Introduction: Mutual Contempt
The decayed condition of American democracy is difficult to grasp, not because the facts are secret, but because the facts are visible everywhere. Symptoms of distress are accumulating freely in the political system and citizens are demoralized by the lack of coherent remedies. Given the recurring, disturbing facts, a climate of stagnant doubt has enveloped contemporary politics, a generalized sense of disappointment that is too diffuse and intangible to be easily confronted. The things that Americans were taught and still wish to believe about self-government -- the articles of civic faith we loosely call democracy -- no longer seem to fit the present reality.
This dissonance between fact and faith is so discomforting that many naturally turn away from the implications. The visible dysfunctions in politics are dismissed as a temporary aberration or explained away, cynically, as the way things always were. The reluctance and evasion are understandable: Some unwanted truths are too painful to face.
The blunt message of this book is that American democracy is in much deeper trouble than most people wish to acknowledge. Behind the reassuring .facade, the regular election contests and so forth, the substantive meaning of self-government has been hollowed out. What exists behind the formal shell is a systemic breakdown of the shared civic values we call, democracy.
Citizens are cut out of the politics surrounding the most important governing questions. The representative system has undergone a grotesque distortion of its original purpose. The connective tissues that in different ways once linked ordinary people to governing-political parties, the media, the secondary mediating institutions -- no longer function reliably.
At the highest levels of government, the power to decide things has instead gravitated from the many to the few, just as ordinary citizens suspect. Instead of popular will, the government now responds more often to narrow webs of power -- the interests of major economic organizations and concentrated wealth and the influential elites surrounding them. These organizations and individuals manage to shape the largest outcomes to the extent anyone does, while they neutralize or deflect what ordinary people think and believe.
In place of a meaningful democracy, the political community has embraced a permissive culture of false appearances. Government responds to the public's desires with an artful dance of symbolic gestures -- hollow laws that are emptied of serious content in the private bargaining of Washington. Promises are made and never kept. Laws are enacted and never enforced. When ordinary people organize themselves to confront the deception, they find themselves too marginalized to make much difference.
Governing elites, not surprisingly, tend to their own self-interest but, even when their intentions are broadly public- spirited, the result is generally the same: The people are missing from the processes of self-government and government itself suffers from the loss. Disconnected from larger public purposes, people can neither contribute their thinking to the government's decisions nor take any real responsibility for them. Elite decision makers are unable to advance coherent governing agendas for the nation, however, since they are too isolated from common values and experiences to be persuasive. The result is an enervating sense of stalemate.
In sum, the mutual understanding between citizens and government necessary for genuine democracy is now deformed or neglected. While democracy's decline has consequences for everyone, certain sectors of the citizenry suffer from the loss of political representation more severely and personally than everyone else. In general, they are the people who already lack the advantages of higher education or social status. Their political influence cannot depend upon private wealth since they have little or none. The atrophied political system has left them even more vulnerable to domination by others.
While none of these complaints can be regarded as exactly a secret, there is a deeper dimension underlying the democratic problem that is not so easy for ordinary citizens to see. Democratic expectations are now confined and debilitated by the new power relationships that surround government and are buried in the everyday context of the nation's politics -- tacit understandings that determine who has political power and who doesn't. These power relationships are rooted in the complexities that have changed American politics so profoundly over the last few decades, either the deep tides of culture and economics or the conscious political action of interested parties.
Uncovering the patterns of these underlying power realities will be the principal task of this book. They are difficult to discern amid all the bewildering daily facts, but they represent the real source of the general discontent with American politics. They are, likewise, the unpleasant truths that people wish not to face.
Many citizens, especially those closest to power, will be reflexively inclined to resist this diagnosis. Partisans typically claim that the governing problems can be blamed on the people now in power -- either Republicans in the White House or the Democrats who control Congress. Others will observe that, whatever obvious flaws now exist, American democracy has always been afflicted by large imperfections and contradictions. Both claims are narrowly correct, of course, but they are also ways to evade the present reality. The roots of democratic decay, as this inquiry will demonstrate, are deeper than personalities or parties and the familiar ideological arguments; the system will not be cured by an election or two that change the officers of government. Furthermore, the nature of the civic breakdown is peculiar to our own time, reflecting our contemporary conditions and failures; the questions cannot be answered by reciting the shortcomings of previous eras.
Another reason why the actual condition of democracy is difficult to grasp is that the form and facade of self-government remain elaborately in place and functioning. In fact, the mechanics of electoral democracy are now more highly developed (and more costly) than at any other time in history. Collectively American voters will select more than five hundred thousand people to represent them in the public's business, from local sewer commissions to the White House. The results, as everyone knows, are so unsatisfying that the active electorate has been steadily shrinking for a generation and "reforming" elections has become a major preoccupation of public-spirited debate.
The distinguishing premise of this book, however, is that the democratic problem originates from a different source -- the politics of governing, not the politics of winning elections. Most political inquiries focus their analysis on campaigns and candidates, the techniques of persuasion and of assembling electoral majorities, the contest of slogans and ideology and so forth.
This book is centered on the complicated politics that lies beyond elections -- the practical questions of how and why some interests are allowed to dominate the government's decision making while others are excluded. After all, this is the realm of politics that matters to people in their everyday lives. And this is the realm where we will find tangible explanations for their discontent.
