John B. Judis's The Paradox of American Democracy

...The rest have been victimized by destruction of the "gentleman" cast to the publishing industry as well as the increasing disappearance of the kind DISSENT / Summer 2000 n 107 BOOKS of reader who might once have been expected to support such enterprises with their time and money...

...So too, is its measured, respectful tone...

...THE PARADOX OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY: ELITES, SPECIAL INTERESTS, AND THE BETRAYAL OF PUBLIC TRUST by John B. Judis Pantheon, 2000, 305 pp $26 jOHN JuDis has written a valuable book of the kind that rarely interests commercial publishers anymore...

...No publication, for instance, was as influential in torpedoing the Clinton health care plan as the once-liberal New Republic, which published Elizabeth McCaughey Ross's disgracefully dishonest scare story about the likely effects of the program on its cover and hence provided Republican political operatives and selfish business interests with the excuse they needed to destroy it...

...In this model, the elites were acting to save their own collective posteriors rather than to smooth the road to social justice...

...One can argue that this co-optation had a beneficial effect on the nation's social peace—no small achievement there—but it also may have forestalled important changes that would have made America a more democratic country...

...The conservatives who came to power with Ronald Reagan and reinforced that victory with their congressional takeover in 1994 rejected the very idea of a dispassionate and disinterested elite that could focus on the national interest...

...This was true vis-a-vis the labor organizers of the New Deal, and the pattern repeated itself in a similar fashion during the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s...

...Judis's work suffers from neither of these foibles...

...Former officials who used to provide dispassionate guidance on difficult foreign or domestic policy issues have become lobbyists and consultants for American and foreign businesses...

...When it was the right, as in the 1980s, then the elites were just as happy to put themselves in their service...

...In doing so, he stands inside a proud progressive tradition of political writers and thinkers like John Dewey, Herbert Crowly, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Michael Harrington...

...ERIC ALTERMAN, Nation media columnist, is the author of Who Speaks for America...

...Why Democracy Matters in Foreign Policy, It Ain't No Sin to Be Glad You're Alive: The Promise of Bruce Springsteen, and Sound and Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy...

...When the pressure came from the left, as in the thirties and the sixties, it was the elites who did their bidding inside official and semi-official institutions...

...The result of all this money, buying both Congress and its one-time interlocutors, according to Judis, is the collapse of the legislative body's ability to serve the country at large...

...Falling victim to or perhaps exploiting the conveniently self-interested arguments of big business and the New Right— the old elites now seek to make a virtue of their own selfishness...

...Unfortunately, there's a lot more noise out there today, and even with the best of intentions and the clearest of thoughts, it's a lot harder to be heard...

...According to Judis, such elites, which arose in self-organized fashion in the United States during the Progressive Era, and who spearheaded many key reforms, have traditionally been represented by such organizations as the Brookings Institution, the Ford Foundation, the National Civic Foundation, the Council on Foreign Relations, and so on...

...In either case, it makes it nearly impossible for the writer to do much beyond preaching to the already converted, and therefore reinforces the very isolation from mainstream debate and discussion that caused the isolation in the first place...

...Thirty years ago, that meant choosing William Bundy to edit its flagship publication, Foreign Affairs, as if his role as one of the primary architects of the Vietnam War had no implications for the quality of his judgment or worthiness of his values...

...His argument is itself a pretty simple one...

...Judis's decision to credit establishment elites with generally disinterested motives is a crucial one because it drives his model of how social change takes place...

...True, he is using the word "elite" in a slightly confusing, almost tautological fashion...

...Judis devotes a great deal of attention to free-trade related debates and his treatment of the "fair trade" position is considerably more sympathetic than anything that would pass for responsible in any publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution, the New York Times editorial page, or any of the institutions described in his study...

...rOR ALL THE histrionic self-identification of so many intellectuals with the "wretched of the earth," fearlessly speaking "truth to power," an intellectual class that serves money and power is the more typical historical arrangement...

...Democracy, he insists, requires disinterested elites to balance the competition between capital and labor, and when necessary, to intervene on the side of one or the other on behalf of social peace, domestic cohesion, and what used to be called "the common good...

...And there was nothing terribly high-minded about it...

...Their very disinterest is what defines them, rather than, say, their income or class position...

...Placing his sympathies openly and honestly on the side of working men and women, he has clearly thought long and hard about a problem that lies at the center of our present conundrum and offered up a thoughtful, nuanced argument about how we might address it...

...So the appearance alone of Judis's book is a cause for minor celebration...

...True, an unsuspected "breakout" is always possible, but the sad fact today is that though conservative public policy books can depend on a reasonably sized natural constituency (along with some mass purchasing by like-minded foundations), liberal authors can have no such confidence...

...On the one hand, the Reaganite "counter-establishment" attacked the hard-won victories of decades of social progress as so much sappy muddleBOOKS headedness and protosocialistic sentimentality...

...Instead of creating a new elite," Judis argues, "they undermined what it meant for the country to have one...

...I am not the first reviewer to discover that Judis's view of the elite organizations he describes is remarkably benign...

...Still, to point out disagreements with Judis's arguments is not in any w-iy to call into question the value of his having made them...

...It is an overarching, public-spirited argument aimed at that nearly extinct species known as the "common reader," about the sorry state of our democracy...

