Gambling: Mapping the American Moral Landscape

16 The Culture War Issue That Never Was Why the Right and Left Have Overlooked Gambling

373 16 The CultureWar Issue That NeverWas Why the Right and Left Have Overlooked Gambling ♠ Alan Wolfe Gambling and Democratic Theory An industry does not become as big as the gambling industry in the United States has become without deep and direct involvement in politics. An activity that is increasingly relied upon to fund services offered by the government cannot help but become subject to government investigation and concern. And a way of life long considered sinful by religious believers will, or so one assumes, become a prominent subject of moral debate in a society in which religion plays such a prominent role in public life. Given the particular nature of the gambling industry, it can hardly be surprising that it has become the focus of considerable public attention. This chapter examines not whether gambling is intimately involved with politics, but how. This is more a normative than an empirical question, but in this case Americans have a wellestablished standard against which political practices can be normatively judged: the standard of democracy. Democratic theorists hold that the ultimate source of political authority lies with the people themselves. If a policy, political practice, or direction for a country is established with some kind of popular consent, 374 Alan Wolfe citizens generally approve of it procedurally, even if they disagree with it substantively; indeed, democratic stability is premised upon the idea that policies arrived at in legitimate fashion ought to be accepted by all whatever their views on the policy. If, on the other hand, citizens feel that decisions are made without public input and scrutiny—by unelected leaders, for example, or by unrepresentative interests acting in secret—they may feel that, lacking democratic legitimacy, such policies can be either be ignored, disobeyed, or challenged. Democratic theorists, as the political philosopher Hannah Pitkin points out, can be divided between those who insist on weak versus strong criteria of accountability.1 Joseph Schumpeter belongs in the first camp.2 Rejecting any notions associated with a Rouseauian conception of the general will, Schumpeter famously argued that so long as elites compete for office, criteria of democratic accountability have been met. Strong theorists of accountability, by contrast, who include John Dewey or, in today’s world, Jürgen Habermas, Amy Gutmann, and Dennis Thompson, hold that mere competition is insufficient; there must be arguments presented in transparent fashion to citizens who should exercise standards of reason in judging between them.3 For present purposes, both approaches can be used. If gambling is found to satisfy both weak and strong standards of accountability , it can be said to have considerable democratic legitimacy. If it satisfies weak standards but not strong standards, we can conclude that it has some democratic legitimacy. If it fails to satisfy either, the conclusion would follow that it has little or no democratic legitimacy. A second criterion of democratic performance involves some degree of balance, competition, or power sharing. As an industry supplying a good for which there is more than adequate demand, gambling interests have every right to lobby legislatures in behalf of their own interests; freedom of speech and association are generally held to be essential procedures through which processes of democracy work. At the same time, both the Schumpeterian emphasis on competition as well as the insights of pluralist thinkers from Tocqueville to Robert A. Dahl and Charles Lindblom warn that democratic success is best established when the influence of any one interest group is counterbalanced by others; The Culture War Issue That Never Was 375 freedom of association exercised in such a way that the power of any one group or side to a controversy is not checked by the others is, in this sense, insufficient for purposes of accountability .4 A society that allowed no group to press claims on its own behalf would not be democratic. But neither, properly speaking, would be a society in which only one side of a controversy were organized. The same idea holds for party competition. On the one hand, as theorists such as Nancy Rosenblum argue, parties are part and parcel of democratic governance.5 At the same time, as even the weaker Schumpeterian account of responsibility holds, there must be competition between them. A party system lacking such competition would lead to a one-party state that would not generally be considered democratic, no matter how large and inclusive that party might be. To evaluate the degree...