Politics is not a game. It exists to resolve the largest questions of the society -- the agreed-upon terms by which everyone can live peaceably with one another. At its best, politics creates and sustains social relationships -- the human conversation and engagement that draw people together and allow them to discover their mutuality. Democracy promises to do this through an inclusive process of conflict and deliberation, debate and compromise. Not every citizen expects to speak personally in the governing dialogue, but every citizen is entitled to feel authentically represented.
The substance of governing politics is the stuff that election campaigns and standard political commentaries mostly ignore -- the nettlesome facts of decision making behind the rhetoric and slogans. Typically, political reporters separate "politics" from substantive "issues" as though they were two different subjects. Yet, in government, even the dimmest member of Congress understands that the substance is the politics. No one can hope to understand what is driving political behavior without grasping the internal facts of governing issues and asking the kinds of gut-level questions that politicians ask themselves in private. Who are the winners in this matter and who are the losers? Who gets the money and who has to pay? Who must be heard on this question and who can be safely ignored?
Thus in order to examine the condition of democracy, this inquiry will explore the contours of a lengthy list of governing issues, some familiar and some obscure, asking the same kinds of questions. Economics, taxation, the environment, education, national defense, financial regulation, wages and working conditions, labor law and corporate citizenship -- all these and some others will appear as the raw material. In every case, the overriding purpose is to plot out patterns of behavior that are general in governing politics. As the evidence accumulates from different examples, the central goal is to reveal the deformed power relationships that explain why this democracy regularly disappoints its citizens.
This critique does not rely upon any idealized notions of what democracy means, but on the elementary principles everyone recognizes. Accountability of the governors to the governed. Equal protection of the law, that is, laws that are free of political manipulation. A presumption of political equality among all citizens (though not equality of wealth or status). The guarantee of timely access to the public debate. A rough sense of honesty in the communication between the government and the people. These are not radical ideas, but basic tenets of the civic faith.
Nor does this analysis pretend that American democracy once existed in some perfected form that now is lost. On the contrary, Americans have never achieved the full reality in their own history or even agreed completely on democracy's meaning. The democratic idea has always been most powerful in America as an unfulfilled vision of what the country might someday become -- a society advancing imperfectly toward self-realization. In that sense, democracy is not so much a particular arrangement of government, but a difficult search. It is the hopeful promise the nation has made to itself. [1]
The search itself is now at risk -- the democratic promise of advancing toward higher ground. From the beginning of the Republic, the redeeming quality of American politics -- and the central virtue of democracy -- has been the capacity for self-correction. That capacity is now endangered too.
A democratic governance is able to adjust to new realities because it is compelled to listen to many voices and, sooner or later, react to what people see and express. In the American experience, the governing system has usually found a way to pull back eventually from extreme swings or social impasse and to start off in new directions. Not perfectly, perhaps not right away, but in time it did fitfully respond. This capacity was more than a matter of good luck or great leaders. As American democracy evolved, multiple balance wheels and self-correcting mechanisms were put in place that encourage this. They promote stability, but they also leave space for invention and new ideas, reform and change.
These self-correcting mechanisms are such familiar features of politics as the running competition for power between the two political parties, the scrutiny by the press and reform critics, the natural tension inherent in the coequal branches of government, the sober monitor imposed by law and the Constitution, the political energies that arise naturally from free people when they organize themselves for collective expression. People are counting on these corrective mechanisms to assert themselves again, as they usually have in the past.
The most troubling proposition in this book is that the self-correcting mechanisms of politics are no longer working. Most of them are still in place and functioning but, for the most part, do not produce the expected results. Some of the mechanisms have disappeared entirely. Some are atrophied or blocked by new circumstances. Some have become so warped and disfigured that they now concretely aggravate the imbalance of power between the many and the few.
That breakdown describes the democratic problem in its bleakest dimensions: Instead of a politics that leads the society sooner or later to confront its problems, American politics has developed new ways to hide from them.
The consequences of democratic failure are enormous for the country, not simply because important public matters are neglected, but because America won't work as a society if the civic faith is lost. Unlike most other nations, the United States has always overcome the vast differences among its people, the social and economic enmities and the storms of political disagreement, through the overarching bond of its democratic understandings. If these connections between the governed and the government are destroyed, if citizens can no longer believe in the mutuality of the American experience, the country may descend into a new kind of social chaos and political unraveling, unlike anything we have experienced before. The early symptoms of such deterioration may already be visible.
Naturally enough, most people focus on narrower, less disturbing explanations of what is wrong. In the standard political dialogues, especially among elites, the discussions generally settle on three familiar ways of explaining the current political distress. The problem is diagnosed, for instance, as the failure of ill-informed citizens and the exaltation of fickle public opinion. Or the problem is attributed to the format of modern election campaigns and the elaborate electioneering technologies surrounding candidates. Or it is defined, more bluntly, as a problem of dirty money, the millions of dollars in campaign contributions that flow to the politicians.
None of these is entirely wrong, but all are inadequate to the true scope of the democratic problem. In order to proceed with an examination into deeper causes, let us first take up these conventional ways that people think about the troubled democracy and explain why each falls short. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate that the only way out of the political distress is to address the democratic problem in its fullest terms, whole and direct, as though the civic principles still matter to us.
