Parties as business ventures

An article in this week's issue of the magazine Respekt brought me up short. (See the full translation here.) The passage that really brought me up short was this one:

ODS is quickly turning into a party whose membership card is a good thing to have in your pocket when you're competing for public purchases or subsidies from the European Union. Cynical managers and entrepreneurs are joining, who will tell you in informal conversation that that's their only interest in it.

(ODS is the Občanská demokratická strana—Civic Democratic Party, a European-Liberal party (i.e. conservative in U.S. Terminology) that arose out of a split of the Civic Forum. The Civic Forum was created in the course of the overthrow of communism in November-December of 1989, and it formed the first post-communist government that took shape in January 1990. ODS is also the leading member of the coalition government that was formed after the parliamentary elections in June.)

It was reminiscent of the days of communism, when certain careers absolutely required membership in the communist party. So while the party ideology portrayed the members as the most idealistic people in society, many people joined as a practical necessity for doing what they wanted to do in life.

One day during my Moscow semester in the fall of 1988, a few of my American classmates and I sat a table with a couple of Russian students at lunch. One of the Russians asked if there were many communists in the U.S. "Well, we have a communist party, but very few people are actually members of the party. Then there are others who simply believe in the ideals." "Yes," she responded, "we have a few of those too," and her tone made clear that the believers and the party membership were generally not the same people.

So here we are 20 years on from the fall of communism and at least in some circles people view parties not as means of governing the country in one way or another, but as a sort of necessary business expense. It's different, of course, in that you get to choose which party to use as your vehicle for access to taxpayer funds, whereas before the Communist Party monopolized this role. But it's a far cry from the heady dreams of democracy that accompanied the Velvet Revolution.

And it raises questions about how much our own politics in the U.S. is operated on the same basis--the K-Street Project comes to mind, where lobbyists would be shut out of important legislative discussions if they didn't direct their contributions exclusively or predominantly to the G.O.P.

Kids on trains

I don't know whether this is more a difference between the U.S. and other places, or between rural/suburban and urban places.

I live in a small town in upstate New York. Elementary-school kids walk or bike to school, or their parents drive them. A 6-year-old might walk with her 11-year-old sister, but wouldn't walk by herself. And the 11-year-old is only as independent as she is because it's a small town where we know a lot of our neighbors and the traffic is very mild.

It's rather different from this article flagged here by Atrios. At the end of the schoolday the kids are gathered in the gym. The parents, in their cars, line up like airplanes waiting to land. As they pull in one by one to the single pick-up point, a staffer outside radioes in which kid to send out. The kid "is grabbed from the gym, escorted to the sidewalk and hustled into the car as if under enemy fire. His mom peels out and the next car pulls up. 'Sydney's mom is here!'"

Greensboro N.C. has about 260,000 people, so it's obviously not directly comparable to our laid-back town of 12,000. We and our neighbors probably wouldn't let 11-year-olds travel clear across town on their own, but neither would we treat the distance between the school door and the curb as if it were somebody else's free-fire zone.

But then consider Prague. This is a city of 1.2 million, and we see kids who are probably 10 or 12 years old, traveling solo through the subways, on the trolleys, walking along busy roads.

Some of this has to do with changes over time. When I was perhaps 9, my mom would send out a pack of kids bracketed by my 12-year-old sister on the old end and me on the young end. We would ride the MBTA from the suburbs, through downtown Boston, to the Science Museum. I was the navigator, my sister was the all-around Responsible Party. At age 12. Anecdotal evidence says that Americans don't do that anymore, and people chime in all over the place with stories of "when I was a kid." But in Prague, people still do send their kids off through the big city all on their lonesome.

And it's not that it's perfectly safe. Thinking about this question this morning on the trolley as we took the boys to school, I remembered an ad I saw in a newspaper not long after we got here, saying something to the effect of, "XX,XXX people were injured at crosswalks last year. School starts in a week. We'll be out in force ticketing drivers who break traffic laws." So people (including kids, some of them unchaperoned by an adult) get hurt on the streets, and presumably some of them die. But Czech parents still send their kids off into the city on their own.

If I get around to it, I'd be curious about some statistics comparing relative traffic injury rates here vs. the U.S.