The Emergence of Modern Politics

excerpted from the book

The New Progressive Era

Toward a Fair and Deliberative Democracy

by Peter Levine

Rowman and Littlefield, 2000, paper

p45
... the credit for ending segregation belongs not to Progressive reformers or other federal politicians but primarily to Southern blacks. Civil rights initiatives succeeded only after valiant, well-publicized grassroots struggles had provoked white racist violence that embarrassed the national government. For example, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed when Bull Connor trained his fire hoses on black children in Birmingham; the Voting Rights Act passed when Colonel Al Lingo's state troopers beat peaceful marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge near Selma. Furthermore, legal guarantees of rights meant nothing until civil rights workers actually registered voters, ran for election, and took office amid violence. Where the largely white Progressives had failed to bring democracy to people of color, the black-led civil rights crusade largely succeeded, using methods of nonviolent resistance.

The ideas that inspired such leaders as Martin Luther King, Jr., mostly came from sources other than Progressivism. King, for example, drew on the Exodus story and the Hebrew prophets, the New Testament, the rhetoric of the abolitionist church, the long tradition of African-American solidarity and resistance, and the struggle against European imperialism, especially in India.

p46
[Martin Luther] King [Jr.] ... came to see the Social Gospel doctrine as naive. He reached this conclusion under the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr, another theologian who had considered himself a Progressive. (Indeed, Niebuhr began his political career working on La Follette's last presidential campaign.) "I became so enamored of [Niebuhr's] social ethics," King once wrote, "that I almost fell into the trap of accepting uncritically everything he wrote." 18 Niebuhr took seriously the idea of original sin, believing that force or greed governed all large-scale human institutions and that consensus was utopian. Individuals, who were created in God's image, could be moral in their personal relationships; but human beings also had to live in society, and no society would cohere except under threat of force. Niebuhr accused Rauschenbusch of overestimating the power of moral suasion and "the community-building capacities of human sympathy." Polities, for Niebuhr, was largely a clash of economic interests, and society could become just only if powerful interests were curbed by force.

Despite his "realism," Niebuhr shared the Progressives' ideal of a democratic society, governed by discussion rather than coercion. Like his Progressive colleagues, he thought that the point of a democratic state was to "arbitrate conflicts from a more impartial perspective than is available to any party in a given conflict." A true democracy was not merely a system of private rights but a community in which "rights and liberties [are] exercised with a higher sense of responsibility for the common good."' All of this sounded like conventional Progressivism, but Niebuhr was hard-nosed enough to think that the struggle for community and justice often required force. For example, he argued that American whites would never renounce their privileges without a struggle. However, black Americans faced very long odds if they resorted to violence; and force had a tendency to spin out of control. Under these circumstances, Niebuhr advocated Gandhian methods of nonviolent resistance. Beginning in 1947, the Civil Rights Movement used just such methods to achieve racial justice that had eluded the Progressives. Thus King and his colleagues moved beyond Progressivism by embracing radical, confrontational, extra-legal means to achieve a Progressive end. Such means might have frightened reformers like La Follette, but they proved necessary-for reasons that Niebuhr understood.

The Civil Rights leaders also enriched the Progressives' ideal of a democratic community. For many Progressives, the basic goals of reform were negative: to protect the people against corrupt politicians and predatory special interests. They knew what they opposed but not exactly what they stood for. La Follette once wrote: "Mere passive citizenship is not enough." But the alternative that he favored was a defensive struggle against anti-democratic forces: "Men must be aggressive for what is right if government is to be saved from those who are aggressive for what is wrong."

p49
Looking back at the New Left, it is difficult to see through the late-60s haze of incense, pot, tear gas, and burning cities. But if the "Movement" began at any identifiable moment, it was when Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) published their Port Huron Statement in 1962. This document popularized the phrases "new left" and "participatory democracy" for the decade to come. It was written at a conference organized by Robert Alan Haber, whose parents had named him after Robert La Follette, Sr. The SDS itself grew out of the John Dewey Discussion Society at the University of Michigan. Its founders still thought in the tradition of Midwestern Progressivism; La Follette could easily have signed their Statement.

Far from demanding social revolution or Marxist economic policies, the Port Huron Statement advocated conventional political reform. The SDS authors claimed that the seniority system in Congress gave too much power to racist "Dixiecrats." The major parties were incoherent coalitions, so voters lacked clear choices on election day. Blacks and migrant workers were disenfranchised; gerrymandering hurt the cities. Politicians "respond not to dialogue, but to pressure: and knowing this, the ordinary citizen feels even greater inclination to shun the political sphere." An "enormous lobby force, composed predominantly of business interests, [spends] hundreds of millions each year."