***
Many years ago, when I was a young reporter covering the Kentucky state legislature, I witnessed for the first time a spectacle of democracy that is not mentioned in the civics textbooks. In the midst of debate, the legislators erupted in noisy chaos -- shouting wildly at one another and throwing papers in the air, charging randomly around the House chamber like angry children in a group tantrum. As I later learned, any representative assembly may occasionally experience such moments of bedlam, from city councils to the Congress. They occur on especially divisive issues, when the emotional frustrations boil up and overwhelm decorum.
At the time, I was quite shocked, a measure of my youthful innocence. A jaded old statehouse reporter noticed my astonishment and offered some perspective on the unruly behavior of the elected representatives.
"If you think these guys are bad," he said, "you should see their constituents."
His wisecrack was wickedly funny but, as I came to understand in subsequent years, it also stated an inescapable truth about 'representative democracy. At its best moments and its worst, the democratic system is a kind of two-way mirror between the people and those who are chosen to represent them. It reflects the warts and virtues back and forth between them. Sometimes, as if in a funhouse mirror, the image of politics becomes grotesquely distorted and mocks the public's virtuous sense of itself. At other moments, the mirror reflects political behavior that confirms and even exalts the public's self-esteem.
Either way, people cannot easily escape from the connection. If Washington is a city infested by fools and knaves, where did they come from and who sent them? If citizens do not like what they see in the mirror, what do they intend to do about it?
This tension is as old as the Republic, but a peculiar dimension has developed in modern politics. Politicians are held in contempt by the public. That is well known and not exactly new in American history. What is less well understood (and rarely talked about for the obvious reasons) is the deep contempt politicians have for the general public.
Politicians, rather like priests or police officers, are regularly exposed to the least attractive qualities of human nature -- gaudy dimensions of greed and confusion and mindless fear. It requires strong character for a politician to resist cynicism and retain an idealistic sense of the democratic possibilities. The speeches invoking "the people" as the sacred source of political power have taken on a mocking ring for many.
A Washington lobbyist, a former congressional aide with close relations to influential Senate Democrats, described the perspective with more candor than is allowed to politicians. "This city is full of people who don't like themselves, don't like their jobs and don't like their constituents -- and I mean actively don't like their constituents," the lobbyist told me not long ago. "I'm convinced one of the reasons they are in session so long is that members of Congress have gotten used to being here and they don't like going home where they have to talk to a bunch of Rotarians and play up to local leaders who are just dumb as stumps. They prefer to be here, to be around people they know and like and who understand them -- lawyers, lobbyists, the press and so forth."
Alienation, in other words, runs both ways. The mutual contempt that divides the governed from the governing authorities is the attitude underlying everything else in modern politics, both a symptom of the decay and an active agent in furthering the deterioration. In many private quarters of Washington, Alexander Hamilton's derisive dictum -- "The People! The People is a great beast!" -- has become an operating maxim. Survival in office requires a political strategy for herding "the beast" in harmless directions or deflecting it from serious, matters it may not understand. Now and then, to the general dismay of political elites, Hamilton's "beast" breaks loose and tramples the civility of the regular order, though this usually occurs on inflammatory marginal issues that have little to do with the real substance of governing. [2]
Political elites, nonetheless, complain constantly of their own powerlessness to govern. They depict the system as the hostage of random public opinion -- a "plebiscite democracy" directly wired to every whim reflected in the polls and unable to lead in difficult directions. Among themselves, establishment leaders talk, somewhat nostalgically, about the old days when a handful of party leaders could dictate the terms of national legislation. They ponder structural reforms that might somehow restore centralized party control and insulate politicians further from the fickle voters so that "leadership" could flourish once again. Their anxieties, though sincere, would seem most bizarre to the millions of alienated voters who feel left out and ignored. [3]
Voters do sometimes resemble a leaderless mob -- at least that is how they look through the lens of contemporary political events. They are ignorant on important matters and turn away from complexity. They do charge this way and that, spilling bile or temporary enthusiasms on the public arena, then moving quickly to something else. The jaded perspective shared privately among elected representatives is not altogether wrong. However, if the representative structure were someday altered to shield officeholders and distance citizens even further from power, the "people" would likely become even more disruptive.
Whatever frailty and infirmities dwell in the populace, Americans of today are not, on the whole, less capable than their forebears. But the political culture, the terms and conditions that now circumscribe democratic expression, certainly makes them look that way.
If citizens sometimes behave irresponsibly in politics, it is the role assigned to them. They have lost any other way to act, any means for influencing the governing process in positive and broad-minded terms. The subject of how ordinary people have been gradually cut out of a responsible place in the governing process (and how they still struggle to attain a share of power) will reappear in many forms throughout this book. It is one side of the two-way mirror and, in my thinking, the more important side.
Citizens have been pushed into two cramped roles in politics, neither of which can satisfy their own aspirations or the requirements for a functioning democracy. Both also tend to disturb the governing process that elites are concerned about. In one role, citizens are the mindless mass audience that looks so dumb -- the faceless crowd that speaks in politics mainly through opinion polls. They are the spectators who react clumsily to only the most vivid events, a war or sex scandal or pretty TV commercials.
