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.
