using Open Data and Civic Analytics to Improve Public Services in Chicago

Chicago is a national leader in open data and civic analytics. I was pleased to get to spend some time yesterday with Tom Schenk, Chief Data Officer there, to get an update from him on some of what the Windy City is up to. He also graciously recorded a podcast. Topics include:

• 0:00 – Intro and “Pre-Crime” for Rat Infestations
• 3:59 – Tracking West Nile Virus
• 5:15 – The Civic Analytics Network
• 7:05 – Getting Data from Sharing Economy Companies
• 9:25 – Chicago’s Open Source Software Strategy
• 12:00 – Where to Find Chicago’s Open Data and Analytics Resources
• 13:15 – What Is the Sweet Spot and Future of Open Data?
• 16:52 – What Is Coming Next From Chicago?

If the audio player doesn’t display for you, click over to listen on Soundcloud. Would you please also leave a rating for the podcast on iTunes if you haven’t already? Because this helps more people discover the podcast. Thanks.

Subscribe to podcast via iTunes | Soundcloud.

from Aaron M. Renn
http://www.urbanophile.com/2016/08/30/using-open-data-and-civic-analytics-to-improve-public-services-in-chicago/

A Short Primer on Strength Training

I mentioned in a previous post that I deadlift. I took up barbell lifting about a year and a half ago after spending a lifetime doing little more than running. I really enjoy it but certainly wouldn’t hold myself out as an expert.

Fortunately, I found someone who was an expert to train me in the lifts. That’s Michael Wolf of Wolf Strength. The guy is an associate of Mark Rippetoe, author of Starting Strength (the bible of barbell lifting). He’s also quite an impressive lifter himself.

Wolf joined me this week for a chat on strength training. If the podcast audio doesn’t display for you, click over to listen on Soundcloud.  We discuss the what’s and why’s of strength training, the difference between “weightlifting” “powerlifting” and “bodybuilding”, and a bit about Crossfit and P90X.

Subscribe to podcast via iTunes | Soundcloud.

from Aaron M. Renn
http://www.urbanophile.com/2016/08/26/a-short-primer-on-strength-training/

Hillbilly Elegy: Culture, Circumstance, Agency

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
by J.D. Vance

The book of the moment is JD Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy, currently residing at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

Vance’s story has hit a nerve by providing a compelling lens through which those appalled by the popularity of Donald Trump in working-class circles can understand his improbable rise. Who are these Trump voters? Vance, a son of Appalachian hillbillies who ended up graduating from Yale Law and now works for a Peter Thiel founded investment fund in San Francisco, says they are his people. By telling his story he hopes to help us understand them. And to understand that while they have suffered external economic blows, ultimately their inability to respond positively to them is a result of their own failed culture.

The book is a fantastic read and highly recommended. But I find it puzzling that this book has so received so many positive reviews and so little substantive critique in light of its flaws and limitations.  To remedy that I wrote a long review of the book that is now online at City Journal called “Culture, Circumstance, Agency.”  In it I recognize the virtues of Vance’s account, but also take him to task in some areas.  Here is an excerpt:

He then applies to and is accepted at Yale Law School, where the cultural gulf between his hillbilly upbringing and the American elite first comes into full relief. He discovers the role that social capital, mentors, and connections play in success. One of his professors at Yale, Amy Chua, of Tiger Mom fame, becomes a key advisor and advocate for him. He struggles in settings upper middle class students would navigate with ease. He spits out sparkling water in disgust and surprise the first time he drinks it. When a law firm takes him to an upscale restaurant for dinner, he has to call Usha, then his girlfriend, to ask how to use the silverware. At Yale, he discovers that he must not just reject the toxic elements of his old culture but also embrace this new one to get anywhere.

The social deficiencies of the working class are under-appreciated by those who never suffered them. I also came from a working-class background. After flying to a job interview in Chicago in college, I didn’t know how to take a taxi and was too ashamed to ask. I tried getting in a cab dropping off passengers; the driver was kind enough to tell me where the cabstand was without humiliating me. I didn’t know how to use chopsticks. I didn’t know the way much of the professional world functioned. And a lot of those things I didn’t know that I didn’t know. I estimate that I started out five to 10 years behind those who came from upper middle class homes in important ways. I’ve heard the same from others of similar origins.

