Arrogant Capital: Washington, Wall Street, and the Frustrations of American Politics.

For a number of years analysts of American government argued that the stalemates and blockages that characterized the legislative and policy processes in Washington were the result of divided government, a circumstance in which one party controlled the presidency and another controlled Congress. Bill Clinton's election was supposed to change all that. Party government, Clinton argued during the campaign, would break the gridlock of Washington and get the country moving again on long-neglected domestic problems. Of course, it hasn't worked out quite that way. Clinton has had some legislative success and has at times enjoyed the support of his party in Congress. But just as often it seems that the Democratic president, faced with the Democratic Congress, has had to engage in the same kind of house-to-house combat with congressional barons that bedeviled his Republican predecessors.

In his new book, Kevin Phillips sets out to explain why gridlock and the stalemates of American government cannot be cured simply by the imposition of party government. The American government, he argues, has been taken over by a new class of parasites. Lawyer-lobbyists and other special-interest pleaders have proliferated wildly and turned Washington, D.C., into a cosmopolitan capital (with French restaurants!), far out of touch with the common citizenry, and far too entrenched to allow for the kind of innovation and new directions the country desperately needs.

For Phillips, the genius of American politics has been the "bloodless revolutions" that have periodically come along to sweep the decks clear of tired leaders, played-out political coalitions, and out-dated policies. "Watersheds" (political scientists will recognize them as "critical elections") have followed on catastrophes such as the Civil War and the depressions of the 1890s and 1930s and forged out of these tragedies new possibilities, new parties, and at the very least, new relationships between political institutions and the citizens they represent. Phillips argues that we are desperately in need of such a cleansing now, but that it is being prevented by the parasitic culture of Washington. "The people," he claims, know instinctively what needs to be done, but they are being thwarted by the "special interests" that defend the status quo, and the cultural and financial status they have derived from it, with great skill and even greater energy.

Phillips's solution to this problem is to allow the people to bypass the presldent, the Congress, and the political parties, all of which are controlled by the parasites, through the implementation of more direct democracy. Referenda on crucial issues of the day--and here one hears the echo of Ross Perot's call for national town meetings through interactive video--would allow policy to reflect the will of the people rather than the narrow interests of the parasites. Phillips has many other recommendations, but the heart of his argument is that since the parties cannot bring us to a new "watershed" we must allow the people, through new technologies, to do it for themselves directly.

Phillips has an excellent record as a political prognosticator, and one should always take seriously his sense of the state of American politics. Indeed, Arrogant Capital is chock full of the kind of pointed observations and well-aimed barbs for which Phillips is justly famous. The problem with his argument, however, is that in his zeal to identify with the populist frustrations of "the people" he has effectively absolved "the people" from playing any role whatever in creating the present mess in the first place. Is it really true, as Phillips seems to believe, that the people have been unwitting bystanders to all the changes that have taken place in American politics over the last fifty years? Didn't "the people" choose divided government over and over again in free and fair national elections? Didn't "the people" enthusiastically support the irresponsible fiscal policies of the Reagan era that caused the structural deficit Phillips so eloquently decries? Didn't "the people" decide they would rather view partisan politics as a television show scripted by admen rather than as a community-based activity requiring organization, planning, and thought? Didn't "the people" join organizations and groups in overwhelming numbers and then hire lawyer-lobbyists to protect their "special interest" at all costs? Phillips may be right that Washington has become an arrogant capital incapable of meaningful reform. But for a full account of the source of that problem Arrogant Capital must be read in conjunction with Jonathan Rauch's Demosclerosis: The Silent Killer of American Government.

Rauch distinguishes himself from Phillips immediately by noting in his opening chapter that "the people" in fact make up the interest groups at the heart of the problem. "We have met the special interests," Rauch writes with admirable clarity, "and they are us.... The problem is not any kind of 'them.' It is not the political group you most despise, whoever that may be. It is you and me and many people like us." Rauch argues that America is suffering from "demosclerosis," a hardening of the arteries of American political life that has made it impossible for our political leaders, no matter how energetic or well-intentioned, to adapt to changing circumstances and new problems.

The problem, in short, is that interest groups defend government programs and financial transfers that have long outlived their original purpose or collective social value. As a result, new programs do not replace old ones. Rather, the new is added to the old in an increasingly unwieldy and even irrational edifice of tax breaks, setasides, subsidies, and bureaucracies. The pathologies associated with demosclerosis are many. First of all, the government cannot really reform itself; reform comes if at all on the margins, never affecting the thousands of programs and subsidies that lie at the heart of the problem. Second, tremendous amounts of energy, talent, and capital go into cutting up an existing government-baked pie and away from private enterprise, innovation, and investment. And finally, policy paralysis, or gridlock if you will, sets in as a country which is arguably richer and more powerful than it has ever been finds that it "can't afford" universal health care, welfare reform, or any other social program anyone wants to name. We can afford it all and more, Rauch claims, but we can't afford those programs in addition to all the agricultural subsidies, commercial sweetheart deals, and middle-class welfare entitlements (tax deductions), that we the people are so assiduously defending.

Rauch's cure for demosclerosis is a tough one. Republicans, he says, should support higher taxes in the name of fiscal responsibility, and Democrats should support slashing government programs in the name of rationality and a responsible setting of priorities. And both should endorse experimentation and reform as the keys to good health for an ill, but still very resilient, polity. He is not optimistic that the cure will be applied, of course. But he is hopeful, at least, that the malady will be accurately diagnosed.

Rauch's argument, at its core, is really quite similar to Phillips's. Both authors hold that the American system is in desperate need of innovation and reform, and both hold that the necessary changes are being prevented by the entrenched power of special interests represented by a new parasite class of Washingtonians. The difference between the two, however, is more stark than the similarities. For Phillips, the people are the victims of the piece who must turn to new technologies and new political arrangements to reassert their control. For Rauch, the people are the problem. We have, he claims, become a nation of "expectant whiners," and our deep troubles, our demosclerosis, will not be cured until, both collectively and individually, we grow up, shape up, and give up our own special interests.