An Immune System out of Control

Every political system is filled with tensions, with what Marxists call contradictions. Preferences that are logically or practically contradictory must both be satisfied. A logical system is invalidated when beset by contradictions. Politics and society, however, are not logical constructs. Rather than killing a system, its contradictions may define it. What Marxists see as a contradiction between legitimation and accumulation is a choice no modern welfare state can make; the whole point is to keep both democracy and capitalism. Contradictions are important not because they will destroy a system but because they explain so much of the politics within it.

The tension between the state as the holder of formal authority and the state as a set of attitudes toward political questions is especially sharp in America. A president, like Reagan, can have great formal authority yet not share both the positive attitude toward institutions and the sense of common enterprise with other officeholders that we generally associate with state managers. The editors of major newspapers and leaders of foundations tend to have the attitude without the authority. We suspect that any modern political system involves some disjunction between these two sides of stateness. But the strength of the public sphere, combined with the separation of powers, probably allows less overlap in the United States than in other nations. The deficit furor is a case of formal outsiders telling the holders of authority to start acting more like the state.

The split between authority and attitude in the United States helps explain the peculiar spirit of budget politics: an establishment that

sounds extremist. The government, not some interest group, has defied the rules of the game.

In the ideal world of the political center, everybody would sacrifice equally to reduce the budget deficit. However, in the real world, most people are unwilling to pay their fair share of deficit reduction, for the reasonable reason that they would lose more than they would gain. That is why packages, including Gramm-Rudman-Hollings, have always clipped only portions of the budget. Overstated claims about the deficit's horrors should be understood as attempts to convince people that they have more to gain from deficit reduction, and therefore should gladly sacrifice more than they currently believe.

Although it is not unique, the contradiction at the heart of deficit politics is unusually concrete, visible, and difficult to live with. There is no way to reconcile three rules of the game: budget balance (or an approximation thereof), fair shares, and majority rule. No majority can be built that will substantially reduce the deficit without clobbering the minority—something centrists won't do. The center's dream of equal sacrifice has not been approximated, for the simple reason that the benefits of deficit reduction, for most individuals, are less obvious than the costs of paying a fair share.

Therefore, the two key processes of the democratic state have been turned against each other. The public interest as articulated in the realm of the public sphere has been defined as deficit reduction. That has been the most obvious violation and the easiest criticism, and value enforcement by the media is most commonly negative; politicians and economists have fed the criticism. The deficit provides an easy way to keep score. But this definition of the public interest in the public sphere contradicts majority interest represented through the formal procedures of legislation.

Politicians have responded with continual legislative hostage taking, mythical budget resolutions, and a quest for automatic formulas. At its worst, in Gramm-Rudman-Hollings, the deficit panic created a law that either meant nothing or meant that all other budget laws did not count. Nobody could tell. Clear, however, is the quest for automatic government that GRH epitomizes, rejecting the normal processes of government through assembly of majority preferences.

In pursuit of the public interest, the most fundamental rules of the game, those that structure the legislative process, have been put up for grabs. That has been done as much in the name of system maintenance (for a Rudman or Domenici or Chiles) as in pursuit of a minority ideology (Gramm) or a partisan advantage (most legislators, most of the time). The politicians are telling people to ignore laws: if we pass an appropriation, we don't mean it; we promise to reduce the deficit with a sequester,

but we don't really mean that either. At worst, the politicians have abandoned the idea that procedures have any value separate from whether they reduce the deficit. Why, then, should anybody accept any decision, ever? Lowi's fears are being realized in an entirely unexpected fashion: instead of formal authority being reduced by the pursuit of special interests, it is being battered by a panic about the public interest.

We do not worry that the governed will be immediately disaffected. The crisis of congressional procedure described in this book is an inside-the-beltway story that the public will, in the main, tune out. Its relevance to daily life is slow and indirect. Furthermore, as David Truman knew, the system is legitimated by the public sphere's continual repetition of its wonders. Celebration of the Constitution in 1987 was but one example. Attention is directed, not to the difference between the existing equilibrium and some ideal, but to the difference between America and other places. America is seen as both more free and more stable than anywhere else. Basic emotions of nationalism and patriotism are linked, not to a land or a people, but to the system of government. The forces generating popular support for the governmental system are very powerful.

Yet we wonder how the governors themselves will ever decide what to do if they lose, as they seem to be losing, their willingness to accept the outcome of decisions made by established procedures. Government requires obedience to formal rules for settling disputes. However, since the mythical budget resolution of 1983, such obedience has diminished.

The course of budgeting suggests that the elites, not the masses, have lost confidence in the rules of the game. Politicians engage in endless rounds of hostage taking; the media, instead of condemning procedural terrorism, say it is okay so long as the deficit is reduced. Apparently there is room in the public sphere for furor about only one aspect of the public interest; the interest in authoritative procedure is crowded out.

The budget deficit is sometimes portrayed as a cancer, eating away at society without being visible on the surface. So, though we are dubious, it may be. Yet the reaction to the deficit resembles an immune reaction run amuck. The body has no way to defend itself against itself, just as at present there is no one to defend the politicians of the center and all those most concerned with preserving the political system against their own attacks on the system. The crisis is a crisis of their own confidence.

There is much difference between theorists who view democracy as being about procedures enabling people to agree on what they can and those who view democracy as being about the attaining of certain substantive ends. When there is a dominant party or faction, these differences may amuse philosophers, but they need not trouble members of the

political stratum who justify the procedures because they agree on substance and accept majority rule on substance by accepting the procedures. The battles of the budget evoke reflection on such hitherto arcane matters precisely because the political stratum is divided and the public has not yet decided. The grand irony is that the people could resolve the state's problem by developing consistent preferences. The people could resolve their governors' dilemma: What could be more democratic than that?

The trouble nowadays is that the voice of the people—reduce the deficit but do not undertake drastic measures which may do more harm than good—has been drowned out by the shouts of catastrophe coming from the political stratum. We think "the people" are right; as part of this political stratum ourselves, we next shall develop a policy rationale and a political strategy that would fit their voice.