The SDS authors also argued that civil society needed renewal, in order to remedy the "loneliness, estrangement, isolation" that "describe the vast distance between man and man." They opposed big bureaucracies, for, in a participatory democracy, "decision-making of basic social consequence [would be] carried on by public groupings." Therefore, they argued: "Mechanisms of voluntary association must be created through which political information can be imparted and political participation encouraged." To counter special interests, citizens should organize into participatory groups, and the government should distribute "objective materials on all public issues."

The SDS authors wanted to enlarge the public sector so that economic activity could be "debated and planned," which was impossible in a market. But they wanted this state sector to be truly "public, and not the arena of a ruling bureaucracy of 'public servants.'" This would require "steadfast opposition to bureaucratic coagulation." More important, it would demand "experiments in decentralization." Although they didn't use his name, they endorsed Wilbur Phillips's Social Unit Plan for "community decision-making and participation."

From 1962 to 1965, SDS members tried to put their theory into practice by organizing poor residents of Northern cities. At the same time, the most radical of the Civil Rights groups, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), organized blacks in the rural South. Both groups considered themselves 'nonideological," believing that the people they organized should set their own political agendas. They saw themselves as catalysts, not as leaders in the traditional sense. They encouraged poor people to talk about social issues, taught them political skills, formed loosely structured organizations, and established "free spaces"-offices, shelters, and union halls-where people could meet to talk. Jane Mansbridge recalls, "In the late 1960s, every major American city and every rural area to which young people had migrated could claim a host of free schools, food co-ops, law communes, women's centers, hot lines, and health clinics organized along 'participatory' lines." For the most part, they followed "the unwritten rules of unitary democracy: face-to-face, consensual decision making and the elimination of all internal distinctions that could encourage or legitimate inequality."

Most of this was happening without SNCC or SDS, whose organizers had encountered difficulties by the middle of the decade. Their privileged backgrounds caused them to stand out uncomfortably in the poor neighborhoods where they worked. They discovered intimidating obstacles to even modest social change, and their resistance to authority made them hesitant to adopt leadership roles. In one extreme example-the SDS "nonproject" in Hoboken, New Jersey-the "organizers" decided to take no action beyond finding blue-collar jobs and waiting for the working class to mobilize itself.

As the sixties progressed, frustrated SDS members renounced their own Port Huron Statement as "bourgeois" and began endless debates about the nature of the Marxist revolution to come. However, parts of the statement were implemented when Lyndon Johnson began the Great Society initiative in 1964. Johnson certainly paid no attention to the SDS or SNCC, but ideas about participatory democracy were in the air, thanks to John Dewey and the Progressive Settlement Houses, C. Wright Mills and Saul Alinsky, organized labor and the mainstream Civil Rights organizations, sociologists like Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin, and the Ford Foundation. The Kennedy administration had put some of these ideas into practice when it began a juvenile-delinquency program, but the Kennedys were more interested in expertise and efficiency than grassroots democracy. Then urban America started to burn, and the Johnson administration had to respond somehow to the new militancy of Northern blacks. In 1964, Johnson announced a War on Poverty.

The main weapon in this "war" was the Economic Opportunity Act, which introduced the idea of "community action" to end poverty in the United States. A community action program had to be "developed, conducted, and administered with the maximum feasible participation of the residents of the areas and members of the groups served." Johnson explained: "This program asks men and women throughout the country to prepare long-range plans for the attack on poverty in their own local communities. These are not plans prepared in Washington and imposed upon hundreds of different situations. They are based on the fact that local citizens best understand their own problems and know best how to deal with those problems.

In the same vein, the Model Cities bill of 1966 required "widespread citizen participation." Under the authority of these statutes, the federal government began Head Start, the Public Health Service, the Legal Services program, public housing and urban renewal assistance, community mental health centers, the New Careers Program, and scores of other welfare initiatives. These new programs, plus much of the existing welfare state, came under the "maximum feasible participation" mandate. Community Action Associations, or CAAs, were established in poor and disadvantaged areas-theoretically, to oversee all federal services and to give citizens opportunities to influence the welfare bureaucracy. After eighteen months, 1,000 CAAs had begun operation and were experimenting busily. They created citizens' advisory committees; held open hearings; organized "unions" of people who received government services; established community corporations with actual control over services; developed poor peoples' political skills; and otherwise tried to generate an "urban community based on small, self-contained, self-maintaining, self-directing neighborhoods."

