Impatient Democrat

...We are a sloppy, accommodating, choice-avoiding people, and while anything is possible if things get bad enough, my feeling is that we are a long way from accepting the discipline Lowi prescribes...

...In short, the creative potential of government would be unleashed, unencumbered by perpetual politics...

...To the extent that he is correct, a good many of us have much to answer for...

...John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and John Kenneth Galbraith are destined to join Herbert Hoover, William McKinley and William Graham Sumner in the rogues' gallery of unseeing politicians and mistaken ideologues...

...then, is reconstruction to be achieved...

...Does he really believe its more muscular elements will content themselves with a single medium of participation—elections...

...After all the fevered pamphleteering and cocktail-party quips about the irrelevance of liberalism to the crises of our times, comes Theodore Lowi, a first-rate political scientist, to make it official...

...Although Lowi is careful to talk of achieving a purer democracy, there is nevertheless a strong elitist (in the old Jeffersonian sense of "aristocratical") undertone in his proposals...

...Nor is it an answer for the poor to become better organized and compete more effectively...

...The central pathology of American politics, it is suggested, is a degenerate public philosophy: interest-group liberalism, the source of major reformist premises for intellectuals and public men since the 1930s...

...Lowi has badly distorted the position of pluralist political scientists (or the best of them, which is all that counts...

...and finally, just a hint of plebiscitary democracy, with its troubling assumption that national yes-or-no majorities are a sufficient moral basis for pushing around substantial minorities...

...Their root error, he feels, was to accept the special segments into which the citizenry has largely organized itself as legitimate participants in policy formation...

...Private sub-governments do emerge within the system...

...It is impossible for a pluralistic democracy to commit itself to any particular, highly specific vision of justice...

...According to Lowi, the only correct part of this theory is that interest-group politics results in stability —a value, we are told, that need not concern us much today...

...The most we say for the system is that it has been fairly flexible in admitting new claimant groups: it has been fairly stable...

...And what do you offer in its stead...

...This is not an inconsequential recommendation, but whether the system will be adequate to future demands is anybody's guess...

...How...

...God knows, our present way of doing things is slow and hit-or-miss...

...Liberalism—with its civilities, foundations and Federal funds—is about to go the way of laissez-faire...

...In this respect, his book bears a marked resemblance to that previous declaration of impatience with American politics, Walter Lippmann's The Public Philosophy (1955...

...It is questionable, to say the least, that national majorities would sustain a set of rulers who vigorously pursue these policies...

...and it has offered a way for a diverse and deeply divided nation to get along with only one civil war...

...Whether one regards the "gains" made by blacks in the 1950s and '60s as modest or insignificant, it must be recognized that they were made principally through group bargaining and accommodation, not electoral politics...

...Unfortunately it also involves three major difficulties...

...Does Lowi really think a society as highly differentiated as ours, with (for better or worse) strong traditions of individualism and distaste for coercion, can be managed in the way he suggests...

...First...

...Lowi confesses sympathy for turn-of-the-century Progressivism, and there is a hint that his elections would be held more frequently than at present, perhaps supplemented by referenda...

...Through the creation...

...They will only be bought off with a variety of spending programs that will create payrolls for the activists—the Establishment's equivalent of the boss' Christmas turkey and a load of coal—without any reconstruction of American society...

...One of his objectives is to break down suburban boundries by having school districts reach out from the center city like spokes from a wheel, and placing housing projects among the half-acre split levels...

...Nothing like an equilibrium results...

...Most of the academics Lowi deprecates would, I think, be prepared to concede much of his analysis...

...This is a fascinating book—brilliant in some parts, slapdash in many others, and audacious throughout...

...The academics further posited that a brisk competition among groups would result in a political equilibrium representing all interests...

...It is difficult to plan in a context of interest-group politics...

...Their response to Lowi might well be: "We never promised you a rose garden...

...To be blunt, would the change in fact operate to the advantage of American Negroes...

...Second, what Lowi has offered is a hash of familiar leftovers: Pro-gressivism, with its prissy disdain for bargaining and its guiding image of the good, clean, upper-middle-class official operating in accordance with sound business practices...

...Third, suppose we did manage the transition Lowi has in mind, what leads him to believe he would get the revolutionary policy he desires...

...To take an obvious example, in The Governmental Process (1951) David B. Truman never implied any equilibrium of competing groups...

...He stated quite clearly that the resources for such combat are unequally distributed, and that it is hard for certain kinds of interests to get into the action...

...And there is always great value in an outburst of sophisticated frustration...

...the rich and skillful get richer, and the poor (Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Mexican-Americans, consumers, and hippies) get done out...

...political Anglophilia, with its notion of an orderly, sensible electorate which passes judgment at election time and defers to the rulers between elections...

...This argument has great appeal...

...The important thing, however, is that groups would not muck about in government after the electoral verdict is in and officials are devising policy...

...They failed to insist that the government remain aloof from stridently voiced group claims...

...Because the most systematic expositions of this philosophy have come from academic political scientists, Lowi first concentrates his fire on his fellows...

...Since they would not be forced to compromise priorities by accommodating divergent interests or taking account of competing ideals abroad in the land, the rulers and their servants would be able to move toward an ideal of justice and could plan social change in a superior fashion...

...For the rest, group participation means either domination of policy areas by single entrenched interests—in effect, private subgovernments—or a bargaining process that results in governmental programs being nibbled out of existence by numerous nongovernmental claimants...

...Because of the frankly polemical style, it is not easy to summarize, but Lowi's argument is well worth the effort...

...It is very hard to pursue revolutionary objectives through electoral, and presumably majoritarian, means in a basically conservative country...

...Lowi affirms, of a new public philosophy that keeps the interests out of government...

...But Lowi must match the brilliance of his critique with a pragmatic rationalization of his prescriptions if he is to rise from stimulation to persuasion...

...The rulers would make crisp, authoritative decisions to be carried out by a new class of neutral civil servants preoccupied with efficiency rather than negotiating with those affected by their activities...

...Since adjustments would have to be worked out between conflicting demands, everyone would have a stake in the process and stability would thus be insured...

...The "people" would speak in periodic elections...