The biggest problem with coverage of the US election is that almost nobody covering American politics has ever had to cover a pure patronage system, and very few people understand how autocratic pseudo-democracies do genuinely manage to get people to vote for them over and over again

Does this observation apply to Boomer Chicago journalists?

My armchair theory is: 'the failure of Weimar was inevitable' theory blinds us to the risk of democracy being subverted by democratic means, and that this is especially so for the former allies.

There is this kind of idea that "the end of democracy" means the end of elections. When it fact what it means is, the institutions of the state being used to reward political loyalty and punish opposition, so that people have to support "the regime" in elections or their careers die

It used to be there when we had many major cities with both independent newspapers & a history of partisan political machines. Any old-school Chicago Tribune or Sun-Times beat reporter would have known how the Daley patronage machine worked.