Special interests and The city on a hill
Hausknecht, Murray
Political parties," Gary Hart told the Alabama Legislature during the primary season, "must free themselves from the grasp of the special interests and once again address the country's national...
...Any politician who openly solicits support, and unreservedly welcomes it, only confirms the validity of the original animus against all politicians...
...When "demands" for higher wages, fewer hours, and better fringe benefits are successfully negotiated, there is no way to blur the impression that only one group will profit—especially when the company announces its increased costs will be passed on to the customer...
...The weakening of the labor movement will not serve "the national interest," "the common good," or "the coming generations...
...The political consequences were clearly stated by James Madison in Federalist Number 10 when he warned of parties "united or actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or the permanent and aggregate interests of the community...
...IN MODERN SOCIETIES it is extremely difficult to order life so that communal ends can be the primary ends of action...
...Perhaps America will become a "city on a hill" when those special interests are finally overcome...
...Nor will it seem mean-spirited to many people who usually become conscious of unions in negative contexts...
...Those who are hostile to the unions, like Hart's reputed following of young professionals, are affirming their commitment to the traditional American creed of individualism...
...By creating an organic community, Winthrop said, those frail humans could live up to the terms of their divine commission: 'we must be knitt together in this worke as one man...
...Unions, like other modern organizations, tend to be large-scale structures that fall heir to the ills of bureaucracy, and they are easily lumped with Big Business and Big Government...
...To see the organization of those without property as similar to the coming together of the wealthy and the powerful is to misunderstand the world in which we live...
...If Winthrop's vision, which also assumed that existing inequalities had to be preserved, demands action based upon subjective feelings that people belong together, Madison's vision demands an orientation typical of modern capitalist societies—in Weber's terms, an orientation that "rests on a rationally motivated adjustment of interests...
...Indeed, American culture assumes that people will not only pursue their own ends but that they ought to do so...
...Between them there is no middle ground...
...It works the other way too: when those whose only experience has been the traditional community see that the rewards of modernity are possible for the likes of them, they eagerly reach for the rewards...
...With the successful organization of public employees in recent years many strikes not only upset daily routines, they also conspicuously violate the more sacred "public interest...
...Unions, or "Big Labor" as they are known to conservative speech-writers, are perfect targets for hostility...
...Unions, because they represent the interests of one group and are perceived as large, impersonal, powerful forces akin to corporations, become a convenient symbol of that alienating part of modern life with which we are uneasy and whose existence we wish to deny...
...In that unsentimental view, the problem of "the interests" had little to do with selfishness as a moral evil...
...Let's talk about sacrifice...
...as members of the same body" continues to echo through American history...
...On the other side stand an unnumbered throng, those who gave the Democratic Party a name and for whom it assumed to speak.' " The "interests" of the populist perspective are lurid powers not bound by the rules of the political game...
...But the vision also possesses a large measure of irrationality...
...On the one side are the allied hosts of monopolies, the money power, great trusts and railroad corporations, who seek the enactment of laws to benefit them and impoverish the people...
...it is one of the meanings we assign to "individualism...
...For Rather, as for Reston, a leader who requires "sacrifice for the common good" is needed to restore the unity of the body politic...
...The theme of Americans "knitt together...
...When it is allied to practical self-interest, the cry of "special interests" becomes a powerful slogan...
...To say "Teamsters," for example, conjures up images of racketeering and "unsavory connections with the Mafia...
...it is intimately connected to a paranoid style of American politics that sees political action in black and white terms and history as determined by conspiratorial forces: "There are but two sides in the conflict that is being waged in this country today," declared a Populist manifesto...
...Political parties," Gary Hart told the Alabama Legislature during the primary season, "must free themselves from the grasp of the special interests and once again address the country's national interests...
...It colors practically all aspects of politics from campaign oratory to Reston's worry that voters will forget future generations...
...what would be the principal sacrifice you would ask of individual Americans if elected...
...Those who have adopted politics as a vocation are all untrustworthy and corrupt...
...The impersonal, calculating, rational orientation to the world characteristic of modern society encourages a longing for the benefits of the communal society (no matter how imaginary those may be) and an active search for those rewards or, at least, an escape from the alienating rigors of modern life...