...But one often gets the feeling that he is allowing his thesis to drive evidence with a hand stuck a bit too firmly to the wheel...

...Former Secretaries of State make provocative public statements defending China while not revealing their own financial stake in the current Chinese government...

...But most historians would credit popular organizations and social protest in both the 1930s and 1960s with driving the engine of social reform...

...The failure of Clinton's health care program dissipated nearly fifty years of political progress toward the consensus goal of universal health care as a right for all of us, rather than a privilege for the well-to-do...

...Although such books are often widely reviewed— and Judis's certainly has been—they need more than just common sense wisdom to justify their existence to the publishing industry...

...HO n DISSENT / Summer 2000...

...Judis writes, In the past, the existence of a powerful political establishment could make up for the shortcomings of public institutions and could work to overcome the absence of shared national goals, but there has been a disturbing decline in the quality of the American leadership class—the former public officials, investment bankers, CEOs, and academics who are peri108 n DISSENT / Summer 2000 odically summoned to lend their wisdom and experience to the government and the country...

...On the other, the traditional elites, battered, beaten down and fearful for their future relevance, said, "Maybe you're right...

...He argued in an online discussion of the book published on Slate.com 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...

...A former long-time contributor to the democratic socialist publication In These Times and currently a regular writer for the New Republic and GQ, he makes no apologies for his left-of-center assumptions...

...When no one is causing any trouble at all, the elites are happy to run things as they see fit, without any interference from below...

...They have grown selfish and corrupt and have jettisoned their historic task...

...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...

...He attributes the ideological victory of the "free trade" position to the moral and political collapse of the elites that he describes and the power that business money now enjoys in determining the parameters of the debate, noting that "while activity outside Washington has atrophied, activity on or around Washington's K Street has spread and expanded...

...The role of the Council on Foreign Relations, for instance, has been to do whatever necessary to keep control of U.S...

...The old elite establishment did not need a weatherman to know which way the political winds were blowing and they recast their ideologies accordingly...

...The lesson of the latter interpretation would be exactly the opposite of that implied by Judis, for the problem is not the lack of public- and progressive-minded elites, but the lack of a public- and progessiveminded movement...

...Hence, no universal health care, no new major environmental initiatives, no changes in one-sided labor law that eats away at the right to organize, no new consumer protection legislation, and so on...

...There was a time when, in a situation like that one, a magazine with so proud a liberal heritage knew which side it was on...

...On the contrary, they were openly probusiness and conservative...

...Brooks Adams was not kidding when he wrote to his friend Oliver Wendell Holmes that "philosophers were hired by the comfortable classes to prove everything is all right...

...Curiously absent from his analysis is much discussion of the role of the media and their increasing ideological coziness with the "comfortable," upon whom we once depended them to afflict...

...Judis tells a finely nuanced story that speaks to his admirable abilities as an amateur (in the best sense of the word) historian...

...But the problem is more than just self-interested behavior...

...And if we build one, they will come...

...If Judis's critique nudges a few of those ex-secretaries to quit selling themselves to the highest bidder and attempt to claim the honorable position in history he has accorded them, his work will more than justify itself...

...One of the most common weaknesses of leftist screeds these days is that they are pitched in a voice that frequently falls somewhere between whiny and accusatory...

...The elite organizations were often not merely seeking to negotiate between these organizations and the powers they sought to overthrow, they were attempting to co-opt the leaders of the movements in order to prevent radical change from overwhelming their positions of power and privilege within the system...

...He makes some fine points, particularly about the larger implications of various intra-elite debates over trade and the power of multinational corporations that I have not seen anywhere else...

...Former presidential candidates lobby for businesses that, as politicians, they had denounced only a year before...

...In 1997, 11,500 lobbyists spent $1.26 billion lobbying Congress—or $2.4 million for each member...

...The result turned out to be a massively funded onslaught on the gains of the American welfare state and rights of working people to organize themselves to fight for their own self-interest...

...Former senators call for the privatization of Social Security without revealing that they are on the boards of directors of securities firms that would stand to benefit mightily from such a change...

...Bankers, business leaders, and corporate lawyers who, in past generations, might have been driven to devote part of their time to public service and to the greater good confine their public activity to lobbying on behalf of their own firm or industry...

...The former is one of the unfortunate side effects of the reification of victimization by so many on the left while the latter seems to derive from a sense of embitterment born of marginalization...

...Today it means attacking with the intent of discrediting any views DISSENT / Summer 2000 n 109 BOOKS that seek to question the fundamental precepts of what is termed the "Washington consensus" in favor of unfettered free trade and minimal interference with the workings of the market, for moral, political, or environmental reasons...

...While some pundits and politicians of the center-left have amassed sufficient celebrity to engage the mass media to help sell their books for them (Bill Moyers, Robert Reich, E.J...

...foreign policy in the hands of the people who have always exercised it...

...But today our elites are letting us down...

...The new groups, in contrast to the old, did not seek to be above class, party, and ideology...

...Dionne), they are few and far between...

...And academics and policy intellectuals who brought a spirit of scientific objectivity and disinterest to political deliberations lend their name and expertise to think tanks and policy groups that are dedicated to promoting the narrowest interests of business contributors...