E.D. Hirsch talks about the “core knowledge” every kid must learn. For those with above-average intelligence, knowledge is relatively easy to acquire if you don’t have it. But there’s also a set of core social knowledge and experiences needed to function effectively in educated society. This can be more challenging to obtain, especially without a mentor. Vance illuminates this oft-overlooked aspect of upward mobility.

Click through to read the whole thing.

I have a number of further observations on Vance and this book that I may put up in a follow-up blog post.

Homepage cover image via City Journal

from Aaron M. Renn
http://www.urbanophile.com/2016/08/23/hillbilly-elegy-jd-vance-culture-circumstance-agency/

As Gasoline and Electricity Performed Their Miracles

The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington won the Pulitzer Prize for best novel in 1919. It’s on the Modern Library list of top 100 English language novels of the 20th century and was made into a film by Orson Welles.

Tarkington was from Indianapolis, which is the fictionalized setting of the book. I recently read the book for the first time, and it’s very good, even today. Tarkington, of whom I knew little, appeared to be a critic of industrialization. The book’s story arc takes place as Indianapolis is being transformed by the massive waves of technological, industrial, and demographic change of the late 19th and early 20th century.

Here’s an extended passage of the book that gives us a contemporary account (albeit from a novel) from someone not entirely enamored of it, particularly the environmental consequences. (The paragraphing may be off as I had to reformat it).

[The city] was heaving up in the middle incredibly; it was spreading incredibly; and as it heaved and spread, it befouled itself and darkened its sky. Its boundary was mere shapelessness on the run; a raw, new house would appear on a country road; four or five others would presently be built at intervals between it and the outskirts of the town; the country road would turn into an asphalt street with a brick-faced drugstore and a frame grocery at a corner; then bungalows and six-room cottages would swiftly speckle the open green spaces—and a farm had become a suburb which would immediately shoot out other suburbs into the country, on one side, and, on the other, join itself solidly to the city. You drove between pleasant fields and woodland groves one spring day; and in the autumn, passing over the same ground, you were warned off the tracks by an interurban trolley-car’s gonging, and beheld, beyond cement sidewalks just dry, new house-owners busy “moving in.” Gasoline and electricity were performing the miracles Eugene had predicted.

But the great change was in the citizenry itself. What was left of the patriotic old-stock generation that had fought the Civil War, and subsequently controlled politics, had become venerable and was little heeded. The descendants of the pioneers and early settlers were merging into the new crowd, becoming part of it, little to be distinguished from it. What happened to Boston and to Broadway happened in degree to the Midland city; the old stock became less and less typical, and of the grown people who called the place home, less than a third had been born in it. There was a German quarter; there was a Jewish quarter; there was a negro quarter—square miles of it—called “Bucktown”; there were many Irish neighbourhoods; and there were large settlements of Italians, and of Hungarians, and of Rumanians, and of Serbians and other Balkan peoples. But not the emigrants, themselves, were the almost dominant type on the streets downtown. That type was the emigrant’s prosperous offspring: descendant of the emigrations of the Seventies and Eighties and Nineties, those great folk-journeyings in search not so directly of freedom and democracy as of more money for the same labour.

A new Midlander—in fact, a new American—was beginning dimly to emerge. A new spirit of citizenship had already sharply defined itself. It was idealistic, and its ideals were expressed in the new kind of young men in business downtown. They were optimists—optimists to the point of belligerence—their motto being “Boost! Don’t Knock!” And they were hustlers, believing in hustling and in honesty because both paid. They loved their city and worked for it with a plutonic energy which was always ardently vocal. They were viciously governed, but they sometimes went so far to struggle for better government on account of the helpful effect of good government on the price of real estate and “betterment” generally; the politicians could not go too far with them, and knew it. The idealists planned and strove and shouted that their city should become a better, better, and better city—and what they meant, when they used the word “better,” was “more prosperous,” and the core of their idealism was this: “The more prosperous my beloved city, the more prosperous beloved I!”

