I really encourage people who is interested on interest group politics in US this article from New Yorker: Conflict of Interests, Does the wrangling of interest groups corrupt politics -or constitute it? It is a critic of two books on the problem of interest groups. The first, “The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures,” by Arthur Fisher Bentley, is the one that interest the most. Nicholas Lemann makes very ineteresting suggestion and reflections while critizising it.
My favorite part is:
Just before the table of contents in “The Process
of Government,” on a page all alone, is the avowal “This book is an
attempt to fashion a tool.” A century later, the tool that Arthur
Bentley was attempting to fashion retains its utility, and not merely
for understanding the American political system. (Those who believed in
2003 that Iraqi politics was best understood as a struggle between
democracy and dictatorship, rather than as a struggle among groups,
could have learned from him.) Bentley may have pressed his arguments
too far, but, given our tendency to dismiss interest groups as the
serpents in the political Eden that the Founders created, “The Process
of Government” serves as an indispensable corrective.
When the
reputation of Bentley’s masterpiece was at its peak, it was not just
because he had fashioned a useful tool, of course; it was because many
people saw pluralism as being not only accurate but attractive. To
regain that perspective today requires an even greater undoing of
deeply ingrained habits of thought. Pluralism, in the tradition of
Bentley, requires that one see one’s own political passions, and those
of such unimpeachable actors as winners of the Nobel Peace Prize and
members of the Concord Coalition, as representing something other than
the promptings of pure justice. That does not come naturally. One has
to see that sincere talk of the public interest and the general good
can be dangerous tools in the hands of people one disagrees with, if
not in one’s own. (If you’re a liberal, reread President Bush’s second
inaugural address, a grandiose exercise in public-interest rhetoric
meant to lay the groundwork for waging the war on terror and
privatizing Social Security.) One has to get over the habit of assuming
that “interests,” and, worse, lobbying and corruption, are the province
only of one’s political opponents, and not one’s allies. Pluralism
means dialling down the moral stature that we attach to universalist
arguments, and dialling up the moral stature of particularism.
Still,
the pluralist vision does admit an element of justice. In any political
system that gives people the freedom to organize and vote—and even,
historically, in many systems that don’t—the logic of pluralism
explains why those who do the hard, quotidian precinct work of politics
will generally have more influence than those whose political
participation is confined to writing, thinking, filing lawsuits,
writing regulations, and spending money on media buys. In Bentley’s
scheme, that’s all interest-group activity, but of the weaker “talk”
(instead of the stronger “organization”) variety. Throughout American
history, political organizing has been the means that
outsiders—immigrants, farmers, African-Americans in the Reconstruction
South, and, more recently, netroots activists on the left and
evangelicals on the right—use to gain advantage against the more
talk-oriented élites, who regard their political aims as corruption or
special pleading. On the last page of “The Wrecking Crew,” Frank
finally mentions what, from a pluralist perspective, would be the first
order of business if you believe as passionately as he does that
business-controlled conservative lobbyists are running Washington into
the ground: organizing a political opposition. To be truly effective,
though, such an opposition would have to muster its own army of
Washington lobbyists. It’s tempting to think that just over the horizon
lies a procedural reform that will lead to the lasting triumph of what
looks to you like good government. But the truth is that the only way
to defeat one set of interests is with another set of interests.
