Public Interests

Just as hypocrisy pays homage to virtue, otherwise there would be no need to dissemble, no one begins political disputation with the phrase "though the policy I recommended is against the public interest, nevertheless, it is to my advantage." Although politics is often about advantage, that is not all it is about, or there would be no common bonds.

If politics were only about public interests, however, opposite but equally great evils would assert themselves. Hypocrisy (saying one thing while meaning another) would become the only rhetoric because people could not admit what they were doing. Interests important to many people, as David Braybrooke and Charles Lindblom demonstrated in a Strategy of Decision, would be neglected because no one had a legitimate right to speak up for them.^[43]

Opposing "self-interest" to "public interest" misses the political point, for part of self-interest lies in the viability of institutions permitting self-expression. And part of public interest lies explicitly in facilitating the representation of private interests.

Now the budget may be the last place to look for public interests. No one is disinterested. Everyone involved has something specific they want out of spending and taxing decisions. So many values and valuables are at stake for so many people in government and society in such a disaggregated manner that parochialism ordinarily prevails. But, then again, a narrow, self-enclosing vision does not explain tax reform, Gramm-Rudman, or panic about deficits.

We have, then, a dilemma. Contrary to Marxist "crisis of democracy"

and antipluralist critics, we argue that a politics of the public interest, conducted in the public sphere of debate, is an important factor in the major struggle in current American politics. Unlike classical pluralists, we claim that such politics can be distinguished from and opposed to other kinds of interests. We hold as well, explicitly with Lowi, that whether the state is perceived as acting within the parameters of the public interest as defined within the public sphere is one source of public authority. The attendant bias may be a problem of equity, we have argued, but not a source of instability. The difficulty is that Lowi's explicit politics of the public interest doesn't work. It has become difficult for the government to perform the most elemental of chores—decide how much money to provide for each of its activities—in a timely manner. It gave up on managing the economy long ago; we can't remember the last time we heard a cogent argument that some particular deficit level would have some particular effect on economic variables.