The Historic Power of Special Interests

The machinery of American democracy ground to a halt recently. Despite overwhelming public support for new restrictions on firearms, the National Rifle Assn. and its allies again stymied gun-control legislation on Capitol Hill. In the past, cataclysmic events and national crises allowed the nation to surmount organized interests and enact much-needed, much-demanded reform. But even after the massacre in Colorado and school shootings in Georgia, the majority appears powerless against the money and influence of the gun lobby. The stalemate has flummoxed even Vice President Al Gore; on the campaign trail he wondered how he might rouse “the 80% of the electorate” who favor safer gun laws.

Of course, the gun lobby is hardly the only special interest to squeeze Capitol Hill in a chokehold. Nor is it the first to paralyze Washington by diverting attention from effective reform onto other, vaguer issues like violent videos, creepy Internet chat rooms and schools that do not prominently display the Ten Commandments. But the lessons of history and the astonishing intractability of the current Congress, even in the face of national uproar over schoolyard violence, raise serious questions about the ability of cynical, well-heeled minorities to suffocate the will of the majority.

After World War II, President Harry S. Truman introduced a national health insurance plan. Truman’s proposal, especially medical coverage for the elderly, enjoyed broad popular support in the United States. At that time, every other industrial democracy in the world was adopting a similar policy.

But fearing a loss of income and prestige for doctors, the American Medical Assn. launched a relentless effort to spike the plan. The AMA lobbied Congress and ran a vicious advertising campaign against the bill. It even fabricated a quotation from Vladimir I. Lenin, purporting that the architect of Soviet communism had called national health insurance “the keystone to the arch of the Soviet state.” The AMA triumphed, and the United States remained the only Western democracy not to provide its citizens with guaranteed medical care.

A generation later, amid the double-digit inflation of the 1970s, the federal government maintained price supports and import quotas to protect Big Sugar. The program benefited a handful of sugar producers but pummeled millions of U.S. consumers already victimized by skyrocketing food prices. Asked to defend the sugar supports, President Jimmy Carter’s inflation czar, economist Alfred E. Kahn, remained speechless. Although everyone understood, he could not confess before a congressional committee that the Carter administration dared not offend the sugar lobby. After a long, awkward pause, Kahn replied, “Let the record show an embarrassed silence.” Sugar subsidies survived.

But not just economic interests have derailed popular reforms. Party organizations, religious groups and fraternal societies have also maintained strangleholds on the political process. They have subverted the general welfare to their narrow, parochial aims.

During the 1880s, Americans became increasingly disenchanted with corruption in public office. A decade of high-profile scandals, reminiscent of today’s campaign-finance imbroglios, convinced many that the excesses of the spoils system needed to be tamed. The nation should no longer condone the rewarding of political supporters with sinecures and lucrative contracts or the practice of requiring public employees to kick back part of their salaries to the machines that had provided their jobs. Still, the party organizations, particularly the national Republican Party, which controlled the White House and its rich stores of patronage, repeatedly blocked civil-service reform. The spoils system remained intact until a disappointed office seeker assassinated President James A. Garfield. Then clamor for action finally became irresistible and Congress passed the Pendleton Civil Service Act in 1883. This “Magna Carta of civil-service reform” forbade mandatory kickbacks and awarded many public offices by competitive examination rather than cronyism. Still, civil-service reform proved a rare and partial victory.

During the late 19th century, however, no issues so exercised the electorate as moral reform--temperance, Sabbatarianism, birth control. Most parts of the nation enacted Sunday “blue laws,” closing shops and offices on the Sabbath, and enforced restrictions on the sale and use of contraceptives. However popular these measures were during the Gilded Age, they were outmoded by the 1960s. But while vast majorities of Americans opposed these restrictions, a committed vocal minority kept them on the books.

For example, when Massachusetts scientists conducted clinical tests for the birth-control pill, contraception was still illegal in that state. Legislators simply would not risk the wrath of churches and other religious organizations, despite the wishes of constituents. Only after the Supreme Court invalidated bans on contraceptives in 1965 and the cultural turmoil of the ‘60s eroded support for blue laws, did Congress and the state legislatures begin to retire these relics of the Gilded Age.

Half a century ago, Americans first surveyed the alarming rise of special interests like the NRA and the AMA. Analysts like John Kenneth Galbraith and David Reisman conceded that U.S. voters possessed little real influence on the political process. Policymaking had become so arcane and complex that ordinary citizens could barely keep track of deliberations in Washington, much less surmount the power of organized interests.

But 1950s observers remained confident about the resilience of American democracy. In their minds, the opposing interest groups seemed to counteract each other: Labor checked business, veterans groups balanced professional organizations, civil-rights lobbies monitored church groups. A democracy of interest groups flourished in the modern United States, even if citizen voices grew faint. In the last analysis, in times of crisis--a presidential assassination, an international incident, a cultural rebellion--Americans would break through the gridlock that stalled legislative action.

Recent events cast doubt on that sanguine view. The interests do not cancel each other out and produce a harmonious, functioning democracy. After Littleton, it seems that even a national disaster cannot pry a congressional majority free from the tentacles of a well-financed, well-organized lobby.

The failure of gun control raises issues more fundamental than the fate of firearms restrictions or even the country’s ability to prevent juvenile violence. It asks whether this nation can any longer find the resolve and the unity of purpose to cast aside the lobbyists, their slick ads and their fat checkbooks. It asks whether American democracy or any other so stymied and dominated by selfish interests can long endure. In the current crisis, the answers are by no means certain.