Nicholas Lemann: Interest Groups are A-OK.

From the August 11 & 18 New Yorker, a review of Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew by way of Arthur Bentley's 1908 tome The Process of Government:

“The Process of Government” is a hedgehog of a book. Its point—relentlessly hammered home—can be stated quite simply: All politics and all government are the result of the activities of groups. Any other attempt to explain politics and government is doomed to failure.

[...]

The standard objections are that pluralism gives too little weight to the power of ideas and of social and economic forces, and that it leaves no room for morality. (Pluralism’s equivalent in foreign relations is realism, which strikes people who don’t like it as having the same flaws.) What if there actually is such a thing as a policy that’s right on the merits? Shouldn’t we find a way to make sure that it’s enacted, instead of having to trust in the messy workings of the political marketplace?

[...]

When the reputation of Bentley’s masterpiece was at its peak, it was not just because he had fashioned a useful tool, of course; it was because many people saw pluralism as being not only accurate but attractive. To regain that perspective today requires an even greater undoing of deeply ingrained habits of thought. Pluralism, in the tradition of Bentley, requires that one see one’s own political passions, and those of such unimpeachable actors as winners of the Nobel Peace Prize and members of the Concord Coalition, as representing something other than the promptings of pure justice. That does not come naturally. One has to see that sincere talk of the public interest and the general good can be dangerous tools in the hands of people one disagrees with, if not in one’s own. (If you’re a liberal, reread President Bush’s second inaugural address, a grandiose exercise in public-interest rhetoric meant to lay the groundwork for waging the war on terror and privatizing Social Security.) One has to get over the habit of assuming that “interests,” and, worse, lobbying and corruption, are the province only of one’s political opponents, and not one’s allies. Pluralism means dialling down the moral stature that we attach to universalist arguments, and dialling up the moral stature of particularism.

-Nicholas Lemann. “Conflict of Interests.” The New Yorker, August 11 & 18, 2008. (86-92)

Bentley's thesis does sounds almost right. I'll have to read the book, of course, but what occurs to me after reading the article is that interests don't simply appear out of nowhere. A person's formative years might be the only stage where universal ideas can be inculcated to the point that they will later influence interests. If there is a place for transcendence in modern politics, it must be in education. All the more reason, then, to do what we can to lower the stakes, to make education more accountable to the region than to the nation. For, as John Taylor Gatto has predicted, if instruments of mass social control exist, we can be sure that they will fall into the wrong hands at some point.