Entry 3:

Dear John:

Thanks for your elegant and generous reply! You conclude with a richly nuanced paragraph in which you hope for "reforms that will, perhaps, give government and us a new beginning. Is this just wishful thinking?" To me the answer is yes. In a way, this gets to the nub of what separates us: the arrow of time.

In that same paragraph, you say: "I don't see the defeat of these kind of reforms 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." I think most Americans share your general view, which is that, at any given moment, the government moves whichever way the prevailing vectors of power push it, much as a sailboat might be blown by shifting winds. On this view, the main thing that matters is, Who has the power right now? And if, as you argue, conservative and business interests have acquired too much power at the expense of other interests, shouldn't the answer be to redress the imbalance and move government back on course?

Politics matters, of course. But the most radical move I make in my book is to argue that the standard, politics-oriented view of government is at best incomplete, at worst misleading. The human body is "time-asymmetrical": You can have a big impact on it by changing its environment, but you can't reverse the arrow of time. No 55-year-old will ever be 25 again. Government is also time-asymmetrical. Over decades, the accumulation of lobbies and programs flows predominantly in only one direction.

That doesn't make reform hopeless. Far from it: I argue passionately for a vigorous reforming spirit. But it does mean that, other things being equal, both changing government itself (the conservative agenda) and using it effectively as a flexible, creative implement of successful social change (the liberal agenda) become harder over time. Not impossible, but harder.

You're certainly right about the different climate for reform in, say, 1946. But that's just the point: Many of the sorts of reforms that were doable in 1946 are much more difficult today, because society is crammed with lobbies and government has less room to maneuver. Could Medicare be passed today, when there are about 800 health lobbies in Washington (up from about 100 in 1979)? Not easily. Could Medicare be undone today and replaced with something better? Nearly impossible. In fact, Bill Bradley bravely proposed replacing Medicaid (not Medicare) with something broader and more rational, and you can see where that got him. So we're left with incremental reform. If I'm right, this isn't such terrible news. There's nothing awful about the government we have now. But realism does require forgetting about any "new beginning." Indeed, dreaming about "new beginnings" makes successful real-world reform harder. If activists--left or right--and the public think that success means throwing the special interests out of Washington and starting over, they're bound to condemn as failures the more modest, incremental, but still-vital reforms of particular programs that we actually can do. Such as transportation reform in the 1970s. Tax reform in the 1980s. Welfare reform in the 1990s. And maybe next--who knows?--Social Security reform. All of which are eminently worth doing. The bad news is that politics can change the system only at the margins. The good news is that the margins matter!

I'm the first to concede that I'm the outlier in this debate. Most people would agree with you that a political shift--whether to the left or the right--would do the trick. So why, as we both agree, has the system proved so remarkably resistant to large-scale change, change that goes beyond fixing some program or other?

Personally, I don't think a political imbalance favoring conservative and business interests can be the answer. One reason is that, as your book admirably recounts, those interests took charge under Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich, and they got no further than the liberals did. Another reason is empirical. I don't think business has the sort of large advantage that you ascribe to it.

Business interests are frequently at war with each other (think about the banking or telecommunications reform efforts, where business players shot each other to pieces). And there's a fascinating new book called The New Liberalism in which Jeffrey M. Berry, a Tufts University political scientist, actually tries to measure the comparative influence of business vs. predominantly liberal citizens' groups. He finds that citizens' groups (retirees, environmentalists, consumers, civil-rights advocates, and so on) compete formidably, and that "by 1991 business held only a modest advantage over citizen groups in its win to loss ratio." In the 1995-96 Republican Congress, environmentalists won against conservative interests 10 times out of 12.

Moreover, Berry finds that liberal citizens' lobbies have "had the most success of all interest groups in influencing the congressional agenda." Right now is a case in point. Even if George W. Bush wins the presidency, he'll be working within an agenda largely framed by liberals: regulating guns and tobacco, extending prescription-drug benefits to seniors, furthering federal influence over education, "saving" Social Security and Medicare, and so on.

I'm not suggesting that liberals run this city. I'm suggesting that no one runs it. There are now so many groups on so many sides of so many issues that the balance of power consistently favors no one (or, if you prefer, everyone).

But let's say I'm wrong. May I suggest a thought experiment? Let's say a genie (or even an election) came along and tipped the balance of forces sharply toward the liberal side. We might get a spate of new programs. But then mightn't business respond with an all-out lobbying buildup of its own? Five years later, would there be even more corporate money in Washington, and more business lobbies dug in even deeper than before? You can guess what I think. What do you think? If you're right, what's the way out?