Walter Williams - Reaganism and the Death of Representative Democracy

WALTER WILLIAMS

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I am most indebted to Bryan Jones, who not only read more than one draft of the manuscript but also became my main sounding board for discussing ideas and working through problems. Seldom is one fortunate enough to have a colleague both willing to give his time and able to provide insightful comments. I benefited from both the critique by William Andersen, a constitutional law scholar, of my chapter on representative democracy, and the comments by the media expert Margaret Gordon on the chapter analyzing the media and political information. Rebecca Crichton and Victoria Kaplan offered comments on the manuscript from the generalist's perspective. I am much indebted to my editor at Georgetown University Press, Gail Grella, who provided an extraordinary amount of assistance in helping me clarify points and make the manuscript more readable. Finally, as with earlier publications, my wife Jacqueline (Jackie) Williams pointed out unclear ideas and garbled sentences and paragraphs that found their way into the manuscript.

The dedication is to Jackie's and my first granddaughter, who started life with the names her family gave her and an expected nickname. Born on Halloween day in 1998, she soon became Boo, and the other names faded from view. She and her brothers Charlie and Peter, born December 14, 1996, have brought me great personal joy as this study made me increasingly concerned that the nation was on a frightening path away from democracy as conceived by the Founders.

During the second half of the 1990s, the American economy performed at a pace comparable to the first twenty-five years of the postwar era, with high growth, low unemployment and inflation, and a remarkable 3 percent productivity growth rate. A veritable cornucopia of goods and services poured forth, as the United States rushed past its main rivals to again become the world's economic colossus. People spoke of a "new economy," driven by lean, mean corporations utilizing the fruits of the technology revolution. In sharpest contrast, the federal institutions of governance had been deteriorating since the start of Ronald Reagan's administration. This decline was consistent with the prevailing political philosophy that an active national government would do harm by undermining the economy through its misguided policies.

Reaganism had proclaimed: Get the federal government off the backs of the people-cut taxes deeply, particularly at the top, where high rates discourage entrepreneurs; deregulate business; devolve power to the states-and the nation will flourish again. President Reagan's political philosophy, which replaced the New Deal thinking of Franklin Roosevelt, held that unfettered free-market capitalism could serve the dual role of providing the economic bounty and of sustaining democracy far better than the politicians and bureaucrats in the nation's capital.

This book offers a different view. First, the economy surged so mightily in the second half of the 1990s despite, not because of, Reaganism's antigovernmentism and market fundamentalism. Second, the new political thesis that dominated the last two decades of the twentieth century became a central factor in the severe deterioration of the federal institutions of governance after 1981 and stands as a major barrier to the reform of the American political system. Third, money politics prevailed as members of Congress paid more attention to corporate America, their campaign finance paymaster, than they did to their constituents, and the nation slipped into early-stage plutocracy. Although the United States had not become a full-fledged plutocracy with total control by the wealthy, America's weak brand of democracy is far different from the representative democracy supported by the strong federal institutions conceived by the Founders. Government for the wealthiest citizens and major corporations had replaced government for ordinary Americans.

Finally, the declining capability of the institutional means of governing materially increased the likelihood of developing unsound policies, mismanaging new and existing programs, and failing to achieve the nation's most important domestic policy goals. I will argue that the harm inflicted by Reaganism on the critical institutions of governance created by the framers of the Constitution has undermined the U.S. political system and turned the federal government away from the major domestic policy problems facing the nation.

Putting the structure and processes of the national government at the center of the analysis reveals a critical sea change in the American political system: In the years since the coming of the Reagan administration, the United States has undergone a transformation in its political institutions and its philosophy of governance of a magnitude not seen since the 1930s. An important and related point is how little attention has been paid to the changes in the central institutions of the American political system that have made the current system fundamentally different from that of 1980.

In the upcoming chapters, the in-depth analysis of these institutions will make clear the profound changes in less than a quarter century under Reaganism that have done untold damage to the structure of governance created by the Founders. It also provides evidence to make the case that restoring the institutional efficiency of the federal government must be the pivotal first step toward greater effectiveness in achieving America's domestic policy objectives of personal safety, economic security, individual freedom, and full political citizenship.

The last paragraph raises the need to distinguish between the nation's ends or goals or objectives (the three will be interchangeable for our purposes) and its institutional means. The former set out what people want; the latter are the organizational structure and staff, the policies, and the procedures to be employed by the federal institutions in seeking to achieve the desired goals. The Founders clearly and eloquently captured the relationship between means and ends in the single sentence that constitutes the Preamble to the Constitution: "WE THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

The Founders could not have been more straightforward. Here in the Preamble are the several objectives the nation sought and the means or designated instruments for achieving them-the structure and procedures for the new government and its central institutions as originally set out in the Constitution. September 11, 2001, exposed the weaknesses in the federal government and underscored that the machinery of government must be in good working order if the nation is to accomplish its objectives. Repairing the inadequate means is the first necessary requirement. Only after that can the larger issue of effectiveness in fulfilling the nation's major unmet needs be achieved.