In this embodiment, the "people" are always present in the political debates, but mainly as scarecrows or totems invoked on behalf of someone else's argument. The rich and complicated diversity of the nation is reduced to a lumpish commodity called "public opinion" that is easily manipulated by the slogans and imagery of mass communications. While the spectators watch a political drama unfold, the media and polling companies instantly tote up their "responses" and feed the results back to the politicians.
The other narrow role open to citizens is as special pleaders, defending their own stuff against other aspirants. Millions of Americans are organized quite effectively for this kind of politics, whether as consumers or petitioners for special benefits or the victims of particular abuses. Some well-known citizen organizations -- the American Association of Retired Persons, the National Rifle Association or the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, for instance-are formidable powers on their own terrain and they guard the subjects dear to their members like burly pickets. Self-interested pleas are the warp of democratic politics and always will be, of course, but the contours of modern government make it very difficult for citizens to accomplish anything else.
These two forms of political presence -- the mindless mass audience and the churlish preoccupation with self-interest -- are the familiar grist of political analysis and have been exhaustively examined. This book concentrates, instead, on the vast political space that is concealed by those two facile characterizations -- the ground where citizens are allowed to connect with political issues larger than self, where their self-interest is harmonized with their broader expectations for the society. That political space is now empty on most important subjects-the vast middle ground where democracy has shrunk and citizens have lost their voice.
That observation does not presume that, a generation ago, there was a halcyon era when everyone felt represented on all the major matters in politics, but the politics that constructs such connections and keeps them in good repair has been severely stunted by modern conditions. This is the politics of building reliable mediating mechanisms that enable people to connect with the higher realms of decision making. It is the development of two-way channels of communication that both educate and listen. It is the many strands of connective tissue, both public and private, between the governed and those in power. Without these most citizens will be rendered silent.
A central social irony is involved in this, one that elite critics seem to find difficult to grasp: The disorders of the governing process they worry about are rooted in this same territory of the debilitated citizens. If the government cannot govern effectively, it is not because the "people" are swarming over it with impossible demands, but because the bonds of dialogue and mutual understanding between citizens and government have become so weakened. The governing problem and the democratic problem are one and the same, created by the same circumstances.
Restoring a climate for responsible governing may thus require the opposite of what the elite analysis supposes. Instead of distancing people further from government decisions, it would entail bringing citizens back into the process in ways that seem genuine to them -- that will allow citizens to feel responsible again for self-government.
Many in the mass audience, it has to be acknowledged, are uninterested in this prospect. Despite their grumblings, they have accepted the loss of status without complaint, neither knowing what political capabilities used to exist for them nor able to imagine what might be constructed in the future. Ernesto Cortes, Jr., a highly regarded community organizer from San Antonio, Texas, has observed that Lord Acton's oft-quoted aphorism -- "power tends to corrupt . . ." -- works both ways.
"Powerlessness also corrupts," Cortes said. "We've got a lot of people who've never developed an understanding of power. They've been institutionally trained to be passive. Power is nothing more than the ability to act in your own behalf. In Spanish, we call the word poder, to have capacity, to be able." [4]
The process by which the citizens of America lost the capacity to speak to power in their own behalf is long and complex (and began well before the present era of politics). Many different elements are involved, among them the institutional arrangements in politics, the rise of mass communications, the language of the expert policy dialogue that surrounds the machinery of modern government. While the complexity makes the loss difficult to visualize, most of the elements are not buried secrets, but familiar features of the everyday political landscape.
The transformation of these features was decisive, however. The most obvious one is the atrophied condition of the two- party political system. For all their flaws, the parties once provided a viable connection for citizens, even quite humble citizens, to the upper realms of politics. People who would never be present themselves in the debate, who lacked the resources or the sophistication to participate directly, had a place to go -- a permanent organization where their views would be taken into account and perhaps mobilized to influence the government.
The parties atrophied as organizations for many reasons -- social and political changes as well as their own undemocratic qualities. When they were stronger, the mechanics of party control were often closely held (and regularly abused) to favor certain citizens and interests While excluding others, especially racial minorities and the disorganized segments of society.
Nevertheless, the easiest way to visualize the empty space that now exists in American politics is to consider what party organizations used to do for people -- and what none of the existing institutions of politics does for them now.
If democracy has lost any accountability to the governed, it is because there is no longer any reliable linkage between citizens and those who hold power. If the people sometimes seem dumb in public affairs, it is because no institution takes responsibility for teaching them or for listening to them. If communities now feel more distant from Washington, it is because they are.
***
Another familiar way of explaining the decline of politics focuses on the deterioration of elections and campaigns. The decline of electoral politics has been underway for at least a generation and is now so advanced that even political elites have become preoccupied with its implications. If the people no longer believe in elections, will they continue to believe in the power of the elected to govern their lives?
Every season, new discussions are convened around the subject, searching for the mechanical "reforms" that might restore faith in elections. A veritable fortune in foundation grants has been spent trying to devise solutions -- educating inert voters or promoting old-style candidate debates or discouraging negative campaign tactics. Despite these good intentions, the active electorate continues to shrink and, 'as we will discuss at a later point, the shrinkage is almost certain to continue well into the future.
