The Civil Society Reader

11. from The Governmental Process

11 David B. Truman from The Governmental Process THE ALLEGED MISCHIEFS OF FACTION Most accounts of American legislative sessions—national, state, or local—are full of references to the maneuverings and iniquities of various organized groups. Newspaper stories report that a legislative proposal is being promoted by groups of business men or school teachers or farmers or consumers or labor unions or other aggregations of citizens. Cartoonists picture the legislature as completely under the control of sinister, portly, cigar-smoking individuals labeled “special interests,” while a diminutive John Q. Public is pushed aside to sulk in futile anger and pathetic frustration. A member of the legislature rises in righteous anger on the floor of the house or in a press conference to declare that the bill under discussion is being forced through by the “interests,” by the most unscrupulous highpressure “lobby” he has seen in all his years of public life. An investigating committee denounces the activities of a group as deceptive, immoral, and destructive of our constitutional methods and ideals. A chief executive attacks a “lobby” or “pressure group” as the agency responsible for obstructing or emasculating a piece of legislation that he has recommended “in the public interest.” From time to time a conscientious and observant reporter collects a series of such incidents and publishes them, exposing in the best muckraking tradition the machinations of these subversive “interests,” and, if he is fortunate, breaking into the best-seller lists. Or a fictionalized treatment of them may be presented as the theme of a popular novel. Such events are familiar even to the casual student of day-to-day politics, if only because they make diverting reading and appear to give the citizen the “lowdown ” on his government. He tends, along with many of his more sophisticated fellow citizens, to take these things more or less for granted, possibly because they merely confirm his conviction that “as everybody knows, politics is a dirty business.” Yet at the same time he is likely to regard the activities of organized groups in political life as somehow outside the proper and normal processes of government, as the lapses of his weak contemporaries whose moral fiber is insuf- ficient to prevent their defaulting on the great traditions of the Founding Fathers. These events appear to be a modern pathology. Group Pressures and the Founding Fathers Group pressures, whatever we may wish to call them, are not new in America. One of the earliest pieces of testimony to this effect is essay number 10 of The Federalist, which contains James Madison’s classic statement of the impact of divergent groups upon government and the reasons for their development. He was arguing the virtues of the proposed Union as a means to “break and control the violence of faction,” having in mind, no doubt, the groups involved in such actions of the debtor or propertyless segment of the population as Shay’s Rebellion . He defined faction in broader terms, however, as “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest. . . .” His observations on the source and character of such group differences merit quotation at length: The latent causes of faction are . . . sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. . . . But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation...