The Public Sphere

The phenomenon we are describing has been differentiated from the state by, among others, Jürgen Habermas. Habermas calls it "the public sphere":

A realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed…. Newspapers and magazines, radio and television, are the media of the public sphere. We speak of the political public sphere in contrast, for instance, to the literary one, when public discussion deals with objects connected to the activities of the state.

(One sign of such differentiation, he notes, was "the separation of the public budget from the household expenses of the ruler."^[31] In this view the public sphere should oppose the state. He mournfully argues that the modern public sphere has lost its critical function, as the press became a mainly commercial enterprise. Thus, instead of discussion of the general interest, there is persuasion and propaganda at the service of established authority. Habermas is wrong because welfare policies are extensively debated: their ostensible failures, whether "left" (too little) or "right" (too much), form a virtual cacophony of criticism. Nor is the media much disposed to praise those in authority. Look, read, and see. Nevertheless, he is right in that the participants in public debate are committed to the fundamental outlines of the existing order.

Yet, if these be evils, what political system could be good? In what kind of system are the fundamental aspects of society extensively debated? Only where there is little agreement on them. Then how do people live together? In El Salvador or Lebanon there is fundamental disagreement. There also is not much of a "public sphere"; decision by debate, instead of bullets, presupposes limited stakes. What Gramsci calls hegemony, and Habermas a failing of the public sphere, may be its first requisite.

In any stable system, the people who participate most actively according to the existing rules and come to the top by those rules tend to believe in them. Otherwise they could not justify their power to themselves or others; any system that gave authority to its enemies, as the Weimar Republic did to Hitler, would not be in power very long. Whether the economic system is capitalist, socialist, or something else, is irrelevant. General Secretary Gorbachev, for example, has been very

careful not to question one-party rule in the Soviet Union because his power is based on that primacy.

At the same time, no group of people can ever discuss its general interest without participants pursuing their particular interests in the process. People wish to believe that what is good for them is good for the larger society. So we agree with those, like Madison, who doubted politics could ever be free of such "corruptions," hoping instead only to control their effects.

Thus, we would expect the discussion within the public sphere to include construction companies talking about the nation's decaying infrastructure, businesses talking about capital formation, labor unions about keeping America strong by keeping jobs at home, and wealthy doctors about the long lines and impersonality of socialized medicine, For all we know, they may be right.

Permutations of particular interests shaped attention to the general interest in deficit reduction. Democrats jumped on the issue in part because their constituencies had more problems with Reagan's than with previous deficits. Yet neither the deficit panic in its various forms, nor the dominance of debate over tax reform by appeals to the general interest in a simpler tax code, can be explained by particular interests alone. Similarly, the budgetary rhetoric of fair shares—freezes, three-legged stools, and all that—expressed a norm of balance that has no necessary partisan import. The media are suckers for concepts like deficit reduction, tax simplification, and fair shares because they seem like general rather than special interests. None of these concepts challenge the existing order; instead, they are nearly procedural norms that are supposed to help maintain the system as a whole, which is why they command such widespread support. In everyday rhetoric, in Time, Newsweek, and the floors of the House and Senate, they are presented as the embodiment of the general interest. Try to remember deficit reduction, a simpler tax code, or fair shares being described as the demands of special interests. It does not happen.

Rather than the general interest being unrepresented in the American public sphere, certain policy preferences are conventionally distinguished as the general interest within that sphere. The difficulty is that these conventional notions of general interest contradict the interests of most people. In essence, the policy instructions from the public sphere contradict the instructions legislators receive directly from their constituents . The crisis of budget politics in our time is not a failure to bring the general interest into political debate; on the contrary, it is spoken there ad nauseum. The crisis lies in the conflict between what is represented in the debate of the public sphere and majority interest (more precisely, majorities of interests) in the electoral sphere .