They had one supreme theory: that the perfect beauty and happiness of cities and of human life was to be brought about by more factories; they had a mania for factories; there was nothing they would not do to cajole a factory away from another city; and they were never more piteously embittered than when another city cajoled one away from them.

What they meant by Prosperity was credit at the bank; but in exchange for this credit they got nothing that was not dirty, and, therefore, to a sane mind, valueless; since whatever was cleaned was dirty again before the cleaning was half done. For, as the town grew, it grew dirty with an incredible completeness. The idealists put up magnificent business buildings and boasted of them, but the buildings were begrimed before they were finished. They boasted of their libraries, of their monuments and statues; and poured soot on them. They boasted of their schools, but the schools were dirty, like the children within them. This was not the fault of the children or their mothers. It was the fault of the idealists, who said: “The more dirt, the more prosperity.” They drew patriotic, optimistic breaths of the flying powdered filth of the streets, and took the foul and heavy smoke with gusto into the profundities of their lungs. “Boost! Don’t knock!” they said. And every year or so they boomed a great Clean-up Week, when everybody was supposed to get rid of the tin cans in his backyard. They were happiest when the tearing down and building up were most riotous, and when new factory districts were thundering into life. In truth, the city came to be like the body of a great dirty man, skinned, to show his busy works, yet wearing a few barbaric ornaments; and such a figure carved, coloured, and discoloured, and set up in the market-place, would have done well enough as the god of the new people.

Such a god they had indeed made in their own image, as all peoples make the god they truly serve; though of course certain of the idealists went to church on Sunday, and there knelt to Another, considered to be impractical in business. But while the Growing went on, this god of their market-place was their true god, their familiar and spirit-control. They did not know that they were his helplessly obedient slaves, nor could they ever hope to realize their serfdom (as the first step toward becoming free men) until they should make the strange and hard discovery that matter should serve man’s spirit.

“Prosperity” meant good credit at the bank, black lungs, and housewives’ Purgatory. The women fought the dirt all they could; but if they let the air into their houses they let in the dirt. It shortened their lives, and kept them from the happiness of ever seeing anything white.

from Aaron M. Renn
http://www.urbanophile.com/2016/08/22/as-gasoline-and-electricity-performed-their-miracles/

Trump’s Pitch to Blacks

After Trump made a speech in Milwaukee earlier this week in which he directly asked for black votes, I was asked to write a about it. My piece is now online in City Journal and is called “Trump’s Pitch to Blacks.”

I personally doubt whether he’s really going after black votes (though of course he wouldn’t mind getting some). Rather, this is designed to polish his image as more inclusive. What’s more, his language of “law and order” seems more designed to appeal to whites, and he mentions nothing about black grievances with the police (in contrast to his previous rhetoric in which he labeled the shootings of Alton Sterling and Philandro Castile “terrible” and “disgusting”).

He also talked about his economic policies, etc. But the focus of my piece was on his immigration pitch. Large scale immigration seems likely to downgrade black aspirations and social justice claims in the American political sphere over the long term:

As ethnic groups multiply and grow in America, often borrowing the template of the civil rights movement for their own goals, they dilute the claims of black Americans. A study by sociologists Mary C. Waters, Philip Kasinitz, and Asad L. Asad argued that “the increasing racial diversity of the population owing to immigration means policies that aim to promote racial equality but that are framed in terms of diversity often do not address the needs of native African Americans who, arguably, need such policies the most.” Diversity used to mean “black.” Now it can mean anything from a Mexican small-business owner to a Chinese software developer to a Pakistani doctor. Major Silicon Valley firms actually employ a lower share of whites than the population as a whole—and virtually no blacks.

Click through to read the whole thing.

I have generally been a proponent of immigration (or outsiders generally), arguing that a critical mass of outsiders is necessary to civic dynamism, and that we have actually sucked out many of the risk takers and entrepreneurs from Mexico.

But we can have too much of a good thing. Clearly, we’ve reached the point where the level of immigration is having socially destablizing consequences. Brexit is a perfect example. You can say that’s just racism or whatever. But even if it is, it doesn’t excuse Remainers who refused to make any changes from their share of the blame. Politics exists in the realm of human reality, not utopian ideals.

One likely consequence of US diversification resulting from the current immigration trend is that the claims of blacks will be downgraded in society. Black Americans are longstanding citizens who have suffered unique historic injustices and have yet to be integrated into the economic and cultural mainstream of the country. I believe that’s an urgent task. But it doesn’t seem likely that immigrants and their children will feel a special debt to black Americans in the way that whites – soon to be a minority themselves – do.

Indeed, immigration has already shifted demographics in some cities to make the prospect of future black mayors very unlikely. I highlight this in the piece with regards to Chicago:

Immigration has also badly diluted black voting power and political influence in many cities. In 1980, Chicago was about 40 percent black and 14 percent Hispanic. Blacks and lakefront liberals formed an electoral alliance to elect Harold Washington as the city’s first black mayor in 1983. Today, after black population losses and a doubling of Latino population share, the city’s one-third white, one-third black, and one-third Latino population produces a divide-and-rule dynamic benefiting white mayors like Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel.

Again, read the whole thing.

Image at top my photo of an anti-Trump rally in New York. Cover photo by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 3.0

from Aaron M. Renn
http://www.urbanophile.com/2016/08/19/trumps-pitch-to-blacks/

Why Private Prisons Are a Bad Idea

Image via Shutterstock

Once when I was on a panel discussing privatization, one person said a city should privatize sewers over water service because nobody cares what happens after they flush the toilet, making it an easier political sell.

I took the opposite view for the same underlying reason. Because people do care more about what comes out of their tap, there will be much more focus on holding any private vendor to account to actually deliver the service well.

Given the risk of corruption, bureaucratic ineptitude, etc., I’ve long said that privatization is best for highly visible assets and services the general public sees and users versus things that are out of sight out of mind.  This turns the public into an accountability layer and increases the political risk of privatization, making it more likely the politicians will stay on top of things.

Garbage collection, airports, roads and bridges, a parks conservancy, etc. – all of these are highly visible. The public will see and squawk if something goes wrong.

Prisons are about as far from this as you can possibly get. They are largely invisible to the general public, the “consumers” of the service have little ability to hold the operators accountable, and the public is generally primed to see bad things happening to those in jail as karmic justice.

What’s more, private prisons create a financially self-interested lobbying group in favor putting more people in prison to boost business – not a good idea.

So I’ve always thought privatized corrections was a bad idea. Apparently the federal government finally agrees, as it just announced it is phasing out the use of private prisons.

This is a good move. Whatever theoretical benefits of privatizing prisons, the risks outweigh the potential benefits. I wouldn’t necessarily object to a private company constructing and maintaining the prison building under some type of P3 deal – the risks are lower there – but not actually operating the prison itself.

 

 

from Aaron M. Renn
http://www.urbanophile.com/2016/08/18/why-private-prisons-are-a-bad-idea/

How to Revitalize a Deserted City Center

I’ve highlighted the Renew Newcastle initiative in Newcastle, Australia multiple times before. It’s one of the most innovative urban revitalization projects in the world. They convinced landlords of vacant buildings in a nearly deserted downtown to loan out space to creative entrepreneurs. The results were magic.

Marcus Westbury instigated the project and wrote it up in his fantastic book Creating Cities. I was able to get time with him during a recent visit to New York to record a podcast about Renew Newcastle. If the audio embed doesn’t display below, click over to listen on Soundcloud.

If you haven’t already, please leave a podcast rating on iTunes because this helps people discover it. Thanks to those of you who’ve already done this.

Subscribe to the podcastvia iTunes | Soundcloud.

Cover image by Tim Keegan – CC BY-SA 2.0

from Aaron M. Renn
http://www.urbanophile.com/2016/08/15/how-to-revitalize-a-deserted-city-center/

Taking Indy’s All-Electric Car Share System for a Spin

Indianapolis deployed an all-electric car share system called Blue Indy, adopted from and operated by the company that runs Paris’ system.

