Entry 2:

Dear Jonathan,

I'm glad I got a chance to read your book, which I had shunned earlier because of its original, forbidding title. My disagreements aside, I think it is one of the best recent books on the American political system. My book would have improved by having read it beforehand.

Your view of government, like mine, is a restatement, with a twist, of an older thesis. Back in 1975, Samuel Huntington (probably under the influence of your teacher Mancur Olson) argued that America had become "ungovernable" because of an "excess of democracy" brought about by the proliferation of interest groups. You take a similar tack, but from a more appealing centrist rather than conservative vantage. Huntington blamed left-wing lobbies; you blame all lobbies alike.

My view is a restatement of the theory of corporate liberalism, which held that the American left was co-opted by elite policy groups that sought an accommodation between business and labor. In The Paradox of American Democracy, I argue that the reforms of the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the '60s were made possible by the intercession of the Brookings Institution, the New York Times, the Ford Foundation, and similar elite organizations. And I contend that the main reason we haven't had such reforms for the last three decades is that a powerful alliance between conservative Republicans and business lobbyists has blunted popular pressure from below and shunted aside the moderating influence of elite organizations.

Both of us reject the canard that government itself is responsible for whatever ails Washington. Government in Washington has not grown over the decades; what has multiplied and flourished are the networks of lobbies, think tanks, and policy groups that surround and sometimes besiege government. But we have much different views of what does ail Washington. You argue that any kind of dramatic reform--from the left or right--has become impossible, because government has inexorably evolved into a "sprawling organism, its many parts not particularly good at solving social problems, but extremely good at surviving." I don't see this at all.

Sure, lobbies have promoted and kept in place all kinds of silly subsidies, but they have not been able to block what you would call major reform legislation--from the tax cuts of the 1980s to welfare reform, NAFTA, the WTO, and the Telecommunications Act in the 1990s. In fact, most of these "reforms" were achieved because of intense lobbying by business, which generally outspends labor or single-issue groups by more than 10 to one. Consumer or labor organizations had almost no influence, for instance, on the tax bills of 1981 and 1986 or on the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

When I say that reform has been blocked, I am using the term more narrowly and typically to refer to those measures that equalize the distribution of wealth and power in society or that provide all Americans with the kind of opportunity and security that only the upper classes used to enjoy. Call these reforms "liberal" or "progressive" if you want, but society's commitment to them--from child-labor laws to Medicare--has been one measure of the advance of civilization over the centuries.

These kind of reforms have been proposed recently, but they have been blocked. You can say, of course, that the last major reform proposal--Clinton's health-care-reform plan of 1993--was much too complicated and unwieldy to be adopted. I would agree with that point, but legislation is hardly ever adopted in its original form. What was remarkable was that nothing came from the battle over it. And the reason for that was that an alliance of conservative organizations and business lobbies made any compromise impossible.

You can contrast what happened to Clinton's health-care bill with what happened to the full-employment bill that a coalition of liberals and labor unions proposed at the end of World War II. Like Clinton's health-care bill, it was far too ambitious, and conservative Republicans and Democrats in Congress, backed by the National Association of Manufacturers, set out to kill it. But in 1946, popular forces were somewhat stronger, and public-minded business leaders, organized through the Committee for Economic Development, thought the government should commit itself to preventing the recurrence of a depression. CED successfully engineered a compromise, the Employment Act of 1946. In 1994, there were similar groups of business and labor leaders seeking a compromise health plan--even within the U.S. Chamber of Commerce--but they were beaten down by conservative operatives such as Grover Norquist, Congressional opponents such as Paul Coverdell, and powerful trade groups and business lobbies.

I see the defeat of these kind of reforms not as inevitable or permanent but as the product of today's politics and, more broadly, of the balance of power between labor and consumers on one hand and business on the other. While you regard the repeated outcry against "special interests" as a symptom of the public's misunderstanding of how government really works, I see it more optimistically as a reaction to the predominance of business lobbies (and to the affront to pluralism that it represents) and as a harbinger of reforms that will, perhaps, give government and us a new beginning. Is this just wishful thinking?