By focusing on the electoral process, these inquiries unconsciously define the meaning of citizenship in rather narrow and passive terms -- citizens whose only role is to show up every couple of years and mark a ballot. Nevertheless, the steady decline in voting is the most visible evidence that something is wrong. Elections are the most direct link to governing power -- the collective lever that is meant to make citizens sovereign and officeholders accountable to them. So why don't people use it, especially when they are so unhappy with government?
Since 1960, voting in presidential elections is down 20 percent (and down 30 percent outside the South where the newly enfranchised black citizens raised participation rates). Roughly half of adult America stays home, despite the hoopla and extraordinarily expensive campaigns for the presidency. Elected power in the representative branch rests on an even narrower base -- a third or less of the electorate. In typical off-year elections, important senators and representatives are returned to office on the votes of small minorities, often as little as 15 percent or 20 percent of their constituents.
Nor are elections the satisfying public rituals they used to be -- dramas that renew the popular faith in self-government. After the 1990 congressional contests, three in four Americans said they were not very satisfied with the outcomes, even when their candidates won. [5]
Paul Weyrich, a New Right conservative who heads the Free Congress Foundation, thinks the very legitimacy of government is at stake in those statistics, that people are sending a message the political system does not wish to hear. "We're perilously close to not having democracy," Weyrich said. "I worry about it night and day. Nonvoters are voting against the system and, if we get a bit more of that, the system won't work."
What the disenchanted are saying, what I have heard them say in many different places, is that the politics of elections seem pointless to them -- no longer connected to anything that really matters. Partisan attachments are still active, of course, but much weaker among Americans than they used to be. F9r most citizens, the point of holding elections is not simply to pick Republicans over Democrats (or vice versa) but to decide something real. Elections no longer seem like efficacious exercises for achieving that purpose.
The disconnection between electoral politics and governing was vividly illustrated in 1988 when a Washington polling firm posed a piquant question to voters a few days before the presidential election. Aside from what Bush and Dukakis are saying in their campaigns, what do you want the next president to pursue? The public responded with an unusual list of priorities:
Make sure the wealthy and big corporations pay their fair share of taxes (important to 77 percent; unimportant to 5 percent). Impose stricter environmental regulation on companies that produce toxic wastes (66 percent to 5 percent). Help the poor and homeless to find jobs and earn a decent living (66 percent to 5 percent). Protect American jobs from foreign competition by tougher trade laws (59 percent to 8 percent). Provide long-term health care and health insurance for everyone (55 percent to 5 percent).
The list seems jarring because, as everyone knows, these were not the mobilizing issues of George Bush's campaign nor did they remotely reflect his own priorities. Yet these are the same people who a few days later elected him president. It was only well down the list of the public's agenda that a significant minority could be found for some of Bush's principal goals -- no new taxes (45 percent) or appointing antiabortion justices to the Supreme Court (35 percent). As opinion polls reported, however, most voters assumed that Bush's "no new taxes" pledge was a cynical campaign ploy. They expected him to break the promise once in power and were not especially surprised when he eventually did. [6]
The larger point is that these expressions of popular aspirations did not matter. No one would take them seriously, not the press or even rival politicians. The opinions were regarded as an idle "wish list" disconnected from the governing process. As president, George Bush would govern in a manner directly contrary to most of these particular public desires. Everyone understood this -- including the voters. The disconnection is so commonplace that it now seems "normal" to almost everyone.
Indeed, the idea of accountability has actually been reversed in the logic of modern political analysis: Whatever the winning candidate wants and believes about government, it is conventionally inferred that the voters must want the same. Why else would they have voted for him? Thus, the voters become dependent on the politicians for their political positions rather than the other way around.
The common wisdom of politics has therefore settled on a much narrower idea of what elections are for -- elections are a search for good character. Issues and ideas may provide the fodder of campaigns, but these are mainly useful in illuminating the temperament of the men and women who are running. Are they wise and honest people? Or do they have some hidden flaw? This definition allows conscientious observers to retain their faith in the electoral process and defend its efficacy.
Constructing campaigns around the character and celebrity of the candidates provides another convenient way to empty them of the substantive content of governing. If the search is mainly for good character, then the only "issues" that matter in electoral politics are ones that may help identify the candidate's personal qualities (or denigrate his opponent's). Thus, campaigns turn naturally to irrelevances that provide quick emotional attachments, but have no connection to the real sources of popular discontent.
Electoral politics in the age of mass communications serves as an elaborate mask -- concealing what goes on in government from the untutored mass of voters. But, if the voters have only weak influence over those governing decisions, then who does influence them? That is the question neither political party will discuss with any candor, but citizens at large have inferred the answer. In the 1960s, surveys found that 28 percent of the public was convinced that "the government is pretty much run by a few big interests looking out for themselves." A generation later, this resigned view of politics was held by two thirds of the people. [7]
No amount of tinkering with the mechanics of electioneering is likely to reach the sources of that resignation because none of the people who are in power -- neither Democrats nor Republicans nor their allied interests -- have any incentive to remove the mask (and perhaps much to lose if they did). After all, it works for them. The elected officials of both parties, as well as their supporting interests, understand that their power relationships are sustained by the present arrangement of empty elections. They may occasionally lament the decline in voting, but incumbents are not threatened by this. The fewer citizens who are paying attention and actually voting, the easier it will be for the status quo to endure.