Blue Indy has a station at the airport, and they are pretty aggressively marketing it as a transport option there.

I decided to give it a try. I always thought car share systems required you to pre-register, but apparently not. Blue Indy sells day passes, and you can be from out of state and still do it.

At IND Airport, there’s a kiosk at the entry of the parking garage after you leave baggage claim (right by car rental). You basically Skype with an agent live, giving him your name, address, and cell phone number; scanning in your drivers license; then swiping a credit card. They print out a credit card sized paper card that’s your pass for the day. It operates like an RFID touch card.

The cars are on level five. I Periscoped myself figuring out how to use it. The video is below. It took me ten minutes, but you could probably do it in next to no time once you have it figured out. If the video doesn’t show for you, click over to watch on YouTube.

I only had a couple of problems.  First, I didn’t listen right and forgot to swipe at the main kiosk first. I had thought (incorrectly), I could just grab a car. Also, I thought I could pick the car I wanted, but I either missed me that or they just assigned you one. There’s a light on top of the charging stand by each car, and it turned purple for me to check it out.  I won’t bother detailing the process since you can watch for yourself.

The signage is overall pretty good. The car has a transponder that opens the gate to get out of garage level five where the cars are (something I didn’t catch in the presentation). Also, there’s a dedicated Blue Indy exit lane at the toll booth.

The cars are small hatchbacks as you can see. Very basic, no frills. Manual seat adjust, trunk release, etc.  An odd mix of high and low tech. The air conditioning is adequate but not especially cold. The radio sounds nice. There’s a navigation system, and you can push a button in the car to talk to a Blue Indy rep at any time. The car is also personalized to you when you check it out, so your name is in lights on the nav screen.

The speedometer is a separate thing mounted on the top of the dashboard. Mine was highly pixelated and need to be smacked on the side periodically to clear up. That’s kind of a big deal since if it isn’t working, you don’t know how fast you’re going.

But that was the only issue I had with the car itself, which handled fine. It had no problem cruising at 65 on the expressway. I noticed that it doesn’t coast. If you take your foot off the gas, it actively slows as if braking – maybe recharging itself. There’s no Park gear, but rather you leave it in neutral and activate the manual parking brake.

I screwed up when I took it back. I parked it in a spot, but didn’t get a text telling me my rental was cover. I talked to the rep live at the kiosk. As it turns out, that spot had been reserved. You can only park in spots where the charging station is green. Apparently mine was purple, indicating reserved. They let me park there anyway. I’m not sure how you reserve a space, though supposedly you can do it through the navigation system in the car.

This wasn’t actually where I wanted to park. I’d wanted the station on the next block, but the only two free spaces there were being blocked by a UPS truck.

I suspect this a chronic problem downtown.

The price tag was $18.25 – cheaper than a cab and comparable to Uber. There’s a $6 airport surcharge for arrivals – not sure about departures. I’m told it comes through separately a couple days later.  So potentially you can tack another six bucks on that.

Regardless, if you find yourself traveling to Indy, there’s no reason not to take one of these out for a spin, whether you are at the airport or no. It’s the perfect way to get from downtown to, say, PRINTtEXT at 54th and College Ave, which is one of the world’s great magazine stores and a must visit if you’re in town. I’d never driven an all-electric vehicle on the road before, so it was fun to get the chance.

from Aaron M. Renn
http://www.urbanophile.com/2016/08/02/taking-indys-all-electric-car-share-system-for-a-spin/

#DNCLeaks and the Future of an Illusion

Sigmund Freud was an atheist, but noted that religion, while being what he called an “illusion”, was nevertheless an essential building block of civilization. In The Future of an Illusion he pointed out:

The doctrines of religion are not a subject one can quibble about like any other. Our civilization is built up on them, and the maintenance of society is based on the majority of men believing in the truth of those doctrines. If men are taught that there is no almighty and all-just God, no divine world order and no future life, they will feel exempt from all obligation to obey the precepts of civilization. Everyone will without inhibition or fear, follow his asocial, egoistic instincts and seek to exercise his power; Chaos, which we have banished through many thousands of years of the work of civilization, will come again.

