At a big press dinner one night in early 1985, when I was settling into my first job in Washington, I found myself sitting next to a man who was a lot more interesting than the official speaker at the rostrum. In person, David Stockman, the architect of the "Reagan Revolution," was as brilliant as his reputation, but what was most striking was his candid bitterness. Stockman had come to Washington, with Ronald Reagan, determined to change things. But he had failed, and he knew it. They had failed. Over the next few years, I encountered a few other young reformers. One was the earnest and deeply knowledgeable governor of Arkansas. Bill Clinton's mastery of the inner workings of government policy was astonishing. Ask him about health or welfare or education, and his answers combined the savvy of a politician with the knowledge of a bureaucrat. Then there was an obscure but ambitious young Turk congressman by the name of Newt Gingrich. I'll never forget this starry-eyed back-bencher explaining to a gaggle of conservative activists how Washington could be changed--if only you'd think "outside the box."
Clinton and Gingrich, as I saw first-hand, had brains, talent, determination. They both attempted "revolutions" to rival Stockman's. And they both failed, each more spectacularly than the last. This book revisits the ideas that I first published in my book Demosclerosis, which suggested that Washington's disease is more complex and cunning than even a Clinton or a Gingrich realized. The new edition has a new title, because it is partly a new book. The earlier ideas are here, but I've also tried to account for the experiences of the 1990s--and to peer into the future, where a new relationship between the people and their government is taking shape.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
A century and a half ago, Alexis de Tocqueville came to America and concluded that democracy's Achilles' heel was tyranny of the majority. "The majority in the United States has immense actual power and a power of opinion which is almost as great," he said. "If freedom is ever lost in America, that will be due to the omnipotence of the majority driving the minorities to desperation and forcing them to appeal to physical force." But democracy, here and elsewhere, has not succumbed to majoritarian tyranny. In fact, America has probably done a better job protecting minorities than any other society in history. A hundred years after Tocqueville, many people worried that democracy's vulnerability lay in its lack of resolve in the face of totalitarianism. Dictators, after all, could make decisions almost instantaneously, while democratic institutions dithered and deliberated. That fear, too, was misplaced. American democracy saw the dictators to their graves. It saw the Cold War through in a display of consistency and resolve which history can hardly match. Dithering democracies turned out to have the better side of the deal: they turned out to be much better than dictatorships at finding and correcting their mistakes before mistakes became cataclysms.
Today it appears that democracy's truer vulnerability lies closer to home--in the democratic public's tendency to form ever more groups clamoring for ever more goodies and perks and then defending them to the death. Free and stable societies, it seems, tend to drift toward economic cannibalism and governmental calcification, unless they make a positive effort to fight the current....
One reason democracy wasn't done in by majoritarian tyranny or by the dictators' resolve was that people became worried about both threats, and so managed to defeat them. The current threat is more insidious. It operates quietly and slowly from within, giving us no belligerent "them" to bravely stand up to--no majoritarian lynch mobs with nooses, no implacable Stalins with armies. It is a crisis of American appetites.
This book is not an apocalyptic tirade. It is not about the imminent death of American civilization or democracy or prosperity; I believe in no such thing. It is, rather, about a profound change in American society and behavior over the past thirty or so years which is compromising Americans' ability to govern ourselves and to solve common problems. It is an attempt to show how American society has reordered itself so as to make politicians less and less able to meet the expectations of the citizenry. It is about a social game in which Americans have trapped each other: a game of beggar-thy-neighbor and get-mine-first that damages the economy and chokes the government.
We cannot cope with the game, and mitigate its ravages, until we understand how it captures and uses us. Resentful scapegoating of liberals, conservatives, government, business, foreigners, wealthy elites, the poor, politicians, and everyone else does no good at all. A nation of expectant whiners cannot see through the trap that I am about to describe.
