Those of you who listen to National Public Radio may be familiar with the program On Point hosted by Tom Ashbrook. It is a talk show with guest commentators and listener participation, the main focus of which is current events and public policy. It is a good program to not only learn about contemporary policy debates, but to listen for the normative presuppositions of the views expressed on the show.
In a recent episode entitled Special Interests and the Democratic Party, Ashbrook interviews Jay Cost, a conservative blogger and author of a new book Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the American Republic. You can listen to the podcast and read an excerpt from the book at http://onpoint.wbur.org/2012/05/16/jay-cost.
Cost claims that the Democratic Party is a tool of special interests. Unable to act upon the national interest, and has become a threat to the American republic. The special interest of primary concern are environmentalists, feminists, labour, and minorities.
On the show, labour is his primary concern. Deals between Franklin Roosevelt and labour during the New Deal of the 1930s figure prominently as evidence for his contention. More contemporaneously, he cites the health care debate. Here he focuses on how congressional Democrats and the Obama administration abandoned the public option early on, and negotiated sweetheart deals with big pharma to protect corporate profits and control over prescription drug benefits.
Throughout the show he was pummeled by Ashbrook and the audience for his partisan lack of balance. He is then forced into shifting his ground of debate (and the presumed purpose of the book), making arguments about political dysfunction in general, or the mismatch between political rhetoric and actual policy.
Even so, there were some points of insight in his perspective.
The most important insight is the failure of federalism to control the power of political parties and special interests.
James Madison and other writers of the Federalist Papers (see especially No. 10 and No 51) saw faction (i.e., special interests) as a threat to the republic. They thought that separate branches of government, bicameral legislatures, and reserving some powers to the states, would prevent the rise of controlling factions, and stop them from prevert the publics business for private ends. This is known as divided government. The bill of rights was added to strengthen the protections for individuals. Cost argues that modern political parties and the special interests (factions) they serve have found ways to overcome these impediments, particularly through the use of lobbying, campaign contributions, and mass media. I think he is spot on in this respect.
He is also correct that the Democratic party and many of its members in Congress and the White House have been corrupted by the same forces undermining federalism. These corrupting influences are not the interest groups that Costs claims them to be. None of them including labour has the wherewithal to compete with corporate coffers and their army of lobbyists. It is rather a set of corporate interests manipulating Democrats and Republicans alike. Think the banking and financial sectors, for-profit health care, big pharma, big oil, big ag, high tech, and the arms industry.
Facing a political system that is up for sale, and an economy rigged for the benefit of the few, it is no wonder we see an upwelling of support for populism, represented by both the Occupy Movement and the Tea Party. Some may say the corruption and rigged nature of our political-economic system has been ever thus. To a degree, yes. Government captured by special interests is a threat to every political community throughout history.
Nonetheless, consider the rising tide of social stratification, the increasingly low-wage labour market, the huge percentage of the population living in poverty or near-poverty (35+ %), the inaction to end the current depression and address unemployment, and the plummeting trust in politicians. This is evidence, I think, for a more severe political-economic crisis than at any time since the Gilded Age or the Great Depression.
Costs analysis also suffers in two major respects.
The first is the interpretive frame he brings to politics itself. To focus on the Democrats as especially corrupt is ludicrous. The Republic Party is dominated by large corporate interests, followed by social conservatives, defense hawks, and tea party activists. The party is aggressively partisan, so much so it is content with harming the country in pursuit of political power. More to the point, the theoretical and evidentiary underpinnings of conservatism in American are suspect. Noxious individualism, negative liberty, market fundamentalism, American exceptionalism, Christian identity, anthropocentrism, speciesism — all these and more are banes on conservatism in America. They are discourses that conservatives must revise before they can offer a compelling moral-political vision to the U.S.
The second is the failure to distinguish between public interests versus private interests. This is a point of ethics, and is sometimes discussed in terms of goods and values. Public interests represent the well being of the political community as a whole. In contrast, private interests seek benefits for a non-public, private interests. These are often had at the expense of the public at large. This is well illustrated in the U.S. tax code, which redistributes wealth from the poor and middle class to wealth individuals and corporations. Here we have private interests enriching itself at the publics expense. By reducing the communitys well being overall, such private interests treat other people unethically, privileging their own good over that of others.
This point of ethics maps over to the interest groups Cost is so worried about. Advocates for the environment, women, labour and minorities are not generally engaged in special pleading for narrow private interests. Rather, the interests and issues they represent contribute to the common good. A healthy environment, respect for women and the working class, and opposition to bigotry produce a better society for all of us. Well, perhaps not for oligarchs who use others as means to their own ends.
The ethical and interpretive lesson here is simple. Never let the language of special interests go unchallenged in a moral or political conversation. Explore just what that term means, distinguish between public and private interests, and delve into the substantive impacts those interests have on both human and more-than-human communities. Think about special interests from a moral point of view, as political pressure groups, some of whom have the common good in mind, and some of whom do not. Doing so will help clarify the moral values at stake, as well as your own commitments to the commonweal.