THE PARADOX OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY: Elies, Special Interests, and the Betrayal of Public Trust. (2024)

THE PARADOX OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY: Elies, Special Interests, and the Betrayal of Public Trust by John B. Judis Pantheon, $26.00

AS JOHN B. JUDIS TELLS THE story, six months before his assassination, President John F. Kennedy told a conference of businessmen at the Brookings Institution that "most of the problems ... that we now face are technical problems, are administrative problems."

"Most of us," Kennedy acknowledged, "are conditioned ... to have a political viewpoint," but in the reform spirit that has animated Progressives all century long, Kennedy went on to reckon that this regrettable truth about fallen politics would soon be overcome. Selfish group interests would surely be dissolved in a warm bath of reason and good will, where the tub was in the protective hands of a far-sighted establishment--or rather, Establishment. In the tradition of Herbert Croly, Woodrow Wilson, the New Dealers, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Brookings Institution itself, organized and honorable gentlemen armed with disinterested knowledge would overcome narrow self-interest as a matter of course.

A world where a president of the United States could proclaim such an expectation with a straight face seems to belong to a bygone era, when the term "public servants" did not occasion smirks and Walter Lippmann rather than Maureen Dowd set the breakfast table agenda.

In that vanished world, the Progressive faith in disinterested knowledge on behalf of overarching ends was tended not only by a right-minded public and constructive groups of laborers and consumers, but also, crucially, by elites who were capable of rising above narrow self-interest. In that world, giants strode the Earth: the likes of Dean Acheson, John J. McCloy, and C. Douglas Dillon, organizations like the Committee on Economic Development, and the Twentieth Century Fund. In particular, there were business people (business men, actually) who thought their way beyond their company's--even their industry's, and mirabile dictu, even their country club's--well-being.

"I think there was a period when there were businessmen outside the government who had some authority and who were respected, and who had a genuine national patriotic concern with the problems of the country," said the late Republican economic adviser Herbert Stein to Judis. "I can't think of a single name now of such a person."

It will not come as a revelation to readers of this journal that questions of public policy on consequential issues like health care, taxes, trade, and telecommunications are not settled peripatetically in shady glens where public servants and wise men stroll about in earnest debate over rival conceptions of the general good. They're settled in lobbies where access mixes with private interests.

Nor will it astound liberals who proudly display the scarlet L that the rich get richer while inequality becomes steadily more unequal. The question is: How does it happen that a public that still affirms many Progressive tenets--consumer and environmental reform, health care, managed trade--has largely been ruled, for a quarter century now, by forces committed to crippling those reforms? Judis offers a compelling, largely convincing account of how business has run off with so many political prizes. It is not a pretty picture, and there are plenty of villains, colluders, and bystanders to go around.

For many years, Judis has been waving the ragged liberal wing of The New Republic, where his crisp and properly indignant exposes of deal-making tend to slip from sight among the editors' more urgent preoccupations. His lucid, frequently impassioned book enfolds horror stories about K Street malfeasance and business power in an impressive larger structure. His argument, in brief, is that for democracy to accomplish the common good, three forces must line up at the same time in the right direction: the public as a whole, interest groups, and elites.

The public, yes: We all pay lip service to that vast faceless beast, whose pale visage is usually (if faintly) discerned in public opinion polls. Interest groups are no surprise on anyone's list; pluralist theory has enshrined them for decades. The tantalizing surprise in Judis' argument is his call to elites: Be worthy of your name, your status, and not least, your wealth.

Judis is properly appreciative of interest groups on the liberal side: unions, consumer groups, environmentalists, and others, all of them repositories, or residues, or sometimes tombs, of social movements. As for interest groups on the right, Judis is good on the rise of business lobbies, usefully supplementing William Greider's detailed account in Who Will Tell the People? But he is especially astute on the default of high-minded do-gooders, the twilight of serious think tanks and the rise of empty but expensive suits on the right. He is scathing on the business abandonment of the long view.

To understand what cracked the Progressive faith, Judis revisits the Sixties, which saw the emergence of groups that had been unrepresented in the Fifties--minorities, students, women, gays. The late New Left smashed up a promising reformist start, Judis argues, and the central and enduring figure of the late Sixties is neither Abbie Hoffman nor Huey Newton but Ralph Nader. Movements for the extension of rights, consumerism, and environmentalism are the upheaval's real legacy. What limited their achievement, Judis argues, and put an end to the world of Progressive reform, was not the Gomorrhic Sixties of Bork-Bennett- Gingrich-DeLay demonology; it was the counter-Sixties that was bankrolled handsomely by big business and shepherded into undeserved respectability by an alliance of paleo- and neo-conservatives in the 1970s.

Some of this is a many-times told tale--but Judis adds a good deal. In addition to a review of the organizing-publicist role of Irving Kristol, he is informative about Lewis Powell, the Virginia attorney who in August 1971, two months' short of his nomination to the Supreme Court, wrote a widely-circulated memo decrying Nader and the campus radicals, warning against antibusiness sentiments in the media and Congress, and calling for a political and propaganda counteroffensive from business. Business was especially receptive to ideological appeals, Judis argues, because of the economic downturn that began in the late Sixties and accelerated toward the breakpoint of 1973.

Judis is particularly damning in his analysis of the rightward drift (and sometimes thrust) of the so-called liberal press--particularly The Washington Post and The New York Times. He tracks the decline of the civic guru, noting that the scholarly George F. Kennan gave way to the fawned-upon lobbyist and corporate hobnobber, Henry Kissinger. He crisply and clearly describes how corporate-bankrolled lobbyists stifled reform in the first Clinton administration while liberals spent their time beating up on the president for his timidity.

Under the apt heading, "The Apostasy of the Elites," Judis is also insightful on the once crucial role and subsequent default of the liberal foundations like Ford and Rockefeller. One need not oversell the glories of the high-minded gentlemen of yester-year--arguably no one shares more responsibility for the horrors of the Vietnam War than Rockefeller Foundation President and former Secretary of State Dean Rusk--to be struck by the important contributions that these foundations made to public interest, consumer, and environmentalist law in the Sixties and Seventies. Then what happened? The rise of the rightwing foundations--Olin, Bradley, Scaife and others--in financing, circulating, hyping, and rewarding their own brand of politically correct thought is not a new story. Left of center, is a lesser-known story: retreat.

The philanthropic moderates and liberals who helped consolidate liberal

victories in the Sixties pulled back, settling for easy causes. They were cowed by Republican threats to their tax-exempt status and offered little competition to Olin, Pew, Bradley, the Koch family, Richard Mellon Scaife, and other financers of right-wing lobbies, magazines, Websites, and lunch-clubs. Money is automatically tilted right--an obvious point that Judis might have given a bit more attention--but as the examples of Edward Filene and Robert Brookings make clear, a few philanthropic exceptions can go a long way. Even today, with whiffs of Progressive hopefulness in the air, the prospects for a revival of the elites are not bracing and the philosopher-investor George Soros is the thoughtful institution-building exception who proves the rule.

Hiding, unfortunately, behind a conventional political-sciency title, this is a vigorous and important book.

TODD GITLIN is professor of culture, journalism, and sociology at New York University and the author of several books including, most recently, Sacrifice, a novel.