The Congressional State

If in America the state were not the bureaucracy, where, if anywhere, could it be found? How about political executives? It is rather hard to conceive of Ronald Reagan as "the state" in a European sense. He certainly had a vision for the long-term success of capitalism; yet he surely did not see himself as part of the government. The political executive is easily colonized by people who have few ties to the bureaucracy, little memory, and no ideology of system maintenance. That can change; Stockman is a revolutionary who was won over to a manager's stance. On balance, the political executives do not much look like the state.

The only group that combines power and continuity in a way that allows the efficacy and identity we might call the state is, of all places, in Congress. The idea that this fragmented institution might be the state seems so ludicrous that it has never, to our knowledge, been taken seriously. Yet when Jamie Whitten, chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture for nearly forty years, is jokingly referred to as the "Permanent Secretary of Agriculture," we should take notice. The senior members of Congress have been around a long time, sharing responsibility for running a government. Like European state managers, they have their own bailiwicks; they are also a group of people who know each other well and form a community; they train each other. Unlike European legislators, they run things. Congress has far more control of the budget than does any other legislature we can name. They also feel a responsibility to govern, which is manifest throughout our book. Congressmen such as Senators Dole, Domenici, and Chiles have been most exercised over the deficit.

Although Congress is the core of the American state, the system is fragmented. Congress is hardly the sole possessor of legitimate authority. Presidents have some; so do the courts. In a Madisonian system of "ambition

opposing ambition," opposing holders of authority clash over policy. It becomes hard to talk of state interest when the president and Congress are at odds. The structure of America's budget stalemate would make no sense in other countries that have more coherent states.

When president and Congress clash, they turn to the twin sources of legitimacy: the people and the Constitution. It sounds trite, but listen to the Iran/Contra hearings, where each tried to invoke these authorities against the other. The budget fights have seen some attempts to create constitutional authority, namely the proposed balanced budget amendment. Mostly, however, they have involved appeals to the public, to notions of the "public interest."

Congressmen feel their legitimacy (and, in European terms, that of the state) is threatened by failure to pursue the public interest in deficit reduction. This threat exists not in their imaginations (though partially there) but in a political process, hard to characterize but palpable. It is the process of debating and creating "respectable opinion," those ideas that the media and experts, as well as politicians, consider responsible.

Any politician could tell you that experts and the media, particularly the major networks, newspapers, and news magazines, are predominant forces in American politics. Accusations of a liberal or conservative bias (earnestly denied by journalists, of course) reflect that power. News is meaningless if it does not influence opinion. Headlines in Time, the Washington Post, and other "powers that be" tell us what to think about; their stories then tell us what to think about it. The media's role as purveyor of opinion is most evident when major organs differ, as when Time and Newsweek disagreed on whether President Carter's FY81 budget showed attention to the lessons of Lyndon Johnson's failure to finance the Vietnam War. Less evident, but more telling, was their agreement that Lyndon Johnson's deficit had started an inflationary spiral; the panic about deficits flowed from that supposed fact.

A policy advocate attains nirvana when his position becomes the conventional wisdom: that deficits cause inflation (1973–1983), that deficits cause high interest rates (1983–present), that defense is badly underfunded (1980–1981), that tariffs are bad because they caused the Great Depression (1946–present). As the examples suggest, such wisdoms are neither immutable nor divorced from real world events. People fight to change them. Nor does conventional wisdom always win. It may identify a problem but not a response, as with the deficit. It may not exist; there was no authoritative analysis of stagflation to guide politicians in 1980–1981. Furthermore, there are politicians who, either because of a loyal constituency or their own conviction, can ignore or resist a media consensus. A Ronald Reagan or a Phil Gramm is not interested in other people's judgments, except as a guide to tactics. Reagan had a further

advantage: in many ways he was outside the mainstream of policy debate. Donald Regan's memoir provides a telling example of the difference between Reagan, a politician of conviction, and his conservative but more normal vice president. Reagan tended to quote the Washington Times, which matched his ideology but was hardly one of the "powers"; George Bush quoted the New York Times .

How the movements of opinion within this stratum of experts and journalists favored one political side or another has, of course, been a large part of our story. In defining some opinion as respectable and some as not, some analysis as fact and some as opinion, the experts and journalists are defining, for purposes of mass consumption, public interest and special interest. Thus tax reform—simplification and fewer loopholes—became the public interest even though (perhaps because) there was no public outcry for it. If Bob Packwood had followed his basic instincts and fought reform, he might have been serving his own constituents and even a majority of the public, but he would have lost face in Washington, reported back home as "Senator Hackwood," an opponent of the public good. This pressure for reform was self-consciously nonpartisan, as was the criticism of budget deficits. In fact, both could be seen and were presented as issues of system maintenance, making the system work the way it should.

What outsiders call the establishment does exist as part of our system of government. It also has some attributes of what social scientists call the state.