A Republic No More. Jay Cost

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Hamilton in the 1790s, came to accept almost all of his innovations, and even added a few themselves. The result was rampant political corruption through much of the 1820s, culminating in the Bank War of the early 1830s, a sobering time in the nation’s history when the rule of law was sacrificed for the sake of political leverage.

      Chapter Three brings the political parties into the analysis. As we shall see, they are integral in any understanding of American political corruption, for they politicized the presidency, forcing the occupant to use federal resources to maintain his electoral coalition. The first way that presidents did this was through patronage, or the provision of government jobs and contracts to their supporters. That will be the focus there.

      Chapter Four will be the first to demonstrate a central theme of political corruption: when it is not being actively opposed, it tends to spread. Like cancer or wood rot, it will work its way through an entire body politic, destroying every last vestige of the republican principles that once existed. Something like this happened with the patronage regime. First developed during Andrew Jackson’s administration, it was expanded and “perfected” by the early 1870s, so that the entirety of federal politics was reducible, more or less, to the maintenance of massive, statewide patronage machines.

      Chapter Five will continue this theme about how corruption spreads by looking at the continued federal efforts to promote the national economy. As Chapters One and Two will have shown, this was an early breeding ground for corruption in the nineteenth century, and by the end of that century the corruption had gone from rudimentary to exceedingly complicated and virtually insuperable. After federal patronage dried up with the Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883, politicians—particularly the leaders of the Republican Party and its bosses in machine-dominated states—turned to big business for funds. In so doing, they perverted the bold nationalism of Hamilton’s original agenda into a corrupt logroll that benefited midwestern manufacturers and northeastern financiers at the expense of poor farmers, particularly in the South and West.

      Chapter Six will introduce the progressive movement to the story. The progressives successfully curtailed many of the corrupt practices of the late nineteenth century, but they failed to end them once and for all. Indeed, they made matters worse. While a handful of progressives like Wilson identified the root cause of corruption as having to do with the incapacity of the government to exercise its powers responsibly, they failed to fix this problem. Moreover, the progressives were responsible for popularizing the second nationalistic power mentioned above, that of regulating the economy for noneconomic goals. Absent structural reforms to the government, this would become another potential source for corruption.

      Chapter Seven will look at the New Deal period. A massive expansion in government, this period also (and not coincidentally) produced a startling reinvigoration of corruption, along all three dimensions we will have discussed by that point. First, efforts to revive the domestic economy were captured by congressional logrolls that distributed money based on political considerations. Second, federal jobs were used to create state and even national political machines, as early progress on civil service reform was basically wiped away. Third, the new regulatory powers of the federal government were captured by the most powerful elements in society to secure their economic status, at the expense of smaller businesses, consumers, unions, poor farmers, and the public interest at large.

      Chapter Eight will look at the rise of the interest group society, which accelerated after the Great Depression. It will serve as a fulcrum for the final half of this book. The New Deal/World War II period saw the government do more than ever to promote the economy, regulate the economy, and provide groups with direct subsidies. All of this provided further incentives for factions to organize or, in the case of businesses, to improve their extant organizations. The result of this rapid process was the rise of what has since become known as the interest group society. Today, public policy is often the product of the push and pull of organized pressure groups. Contrary to the optimistic assessment of some pluralist theories of governance, this has had a profoundly negative effect on the body politic, ultimately producing the rampant corruption of the current period. The shady bosses of the Gilded Age may be long gone, but corruption is now as problematic as ever thanks to this new way of doing government business.

      The remainder of the book will expand on the argument of Chapter Eight to evaluate various contemporary policy domains to see the ways in which factions dominate the government, manipulating legislation and regulations toward their own ends. Chapter Nine will explore farm subsidies to show how noble federal intentions to support disaffected groups devolved into naked payouts to well-connected industries. Chapter Ten will look at the modern “pork barrel,” or the ways that members of Congress raid the federal treasury to reward local voters, donors, and themselves. Chapter Eleven discusses Medicare, detailing the ways that pressure groups representing senior citizens, doctors, hospitals, and others ensure that an unsustainable status quo is nevertheless retained. Chapter Twelve reviews how crony capitalism has become a durable, regrettable feature of the body politic, as politicians misuse their power to support the national economy. It will give special attention to the tax code; originally a progressive innovation designed to undermine the crooked regime of protective tariffs, the income tax is now rife with rewards for well-heeled interests. Chapter Thirteen will look at regulations, particularly those governing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to show how adept interest groups can be at capturing congressional committees and executive regulators to ensure that their bottom lines are protected.

      While no single chapter will be dedicated to the effect of governmental growth on the constitutional structure, those four themes (an incompetent Congress, a denuded republican principle, a partisanized presidency, and novel, ad hoc institutions) will be apparent. We will see Congress mishandle and abuse the nationalist powers it has been granted. For instance, in Chapter Eleven we will see how the legislature, at the behest of powerful interest groups, has been totally incapable of reforming the welfare state, despite clear knowledge that reforms are urgently needed. We will see the public struggle to comprehend the policies that legislators in Washington are promoting, and how in turn that enabled them to get away with corrupt practices they otherwise never would have. For instance, in Chapter Five we will see how Nelson Aldrich, senator from Rhode Island and chief Republican defender of the tariff, used the arcana of the law to pay off scores of interest groups, most notably the sugar trust, without any public rebuke. We will see the politicization of the presidency due to electoral pressure, and the attending problems that creates. For instance, in Chapter Seven we shall document FDR’s efforts to misuse federal resources to secure his reelection in 1936 against recalcitrant urban party bosses, and later to purge conservative Democrats from the Senate. We shall see how quasi-independent institutions often create corrupt practices because they fail to fit properly into the Madisonian schema. For instance, in Chapter Two the debauched story of the Second Bank of the United States will clearly illuminate the dangers of chartering an institution whose role in the system is ambiguous. Chapter Thirteen, by looking at Fannie and Freddie, will make a similar point.

      After the Constitutional Convention was finished with its work, delegate James McHenry reported that, as Benjamin Franklin left Independence Hall, a woman asked him, “Well, Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?” Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” The argument in the pages to follow essentially boils down to: we couldn’t keep it.

      We couldn’t keep it because we failed to remember something that Madison had so well understood, which is that the design of a government is essential to its success, and that when one goes about redesigning a government—as he and the Framers did in 1787—one must be careful to do it properly. Indeed, never in world history had a people dedicated so much of its efforts to debating a structure of government, rather than the policies the government would produce.

      Today, we have forgotten that almost entirely, and we hardly give a second of critical thought to our government’s design. Generation after generation has altered that design in subtle but important ways without considering СКАЧАТЬ