...The Age of Reform, p. 64.] Those who respond positively to Gary Hart and Ronald Reagan would have no difficulty seeing "Big Labor" among the "allied hosts...
...There is no doubt that he struck a sympathetic chord and that everyone knew the identity of the villainous force threatening the "national interest...
...Richard Hofstadter, in The Age of Reform (Knopf, 1956, p. 65), quotes William Jennings Bryan thundering, " 'On the one side stand the corporate interests of the United States, moneyed interests, aggregated wealth and capital, imperious, arrogant, compassionless...
...The Cross of Gold speech casts political conflict into a context of a struggle between Good and Evil...
...But this pragmatic basis of antiunion sentiment rests on other powerful, nonrational feelings that reinforce practical interest...
...The existence of the labor movement is in part a denial of this kind of individualism...
...An enduring component of the American political imagination is the image of "the interests," the omnipotent forces arrayed against "the people...
...On this level, opposition to "special interests" is simply a matter of . . . self-interest...
...On the other are the farmers, laborers, merchants, and all other people who produce wealth and bear the burdens of taxation...
...It is the original American vision of a kind of community where all social action, to quote Max Weber, "is based on a subjective feeling of the actors...
...rather, the problem was how to contain an inevitable conflict of interests to protect the class structure...
...they do not hesitate to corrupt politicians and overstep the law in other ways...
...The desire for such a political community is a species of nostalgia...
...that they belong together...
...Our history shows that wealthy and powerful groups have not always stayed within the bounds of legality and common morality...
...our community as members of the same body.' " (Loren Baritz, The City on a Hill...
...After the New York primaries James Reston noted Walter Mondale's "long, careful and expensive effort to win support of the unions" and expressed his doubts about whether the voters would ultimately think, as Thomas Jefferson did, "about 'the coming generations' or whether they would regard their own selfish interests and think merely about themselves...
...In a portentous style suitable to the occasion he asked, "To unite a people, to unite a country, the essence of leadership, part of it at least, is to get individuals to sacrifice for the common good...
...By their very nature unions, and in particular American unions with their historic emphasis on "business unionism," often appear in the public consciousness as defenders of naked self-interest...
...it is a recognition that the survival of individual workers and their families depends upon the collective strength of their unions...
...Candidates unsuccessful in pursuit of the same "special interests" compensate by claiming to have had no traffic with this moral sinkhole...
...Bryan's imagery is part of a cultural tradition going back to the beginnings of American history...
...It will serve only those whose wealth, power, and privilege rest on the existing structure of inequality...
...He was equally forthright in locating the source of the passions and interests in "the various and unequal distribution of property...
...When the Puritans approached the shores of Massachusetts in 1630 their leader, John Winthrop, reminded them that they were bound together in a covenant among themselves and with the Lord of Israel to establish a model society for all humankind...
...Even by the end of the 18th century there were many who recognized that America was already a society in which communal goals were subordinated to group and individual interests...
...The effectiveness of the slogan depends, as do all successful ideological catchwords, on a distortion of reality by the blurring of real differences among individuals and groups...
...The United States is, as it always has been, a class society, and those who work in its factories and fill the slots in its service economy can only attain some of the promises of America as "God's country" by organizing to protect and further their interests...
...When not being titillated by stories of "corrupt union bosses," the public is most aware of unions when they are on strike...
...Winthrop's "city on a hill" is also the earliest version of a dream that is reincarnated in the American mythology of the virtues and lost glories of small-town America...
...If the force you contend with is, to quote a later politician, part of an "evil empire," then entering the world of politics is crossing into a sinister place in which eternal suspicion is the price of survival...
...THE EFFECTIVENESS of Bryan's oratory was related to the evangelical tradition he and other populists drew upon...
...Hart was not alone in his worries...
...a dream that haunted the founding of successive 19th-century utopian communities and the communes of the 1960s...
...The stereotype of the union is assimilated into a vision of the world founded on deeper levels of American beliefs and mythology...
...Only about 20 percent of the work force is unionized, and for a significant part of this group union membership is not a salient dimension of their identity...
...Dan Rather, moderating a debate among the primary candidates, provides another example...
...It is a vision of the political landscape that is surely not wholly incorrect...
...People need to affirm the possibilities of achieving a communal life, and the ritual denunciations of labor provide one such opportunity...
Vol. 31 • July 1984 • No. 3