This danger came not from the elite, which Freud believed would be able to easily replace religion with other motives such as enlightened self-interest, but via a form of populist revolt.

Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brainworkers. In them the replacement of religious motives for civilized behavior by other, secular motives would proceed unobtrusively; moreover, such people are to a large extent themselves vehicles of civilization. But it is another matter with the great mass of uneducated and oppressed, who have every reason for being enemies of civilization. So long as they do not discover that people no longer believe in God, all is well. But they will discover it, infallibly, even if this piece of writing of mine is not published. And they are ready to accept the result of scientific thinking, but without the change having taken place in them which scientific thinking brings about in people.

In short, the illusion of religion on which society was built was destined to crumble under the weight of modernity, hence the need to build replacement structures to ensure compliance with the dictates of civilization.

Our political system is also built on a set of illusions. These illusions are likewise crumbling under the weight of modernity in the form of technology and social media, etc.

For example, the philanderings of various politicians like JFK were well known to many, but went unreported. But when the news media decided not to report about Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, a then-obscure web site called the Drudge Report broke the news. Today, it’s virtually impossible to keep such news hidden.

We also created an illusion that our political system is a form of pure democracy.

Since the disasters of Athens, political theorists have seldom been fans of direct democracy. In the early stages of the American republic, people went into great detail about the dangers of direct democracy, about how our constitution was not direct democracy, and about how they designed a representative republic, with separation of powers and checks and balances and such, to create a functional system.

Since then, we’ve dramatically grown the democratic element of our system, through expanding the franchise, direct election of senators, citizen initiated referendums, and the expansion of the primary election system.  The rhetoric changed changed to match.

We thus created, perhaps without thinking about it, the illusion that our voting systems are purely democratic. In theory we have primaries and conventions in which people vote for delegates, and the person who gets the most votes wins, right?

Not exactly, as we discovered this election season.

On the Republican side, we discovered that even if you win the primary, the actual convention delegates representing that state might actually be supporters of your opponent, selected through a separate shadow process. Other than on the first ballot, they’d then be free to vote their own personal preferences.

On the Democratic side, there are a large number of so-called “superdelegates”, party insiders not selected by the voters.

There’s also the illusion that political party organizations are neutral venues in which every candidate has an equal shot.  But the recent Wikileaks dump of emails from the Democratic National Committee showed that it was controlled by partisans of Hillary Clinton, who were looking for ways to undermine Bernie Sanders – including by considering a smear of his Jewish heritage and/or purported atheism.

Donald Trump’s response to this was to trumpet loudly, “The system is rigged!”

Insiders of course disagree. They say that this is always how it as worked and only a political dummy wouldn’t know that.

It’s true that there’s never been this direct democracy fairy tale, parties have always tended to be controlled by particular factions, etc. But it’s also true that the people have been fed illusions instead of this truth.

So when those illusions about the system crumble, when the curtain is pulled back and people see the reality of how the sausage is made, our institutions themselves become even further discredited.

And candidly, they deserve that discredit.  Our political leaders, unlike the authors of the Federalist Papers, never articulated and defended the actual system we have, relying on tacit illusions instead. So no surprise it is falling into disrepute as those system crumble.

As it happens, while the process may not be fully democratic in its forms, it is still animated by a democratic spirit. The candidates who got the most votes, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, became the nominees. Only die hard #NeverTrump’ers suggested that the will of the voters should be overturned. Similarly in the UK, the members of parliament, while constitutionally not obligated to honor the Brexit vote, have thus far said they will respect the people’s choice.

The bottom line is that our system cannot be sustained on illusions about how it works any longer. There has to be replacement basis, one that likely involves creating a defensible and defended approach that is predicated on transparency (voluntary or not).

from Aaron M. Renn
http://www.urbanophile.com/2016/08/01/dncleaks-and-the-future-of-an-illusion/