POLITICS AND REPRESENTATION

 

The emotional fusion between the People and the State begun by the state-nation and reconceptualized in the nation-state was intensified by the Long War. Governments undertook responsibilities in entirely new areas of the social and economic activities of their citizens, and the nation endorsed the actions of the State through a variety of means, including a vastly expanded voting franchise, an institutionalized role for labor unions, and greatly increased taxation. In the market-state, both sides of this reciprocal equation will change: there will be fewer formal mechanisms for endorsement by the public and the State will undertake to do less.36

Though I shudder to think so, I believe we can expect more reliance on the plebiscite, the initiative, and the referendum, especially as these become so easy and cheap to undertake once interactive cable television becomes universal in the United States. To some extent, we are already living under such a regime. What I have in mind is not the extensive use of referenda at the state level37 but rather the heavy reliance on frequent polling by American office holders. These are a kind of virtual-reality referenda, allowing the politician to test the results of a proposal. Like aircraft landing simulators, these polls give guidance to the politician without his actually putting himself at risk by calling for a referendum that he would have to support (or oppose), 38 and with the results of which he would then have to live.

At the same time, the market-state does not suffer from the acute shame experienced by the nation-state when the subject of campaign finance is discussed. When Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that “Congressmen do not represent interests or trees, they represent people,”39 he was expressing an axiom of the nation-state. Doubtless he believed it, but it would be hard to maintain this view in light of today's functional patronage of candidates by contributors. If there are any readers innocent of this process, it goes like this: campaigns are funded by contributions from persons and groups with interests in the behavior of the candidate if she (or he) is successful. These campaigns are far too expensive to be funded by any candidate personally save the wealthiest individuals, and even these, if they are successful, lose no time in paying themselves back through postcampaign fund-raisers. Politicians of unquestioned rectitude, who would not dream of accepting a bribe—a payment for their personal benefit in exchange for a vote or action on behalf of the payor—have long now accustomed themselves to promising assistance (and sometimes votes) to persons and groups who give them money in the full expectation that the word of the politician is good. Their very rectitude is, ironically, the door opener to the contributor, because it guarantees the payee will deliver as promised. Whether there is anything wrong with this I am hesitant to say. Shouldn't the right-to-life candidate's campaign be the beneficiary of the funds collected to promote a right-to-life policy? Shouldn't the congressman anxious to alleviate unemployment in his district vote for a public works project there, and isn't such a man a suitable person for local business interests to support? But there persists a disquiet among those who believe the civics lessons of the nation-state, which hold that the votes of the public ought to be the only coin of the political realm. I believe a time will come in the transition from nation-state to market-state in which we will reflect on our current fund-raising practices with revulsion and an amazement that we tolerated them for so long.

But that does not mean that we will replace these practices, which seem so violative of the ethos of the nation-state; it is likelier that we will keep the practices and change the ethos. The market-state is not so squeamish. Indeed, its civics lessons hold that there should be no limits on campaign spending from any source so that the true opportunity costs of a candidate's defeat are reflected in the probability of his victory. The market-state merely tries to get the “best” person for the job in the way that universities try to get the “best” students: they set up a market that selects persons on the basis of predictions about their subsequent success. Fund-raising is to governing what SATs and high school grades are to college grades, accurate (if circular) predictors of a later performance that is, in the era of the “permanent campaign,” a repetition of the test itself. Governance becomes a matter of maintaining popularity, which requires further advertising, which requires further fund-raising. The candidate who is tied to important interests by virtue of his fund-raising is precisely the person whose vote will most closely reflect those interests. The more money he raises, the more attractive the candidacy, because successful fund-raising reflects the relationship between the importance of the interests he represents and his ability to represent them (as those interests judge it—and who are better placed to do so than they?). And this is just as well, because initiatives, plebiscites, and referenda are, like all elections, very expensive. The more frequently they come, the greater the match between economic interests and public policy; indeed, this is one of the attractions of the market-state. That this places enormous power in the hands of the media only underscores the change in its constitutional role with the emergence of the market-state.

We can expect an improvement in the quality of the civil service as taxpayers come to demand better performance from government and to appreciate the need for better compensation in order to secure that performance. Like the rise in tuition costs—which is mainly a matter of responding to the increased expectations of students in the context of fixed faculty productivity—a rise in government costs is almost unavoidable. Government bodies do not make decisions more efficiently, for example, because they have computers any more than professors give better comments on essays because these comments are composed on a word processor. This rise in costs will perhaps be counterbalanced by a narrowing domain of the matters we allocate to government. With respect to those responsibilities that governments of market-states retain, we shall expect better performance.