Working the System: Memo to the Tikkun Community

Vol. 7, No. 6. 1992.

The crisis of institutional paralysis is graver than the partisan gridlock that could be solved by having a Democrat in the White House. The real crisis is the emergence of the Special Interest State, a permanent, insulated state within the democratic state. It is informal, a political protoplasm of interests who exercise virtual veto power over issues such as health care reform that garner overwhelming support among the electorate. This is not an enlightened establishment. Its defining obsession is with immediate interests at the expense of future welfare, making it the chief impediment to deficit reductions or any policies of sustainability. …

Societies, like individuals, are not moved to be “competitive” or “productive” or “winners” unless they are fueled and sustained by a meaningful vision or goal. Any economic recovery plan has to be more than the expansion of McJobs; it must rethink the market so that values such as environmental preservation and community begin to be internalized. Clinton intuits that economics and environmentalism and community values need to be melded in his “new paradigms” and “covenants.” He needs to reread Gore’s Earth in the Balance and Herman Daly and John Cobb’s For the Common Good, since the writings of his chief economic advisers offer scant evidence that they have gone beyond seeing the ecosystem as a disposable resource to be developed for high-technology export products. Despite conventional economic reasoning, the ecosystem is not infinite. The environmental issue is not secondary to the economic issue except in the old paradigm. The crisis of America’s economic stagnation arises from over- dependency on Persian Gulf oil, over-investment in the nuclear arms race, addiction to gasguzzling automobiles, skyrocketing cancer and health costs due to toxic pollution, and the catastrophic depletion of resources that are no longer cheap and abundant.

Like the environment, the idea of community is often reduced by government programs to that of a laboratory where individuals are fit into programs administered from the outside. Bill Clinton’s “New Covenant” contains an implicit image of an obligatory contract between the individual below and an omnipotent order above, not one of humbler government and more powerful citizens. Recent history is littered with the debris of these failed notions.

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