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Twenty-Two The Deficit and the Public Interest
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The Dis-United State

We have made a case in this book for the (semi)autonomy of government actors, the holders of formal authority. In the 1950s, by contrast, the dominant theory in American political science, a version of what is called "pluralism," emphasized organized groups much more than officials. Reduced to its essence, in Earl Latham's description, politics could be understood by adding up the group pressures on the various sides; the government was a cash register, giving the total, the largest winning.[29] Over time, the empirical work of political scientists who were both self-consciously pluralist and antipluralist—Robert Dahl, Raymond Bauer, Ithiel Poole, Lewis Dexter, Theodore Lowi, James Q. Wilson, and others—modified this emphasis on groups ruling over politicians.[30]

Political scientists who rediscovered the (semi)autonomy of government actors did not, however, find "the state." Unlike in Europe, they could not sense the self-conscious feeling of top officials that they, not others, have the right to rule. When Hugh Heclo studied the federal executive in his evocative A Government of Strangers, he found that they may know the members of their "issue network" but they do not personally know (and are unlikely to get to know) most leading members of the executive branch. There is little sense of common identity within the federal executive; loyalties go to the agency (Forest Service, FBI) or profession (law, social work) rather than to the bureaucracy as a whole. There is no elite corps of administrators similar to France's graduates of the École Nationale d'Administration or the OxBridge products who become permanent secretaries in the British ministries. Political appointees make up far more of the top levels of the executive in America, and they are often in and out within eighteen months. For all these reasons


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the permanent government, in a sense the Europeans or Japanese understand, does not exist in the United States.

In Europe this top level of the bureaucracy (with or without an admixture of politicians frequently found atop key ministries, such as finance) is the state. In Europe the state came first; representative democracy is a control on it, not its creator. Marxist talk about "state managers" makes sense; they are a distinct class of people, united by a process of training and selection and rules for relating to each other (as much informal as formal) and to society (business, labor, politicians) that build boundaries—who is allowed to relate to whom—and define roles—who is allowed to do what. But who in these United States could fill such a role?


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Twenty-Two The Deficit and the Public Interest
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