Entry 4:

Dear Jonathan:

I prefer going second in these exchanges. I wake up in the morning to read your letter rather than having to stay up all night fretting about mine. But the disadvantage is that we end up debating your ideas about my ideas rather than vice versa.

First off, I don't belong to the sailboat school of political science. I don't believe the American political system is blown hither and yon by constantly changing winds of power. I am much more in the old W.D. Burnham realignment school. I think American politics goes in 30- to 40-year cycles, each of which is characterized by an overall balance of power between business, on one hand, and labor and consumers, on the other. We seem to be at the tail end of a cycle that began in the early 1970s, when the liberal Democratic coalition that had reigned since 1932 fell apart under the pressure of the Vietnam War and the civil-rights movement and when business leaders, worried about growing foreign competition, falling rates of profits, and a labor/New Left alliance, begin to establish ties with Republican conservatives.

This new alliance clearly emerged in 1978 when it defeated Jimmy Carter's liberal economic agenda, and it reigned supreme until the late 1980s, when economic downturn and conservative disunity weakened its hold over the political system. This alliance can no longer get its maximum agenda adopted by Congress--witness what happened in 1995--but it still holds a veto over liberal economic reforms that redistribute power and wealth. Victories by environmentalists? Well, the environmental movement has fared best of any of the post-New Left popular movements, but it hasn't gotten any major bills passed for a long time. The Clean Air Act of 1990 delayed the implementation of standards. In 1995-96, it mainly succeeded in stopping Republican attempts to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency. As it is, business lobbyists have been able to block the implementation of new clean-air standards and to prevent even the consideration of a global-warming treaty.

The labor movement has been able to "win" an increase in the minimum wage, which big business has traditionally supported and which is always accompanied by egregious giveaways to multinational corporations and banks, but it has failed for decades to pass even minor changes to labor law that would make it harder for businesses to fire union organizers. On these kinds of issues that directly pit business and labor, the labor movement has been completely stymied. And consumers? One need only look at the Telecommunications Act of 1996 or at the funding of the consumer-protection agencies. After adjusting for inflation, the funding of the Consumer Product Safety Commission has decreased about 60 percent since 1974, and its staffing has fallen 43 percent. So much for the successes of "liberal citizens' lobbies" in the '90s.

When I wrote my book, I didn't see any change looming from this dismal configuration of power. That was partly because I wrote it from September 1997 to June 1998, when Washington was obsessed with Chinese infiltration of our electoral system and with Bill Clinton's sex life. But it is obvious now that we are in the midst of a political transition, although it might take another decade to occur. The conservative movement has gone from disunion to decadence. It no longer has an organized base in the country but consists of various direct-mail and fund-raising operations in Washington. The Democrats are on the verge of becoming the majority party again. The economic boom has provided the fiscal, if not the political, support for new reform initiatives. And the Internet may be creating the condition for a new kind of popular politics that doesn't require union halls or campuses. I share your skepticism about the impact of John McCain's campaign-finance bill, but his popularity reflected the public's growing impatience with post-'60s Washington.

You remain wedded, however, to your secular (anti-cyclical) model of American government: It's not really an evolutionary model, but government as driven by its own second law of thermodynamics, the result of which will eventually be legislative immobility. I continue to believe, however, that you are focusing on real, but relatively minor, legislative difficulties. It is probably harder today to get mohair subsidies out of the budget, but it is no harder or easier to do the really big economic things than it was 40 or 50 years ago. It took from 1945 to 1962 to get Congress to pass a major trade bill, even though there were fewer lobbies then than now. By contrast, Congress passed two major trade initiatives in the 1990s. Of course, Congress couldn't pass Medicare today, but it couldn't have passed it in 1954 either. It took the rise of the civil-rights movement and of the early New Left, the rout of the Republicans in 1964, and the acquiescence of business. It's not the sheer number of lobbies that counts; it's the configuration of power and movements in the country.

But I've said this before, and I think our readers sense the basic difference between us. Perhaps in our last exchange we could argue about whether there really is a difference between what I call an elite organization (like the Brookings Institution with which you are affiliated) and an interest group. From one reading of your book, you would describe everything in Washington that isn't a political party and wants to influence policy as an interest group. And you would describe every interest group--from Friends of the Earth to the National Federation of Independent Businesses--as selfishly trying to transfer resources from someone else to its clients or membership? Have I misread you on this?