Against these bleak facts, there is a crucial contrary truth, one that is seldom acknowledged and, therefore, not widely understood. It is this: The nation is alive with irregular political energies, despite the failure of formal electoral politics. Citizens of every stripe and status do engage themselves one way or another in trying to move the public agenda, despite all the impediments. Though they may have given up on elections, ordinary citizens do still struggle for democratic meaning, and with imaginative diversity.
Americans have always organized themselves in the myriad "voluntary associations" that de Tocqueville observed in the young Republic, but if anything, the tradition has taken on a kind of manic quality in modern politics. There are literally millions of groups and associations pursuing politics in the broad sense of the word, everything from huge free-floating national organizations to neighborhood crime patrols. Some citizens are attached to so many public causes, they resemble a collage of bumper stickers.
Some of these activities, like the major environmental organizations, have developed real but limited political influence through their ability to define the outlines of the public problems and formulate goals that feed into the main political debate. More typically, citizen politics is detached from any formal structure of political power and, therefore, quite weak.
Even the environmental movement is not able to translate its general public support and potential power into real results since, as the evidence will show, its goals are regularly stalled and 'subverted by the governing system, even when it wins. The environmentalists' potential is enormous but largely unrealized, as their corporate adversaries recognize. Frank Mankiewicz, a liberal activist from the Kennedy era who is now an executive at Hill & Knowlton, the influential public- relations firm, provided a candid glimpse of their nervousness.
"The big corporations, our clients, are scared shitless of the environmental movement," Mankiewicz confided. "They sense that there's a majority out there and that the emotions are all on the other side -- if they can be heard. They think the politicians are going to yield to the emotions. I think the corporations are wrong about that. I think the companies will have to give in only at insignificant levels. Because the companies are too strong, they're the establishment. The environmentalists are going to have to be like the mob in the square in Romania before they prevail."
The irregular politics underway in every comer of the nation provides an optimistic counterpoint for the story this book has to tell about Washington. The contrasting facts of people trying to be heard on large governing decisions, while the governing system responds evasively or not at all, confirm that the democratic impulse is alive. But their difficult experiences confirm also that the impulse is effectively blocked in modern politics.
Some citizens are reduced to flamboyant forms of street theater or even physical disruption in order to make their point. Many are obsessed with the news media because the press seems like their only chance of being noticed or accomplishing anything. Some citizens have become skillful political guerrillas, adept in the tactics of obstructing the government and negating the political agendas they could not otherwise influence.
Conscientious citizens, in other words, have also been stunted by the circumstances of the modern political system. They may blast away at power with telling critiques or try obstinately to block its path. But most cannot imagine the possibility of forming a continuing relationship with power -- a political system that would enable them to share in the governing processes and trust in its outcomes. Even alert, active people have internalized a shriveled version of democratic possibility.
***
The scandalous question that hangs over modern government and excites perpetual outrage is about political money and what it buys. What exactly do these contributors get in return for the hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars they funnel to the politicians? For many people, money explains almost everything about why democracy is in trouble, and exhaustive investigations are devoted to searching for hard evidence of bribery. The general pattern is more ambiguous than the cynics imagine, though still not very comforting to democracy.
What do major contributors get for their money? When I asked a lobbyist of long acquaintance who had served as the self-described "money guy" for selected Democratic senators, he responded with flavorful directness. "This was the period when we were shifting from black bags to accounting and disclosure," Charles Fishman explained, "and I knew how to shake the money tree. After the campaign-finance reforms were enacted, that's when the horrendous spigot was turned on. I phased out of fundraising and became a contributor myself.
"Different people wanted different things, " Fishman recalled. "You handled 90 percent of them with a hand job. You played on their minds. It was dinner with the senator or serving on an advisory committee. You could take care of them socially. Ten percent were out to buy you, for whatever purpose, their industry or whatever. They weren't trying to buy you so much as to keep you where you were on their issue. The smart guys were the ones who came at you on something where you didn't have a position.
"The reaction to this depended on your guy. If you had a senator like Adlai Stevenson, he'd throw you out of the office. He reamed my ass one day because I brought in a guy who was too aggressive in what he was saying. He kept saying: 'I expect ... I expect ... Let's understand what we're doing here.... ' Then there were other senators who said to me: 'Get out of the room. I want to talk to this guy alone.' That's when it happens -- when they're talking one on one. "
Enterprising reporters and reformers who keep the seamy subject of campaign money on the front pages are encouraged to do so by a time-honored syllogism of democracy: Dig out the sordid facts, expose them to the people and public outrage will lead to reforms. The trouble is, this logic doesn't seem to be working anymore. One money scandal after another has been offered to the public in recent years, lurid tales of senators and others trying to fix things in government for their big-bucks contributors. But reform does not follow. The system does not get repaired. The parade of scandals simply continues -- rituals of purification, " as Lewis Lapham called them. [8]
The deleterious effects of money are real enough, but the argument of this book is that money scandals reflect not just simple bribery, but much larger and more systemic disorders in governance. As the modern system has evolved, the complexity and diffusion of decision-making points in the federal government have multiplied the opportunities for irregular intervention and bargaining on behalf of interested parties. Nothing in law ever seems finally settled now because there is always one more stop in the process where both losers and winners may try to negotiate different terms.
