The Venal Center

The people of the United States expect action, compromise and cooperation between the reelected Democratic president and the Republican Congress--and they’re going to see it. The center of American politics is being redefined.

Unfortunately, that’s also the problem. The “vital center” that historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. praised four decades ago has been replaced. Policy in Washington is now made by what we can justly call the “venal center.” This is where the people who gave the national Republican Party a record $549 million during the 1995-96 election cycle overlap with the contributors, many of them the same wealthy Americans, who gave the national Democratic Party $332 million in the same period.

The case can be made, all too easily, that a bipartisan “venal center” now has effective control of both the Clinton White House and the Congress led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.). What’s frightening, historically, is that these venal periods aren’t any coincidence. Money-driven politics rise within a wider money culture--the giant speculative bubbles of the financial markets that characterized the Gilded Age a century ago and again in the Roaring ‘20s. Money doesn’t get driven out of politics, or even pushed hard toward the exits, until its own bubble bursts.

That is why the 105th Congress is almost certain to pass, and the president is highly likely to sign, tax cuts, budget deficit reductions, free trade and economic-deregulation legislation this year. The results won’t have much to do with protecting Medicare, eliminating tax loopholes, reducing corporate welfare or bolstering blue-collar wages. The old vital center did that sort of thing, but not the new venal center, with its focus on lower capital-gains taxes for investors and major reductions in outlays for such middle-class entitlement programs as Medicare and Social Security. President Bill Clinton keeps hinting to wealthy audiences that he shares their fiscal pain, implying he’s not philosophically opposed to capital-gains rate reduction--this may be the most important fiscal litmus of what he’s becoming.

Obviously, many areas of disagreement still exist between the GOP and the Democrats on abortion, chemical weapons, religious schools, gay rights and other social issues. Conservative and liberal fund-raisers pull in a great deal of money from the public to pursue these causes. The venal center, however, doesn’t care about the cultural ideology of true believers. Its interests are largely financial and commercial--questions of taxes and subsidies, though Democratic legislators also get big money from organized labor and the education lobby.

The heart and arteries of the venal center are in political and influence-peddling Washington, among the politicians, consultants and the bloated 20,000-person staff of Congress and among the nearly 100,000 lawyers and lobbyists doing business along the Potomac. But it also depends heavily on another 100,000 Americans, from Bar Harbor to Brentwood, who give most of the megabucks pouring into presidential and congressional campaigns. Both ends of this axis have smothered, choked and nearly strangled American democracy. The influence of money is driving out the influence of voters, whose 1996 participation took the biggest dive in memory.

Three important types of legislation cannot succeed in today’s climate: term limits, which would nip legislative careers in the bud just when they’re becoming useful to their sponsors; serious election-finance reform (as opposed to posturing), which would start to drive the money out of politics, and a full-force crackdown on lobbies and lobbying. Washington politicians are about as likely to accomplish these changes as the Nevada gambling industry is to ban slot machines.

The embarrassment of the president and the speaker--assuming they are embarrassed--over the various political-money abuses to which they have been linked is only the tip of the iceberg. There have been major revelations almost daily since New Year’s. We’ve learned about the latest loophole in the campaign-finance laws--how lobbyists can now pay $3,000 or $6,000 to spend a weekend with a bunch of representatives or senators at a ski resort or a tropical island. We’ve learned how much it costs a banker to have coffee with the president and talk about bank reforms. And we’ve learned that when Congress passes supposedly pro-little-guy legislation, say a minimum-wage increase, legislators use the same bill for unpublicized add-ons like special tax breaks and foundations for millionaires. Say hello again to the venal center. In Washington, there’s almost no escaping it.

In one sense, the Republicans are the biggest offenders. They’re the most committed pursuers of big money and the most supportive of just the kind of economic favoritism that business and finance want. But, in another sense, the president and his White House and Democratic National Committee minions are worse. The GOP elite, if not the party rank and file, believes in the right and might of wealth; but Democrats are the party of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. They’re supposed to attack “the malefactors of great wealth” when greed breaks loose, not suck up to them like a cat at a cream bowl--or like Clinton at a Manhattan townhouse fund-raiser.

This isn’t the first time the American public has seen the U.S. political center venalized. It happened in the late 19th century, with the robber barons, and again during the Roaring ‘20s, when political corruption, a stock-market bubble and preachers drunk on Prohibition all flourished together. But, in both cases, reform ultimately broke through, though a stock-market crash was necessary in both 1893 and 1929. Maybe it will be necessary again, harsh as that sounds.

Meantime, it’s hard to tell just what the American people think. They’re more encouraged about the economy than at any other time this decade. Though fear of what the future might mean for their children has stayed high, only about half--45% or so--continue to say the country is on the wrong track. About as many think it’s on the right track.

Climates like this, historically, are periods when reform cannot succeed, but must gather itself, its evidence and solutions, and wait for the bubble of a larger national venality to pop. If the patterns of the past are any clue, money tends to corrupt politics the most thoroughly when it is also dazzling society the most persuasively--society meaning the culture, commerce and the financial markets. Go-go finance and go-go politics go together. That was true in the 1920s, and it’s certainly true again, now.

It would be convenient to glide past this link. We could talk about embarrassing representatives who take the most vacations with lobbyists by giving them Golden Golf Club awards. We can applaud when some worthy foundation rounds up the usual suspects for a National Commission for Reform of Election Finance. We can try to begin a national dialogue over amending the U.S. Constitution to make clear that giving a check--or a thousand-dollar bill--to a political campaign has nothing to do with free speech.

But it is hard to avoid the sense that none of this will bear much fruit as long as Americans half-believe that the president, Congress and corporate America have the country on track, and mutual funds are turning into Comstock Lodes. In short, don’t look for the money culture to be driven out of politics until it has failed in its own arenas and markets.