The emerging USA: Not your great-great-great-grandfather's dream

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The Coming of the Fourth American Republic
By James V. DeLong
Tuesday, April 21, 2009

The Special Interest State that has shaped American life for 70 years is dying. What comes next is uncertain, but there are grounds for optimism.

The United States has been called the oldest nation in the world, in the sense that it has operated the longest without a major upheaval in its basic institutional structure.

From one perspective, this characterization is fair. The nation still rests on the Constitution of 1787, and no other government can trace its current charter back so far. Since then, France has had a monarchy, two empires, and five republics. England fudges by never writing down its constitutional arrangements, but the polity of Gordon I is remote from that of George III. China’s political convolutions defy summary.

Shift the angle of vision and the continuity is less clear, because we have had two upheavals so sweeping that the institutional arrangements under which we now operate can fairly be classified as the Third American Republic. Furthermore, this Third Republic is teetering (these things seem to run in cycles of about 70 years) and is on the edge of giving way to a revised Fourth Republic with arrangements as yet murky to our present-bound perceptions.

This prediction should be seen as optimistic, not pessimistic, despite the stresses the transition puts on those of us standing on the ice as it cracks. At the risk of practicing “Whig history”—a term applied to the interpretation of history as a story of progress toward the enlightened present—the infelicities of the Third Republic grow tedious, and reform is needed to clear space for the progress of American, and world, civilization.

Understanding the current upheaval is aided by a brief description of the earlier ones.

The first was the Civil War and its aftermath, which established that sovereignty belongs to the nation first and the state second, and that the nation rather than the state claims a citizen’s primary loyalty. When the United States was founded, this ordering was not so clear. James Madison assumed the opposite in Federalist 46 and a generation of southern West Point graduates followed their states into secession in 1861. The shift was traumatic and took decades to complete, but eventually the states became largely instruments of federal policy, except for a few areas in which conformity is unnecessary or special interests have managed to preserve state autonomy for their own purposes.

The upheaval of the Civil War era resolved a second issue, the relationship between the government and the onrushing technological and industrial revolution. The newly dominant federal government would not cripple private action in pursuit of national markets and industrialization, and would not allow the states to do so. Much of this agenda was administered by the Supreme Court—as the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Greve documents in a superb recent lecture, “Commerce, Competition, and the Court: An Agenda for a Constitutional Revival”—but it represented a clear political agenda supported by the dominant forces of the time.

The later historians of the New Deal and the Great Society sneered that the idea of “laissez faire” was an abdication of governmental responsibility, but this was propaganda. The best translation of the term is the activist “let us do,” not the passive “let us be,” and the societal quid pro quo was dynamic economic expansion, not the easy life of the rentier. To a large degree, the ideology of laissez faire was designed to protect interstate commerce from rentiers in the form of government officials extorting payments.

The Special Interest State

The next great institutional upheaval was the New Deal, which radically revised the role of government. The process of economic growth was tumultuous, and the losers and dislocated were constantly appealing against the national political commitment to “let us do.” The crisis of the Great Depression provided a great opportunity, and it was seized. Starting in the 1930s, the theoretical limitations on the authority of governments—national or state—to deal with economic or welfare issues were dissolved, and in the course of fighting for this untrammeled power governments eagerly accepted responsibility for the functioning of the economy and the popular welfare.

Like the primacy of federal over state sovereignty, the shift continued even after the watershed event. Remaining limits on governmental authority were eliminated by the dialectic of the civil rights revolution, in which the federal power over commerce was expanded to meet moral imperatives, and the new standards were then fed back into regulation of commerce.

The combination of plenary government power combined with the seizure of its levers by special interests constitutes the polity of the current Third American Republic.
Inherent in the expansion of governmental power was the complicated question of how this unbridled power would be exercised. As the reach of any institution expands, especially anything as cumbersome as a government, it becomes impossible for the institution as a whole to exercise its power. Delegation to sub-units is necessary: to agencies, legislative committees and subcommittees, even private groups.

The obvious issue is how these subunits are controlled and directed. The theoretical answer had been provided by the Progressive movement (the real one of the early 20th century, not the current faux version). Much of the Progressive movement’s complaint was that special interests, often corporate, captured the governmental process, and its prescriptions were appeals to direct democracy or to administrative independence and expertise on the theory that delegation to technocrats could achieve the ideal of “the public interest.”

The real-world answer imposed by the New Deal and its progeny turned out to be special interest capture on steroids. Control comes to rest with those with the greatest interest or the most money at stake, and the result was the creation of a polity called “the Special Interest State” or, in Cornell University Professor Theodore Lowi’s terms, “Interest Group Liberalism.” Its essence is that various interest groups seize control over particular power centers of government and use them for their own ends.

It is this combination of plenary government power combined with the seizure of its levers by special interests that constitutes the polity of the current Third American Republic. The influence of “faction” and its control had been a concern since the founding of the nation, but it took the New Deal and its acolytes to decide that control of governmental turf by special interests was a feature, not a bug, a supposedly healthy part of democratic pluralism.

And so the Special Interest State expanded, blessed by the intelligentsia. And it feeds on itself; the larger and more complex the government becomes, the higher the costs of monitoring it. This means that no one without a strong interest in a particular area can afford to keep track, which leaves the turf to the beneficiaries. And as existing interests dig in to defend their turf, new interests require continuing expansions of governmental activity to stake a claim on.

http://www.american.com:80/archive/2009/april-2009/the-coming-of-the-fourth-american-republic


James V. DeLong is a former research director of the Administrative Conference of the United States and a former book review editor of the Harvard Law Review.


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