The federal government has thus become a vast arena for bargaining and deal making on every conceivable question. This reality, in turn, has fostered a permissive culture in Washington politics that tolerates loose legal standards and extracurricular actions far beyond the view of citizens or formal accountability. The campaign money lubricates the deal making, to be sure, but the debilitating impact on democracy would endure, even if money were magically eliminated from politics.
Everyone lives in. this political environment and adapts to it, whether he or she is clean or dirty in the handling of campaign money. A newly elected representative quickly discovers that his job in government -- aside from making new laws -- is to act as a broker, middleman, special pleader and finagler. In casual conversation, a senator spoke unselfconsciously about "my client," meaning a defense contractor in his home state who was quarreling with the Pentagon over contract bids. The senator worried aloud about whether to go to bat for the firm since its campaign donations to him might smell bad, if his intervention were ever exposed.
"Client" has a different meaning from "constituent" or "citizen," but the word accurately describes the common relationships that define contemporary politics. The representative structure has been transformed into something quite offensive to its original intent -- a system in which it is nearly impossible to distinguish the relatively honest, hard-working politicians from the old-fashioned crooks, since they both do the same chores for clients. One must examine motives or eavesdrop on private conversations to establish if a political transaction was bribery or the normal daily business of Washington.
In fact, while Congress is most visible in this arena, the legislators are often only peripheral players. The well-placed officers of the Executive Branch, as the facts will show, do the same sort of work every day on behalf of their clients but with more influence over the outcomes and much less risk of exposure.
Politicians, in other words, are trapped in their Own debilitating circumstances, as much as citizens are trapped in theirs. This is why the money scandals do not lead to meaningful reforms -- because even the most honorable lawmakers know that they too are implicated in the moral ambiguities created by the governing system.
Evidence for this conclusion is abundant and appeared most vividly in the celebrated Keating Five scandal of 1990, in which five senators were accused of fixing things for an important contributor from the savings and loan industry. Despite sensational facts, the Senate ethics investigation ended limply and without meaningful disciplinary action. Fellow senators likewise balked at punishing Senator Alfonse D'Amato of New York though he was caught in a series of transactions that earned him the label "Senator Sleaze." D'Amato explained their reluctance as he defended his own behavior. "There but for the grace of God go most of my colleagues," he said. Even colleagues who despised D'Amato's flagrant deals recognized his point. [9]
If this analysis is correct, if the recurring money scandals are really symptoms of deeper pathologies in the way the government is organized and functions, then it opens up propositions that are even more difficult and disturbing than reformers imagine. Among other things; it suggests there are no easy "villains" to be indicted in the search for a restored democracy but a much heavier burden. It points toward terrain that many will find threatening -- reexamining the very modes and methodologies embedded in the common politics of Washington, confronting the permissiveness about law that has become the shared standard for Republicans and Democrats alike.
This search may be especially painful to those who think of themselves as liberals or progressives because part of what we are talking about is actually the inheritance from the New Deal era -- one of the great moments for democratic reform in the nation's history. The New Deal created many new corrective mechanisms in government designed to redress the imbalances of power -- programs and operating features intended to protect the weak from the strong and give many excluded sectors of the population a seat at the table in politics. On the whole, these innovations worked effectively for a generation or longer and some of them still work.
But the New Deal legacy rests upon an idea of interest-group bargaining that has gradually been transformed into the random deal making and permissiveness of the present. The alterations in the system are decisive and, given everything else that has changed in politics, the ultimate effects are antidemocratic. People with limited resources, with no real representation in the higher levels of politics, are bound to lose in this environment.
The painful irony this book explores in different quarters is how the reforms of an earlier generation have become encrusted as new barriers to democratic meaning. The burden of the present is to find new ways around those obstacles.
***
The contest of American politics has always been a dynamic drama of "organized money and organized people," as Ernie Cortes put it. Nothing is ever likely to change that. What is missing in contemporary politics, however, is a clear understanding of how this conflict has been changed and why power has accumulated steadily in the direction of "organized money."
Americans find it awkward to examine power directly. The democratic ethos discourages frank discussion, and everyone in politics, including the most powerful, understands that it is unwise to boast about having more influence than others. Important economic interests are sensitive to democratic attitudes and typically seek out allies that do not themselves seem so powerful. Community bankers are recruited to speak for banking. Small-town insurance agents lobby for mammoth insurance companies; independent drillers and gas-station operators defend big oil.
Given the wonderful fluidity and diversity of American life, power is also difficult to pin down in concrete terms. The confusing features of the social reality have frustrated critics and led some to make elaborate road maps of the powerful, lists of the people and institutions said to be running America -- the two hundred largest corporations, the fifty biggest banks and so forth. The lists prove what most people already understand: Money is power in American politics. It always has been. [10]
This book approaches the subject of power from a different angle -- not to make road maps, but to explore the functional realities of government that will illuminate why some powerful interests manage to prevail with some consistency, while the broad public is assigned to a lesser rank. It is these warped power relationships between people and monied interests and government that tangibly define the democratic problem.
As the evidence accumulates, it should be clear that the mystery of how these new power relationships developed is much too complex to be explained by simple moralisms. On one level, powerful economic interests -- corporations and private wealth--actively set out to seize the high ground of politics by deploying their superior resources and they largely succeeded. In another dimension, however, these powerful interests were merely reacting to the same destabilizing political changes that confronted everyone else. Out of practical necessity, defending their own well-being, they adapted better than others. "Organized money" is ascendant and "organized people" are inert because money has learned how to do modern politics more effectively than anyone else.
The fundamentals of how and why this condition occurred are set out in the six chapters that form Part I of this book, "Realities of Power." From Congress to the complex chambers of the Executive Branch, a series of invisible fences have been erected around important public issues -- operating practices and assumptions that both exclude people from the action and subvert such elementary principles as equal protection of the law. The result is government decisions on matters people care about intensely, from taxation to environmental protection, that are cloaked in reassuring rhetoric but driven by favoritism and manipulation on behalf of monied interests.
The fences include the very language and texture of the contemporary political debate, a mystique of rationality that gives natural advantage to educated elites and corporate interests while shunning the values expressed by ordinary citizens. This common barrier is the focus of Chapter One, illustrated by issues ranging from clean air to junk bonds.
Chapter Two, "Who Will Tell the People?," examines the breakdown of the representative system itself and another barrier -- the culture of political clientism. It will answer an intriguing political question about the now-familiar savings and loan disaster: How exactly did the politicians from both parties manage to keep this from the people for so many years and then dump a huge liability on the taxpayers? It turns out that self-correcting mechanisms in both government and the media are nonfunctional.
Chapter Three, "Bait and Switch, " moves to a deeper and more sophisticated plane of political control -- the artful illusions and bipartisan collusion by which monied interests succeeded in steadily reducing their federal tax burdens over fifteen years while everyone else was compelled to pay more. Taxation, after all, is not an obscure subject that citizens don't much care about. How were the few able to win, year after year, at the expense of the many?
Chapter Four, "The Grand Bazaar," confronts territory that is less familiar to people -- the permissive culture of deal making and regulatory bargaining that permeates Washington and underlies virtually every aspect of governing decisions, both in Congress and in the Executive Branch. The result is random law enforcement, so subject to political manipulation that it creates a kind of lawless government in which the weakest players, like injured industrial workers, are left to defend themselves against the more powerful violators.
Chapter Five, "Hollow Laws," reveals the operating methodologies that enable Congress and the Executive Branch to enact hollow laws -- grand pronouncements on toxic wastes and other problems designed to sound responsive to the public, but also designed to be neutered or neglected later in the dense details of the regulatory government. In this realm, meaningless laws exist, not just for years, but for decades, and the political action never ends. In this realm of politics, most citizens cannot play.
Finally, the capstone of this system is the White House, and Chapter Six, "The Fixers," describes how irregular political intervention on behalf of powerful clients is now institutionalized there -- out of public sight and beyond democratic accountability. In sum, from Congress to the White House to the federal courts, there is no protected ground for citizens -- no corner of the political system that faithfully defends their interests or even tells them the truth about what is happening.
Part II, "How May the People Speak to Power?," turns from the deformed governing system to the people themselves -- the irregular politics of active citizens who are struggling to overcome these disadvantages. Their experiences confirm the bleak analysis of the power realities in Washington. But their struggles also demonstrate their own weaknesses. Citizens have largely confined themselves to the margins of politics, distant from formal power-using "rude and crude" tactics that reflect how disconnected they are, when there are no mediating institutions to speak for them.
Part III, "Mediating Voices," confronts the core political institutions that have failed the people -- two major political parties, the press and the mass-media culture. Each in different ways has lost the ability to mediate for the people at large, but each has also converged with the powerful elite interests that dominate politics. Ironically; the only viable mediating institution in contemporary politics -- the dynamic player that has filled the vacuum -- is the corporate political organization. Corporations speak for their own interests, but they also claim to speak for others. In their own way, they have taken the place of political parties.
Finally, the deterioration of American democracy is now enveloped by larger forces -- the politics of the world -- and this reality is addressed in Part IV, "Triumph and Loss." The end of the Cold War offers a historic opening for Americans to rehabilitate the democratic principles that were corrupted by the long struggle with Soviet communism. Yet the global economy is confronting American democracy with the prospect of great loss -- the steady erosion of national sovereignty, the power to enforce laws, and the widely shared prosperity that supports social amity. The democratic challenge now requires new democratic sensibilities -- larger than the nation's borders.
All these burdensome facts need not lead to despair, however, and the conclusion, "The American Moment," describes why it is possible to imagine a regenerating politics that restores democratic meaning. People have it within their power to overcome all of these obstacles and restore a general sense of mutual respect to public life.
That is the hard work of democracy, but it is not more daunting than what people faced and overcame at different times in America's past. The politics of restoration will start, not in Washington, but in many other places, separately and together, when people decide to close the gap between what they believe and what is. People may begin this work by understanding what they are up against.