The idea of community action quickly ran into trouble. Many local politicians, threatened by direct federal intervention in their cities, began making patronage appointments to CAA boards. Often, when politicians or bureaucrats selected community representatives, residents came to distrust the entire process. Some local politicians actually preferred to hold elections, since independent candidates lacked the money necessary to wage effective campaigns. In general, turnout in CAA elections was low, and professional politicians controlled the outcome. For example, federal officials set up 154 polling places in the Watts area of Los Angeles, chartered 25 buses, and mailed 10O,000 leaflets to residents, but fewer than 1 percent of eligible voters participated, at a cost of $22.94 a vote. When Los Angeles stopped trying to achieve community representation, the federal grants kept flowing. Meanwhile, "poor," "citizen," and "community" all gradually became code-words for "black." Therefore, even well-meaning white politicians assumed that they could fulfill the community participation mandate if they merely talked to established African-American leaders, such as the local head of the NAACP.

Perhaps no one in power had ever meant to cede real authority to welfare recipients. Johnson's promise of broad public participation may have been a rhetorical flourish. However, the promise itself had a powerful motivational effect. Across the country, poor people demanded the right to participate in CAA governance. In at least twenty cities, they gained control of their local boards, usually after a bitter struggle. Once aroused, they took the same fight to school boards, police oversight bodies, city counsels, and state legislatures. A whole generation of poor and minority leaders matured during the War on Poverty-although not exclusively because of it.

Through Neighborhood Legal Services, they filed class-action lawsuits on behalf of poor people. They demanded participation not only in government agencies, but also in all the bureaucracies they encountered, including colleges, hospitals, foundations, and the United Way. CAA directors hired as many as 180,000 workers and created thousands of independent organizations to manage federal programs or to agitate politically; most of these groups were staffed by black people from poor backgrounds. Community-action workers duplicated some of the habits of the old political machines, dispensing patronage and trading favors. However, the beneficiaries were people who had never been able to participate in politics before. In many cases, CAA directors gradually abandoned their militant styles and became traditional politicians or bureaucrats during the 1970s. Radical critics complained that these minority leaders had been "coopted into the system," and leftist historians have since echoed that complaint. It is true that no revolution occurred, but War on Poverty workers organized themselves into insurgent political movements that captured City Hall in Detroit, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, and many smaller communities. Majority rule in the nation's great cities was no small achievement.

During the Kennedy administration, the first experiments in community action were deliberately designed to encourage political reform. The idea was to give federal money to grassroots groups of poor people, bypassing state and local governments that were controlled by affluent majorities or by white-ethnic political machines. Once poor people became organized and politically "competent," they would begin to vote, run for office, and otherwise force their local governments to represent them. SDS, SNCC, and other private organizations on the Left also tried initially to organize the poor so that they could gain more influence over official government institutions; participatory democracy was supposed to complement and improve representative democracy, not replace it.

But mayors and governors were predictably upset when federal money began supporting grassroots institutions controlled by independent black leaders. They fought back, winning some battles and losing others. As the conflict grew bitter-even violent, everyone had to take sides. Johnson, the epitome of a professional politician, lined up with local elected officials. He once asked Sargent Shriver, the War on Poverty's general, whether his office was being "run by a bunch of kooks, commies, and queers." In fact, many poverty activists had completely lost interest in traditional political reform, arguing-as the popular slogan put it-that "democracy is in the streets." They now believed that authentic democracy was participatory, not representative. The democratic spirit was alive on picket lines, in union halls, in communes, even during riots-but not in the dry business of legislation and administration. New Leftists instinctively resisted all kinds of formal authority. In 1971, Crosby, Stills, and Nash sang in protest against the mayor of Chicago, Richard J. Daley: "Rules and regulations, who needs them? Throw 'em out the door!"

This attitude was not necessarily democratic. After all, a standard theory of democracy holds that citizens are best represented by elected officials who sit in deliberative bodies. Nor is it only the Left that resists state authority-Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich have also denounced regulation, bureaucracy, and government intervention. It was true in 1964, as it is today, that local governments ignored some of their citizens, but the proper response was to enfranchise nonvoters, redraw electoral districts, delegate power to local elected bodies, experiment with proportional representation, and revamp campaign-finance systems. Unless local governments were reformed, they would inevitably try to suppress poor people. If radicals succeeded in bypassing or subverting government, then citizens would lose their chance to be represented democratically. Ironically, however, the most lasting impact of the War on Poverty was fairly conventional political reform. Poor people, especially African Americans, gained political skills through community action and then demanded changes in state and local politics. As a result, institutions from school boards to state legislatures became more open, fair, and representative.

The Great Society embodied a liberal social philosophy: it redistributed wealth from the rich to the poor and created new positive economic rights or entitlements. These values did not follow from pure Progressive principles. A democratic people may decide collectively to reject liberalism, as many Americans had by 1980. However, there was more to the Great Society than liberal economics: it also strengthened democracy by building fair, participatory, deliberative institutions at the local level. This aspect of the War on Poverty followed from classic Progressive ideas about citizenship and self-government. An independent study published in 1970 took into account all the failures of community action but concluded: "Federally supported programs have created the ground for a remarkably rich, complex, exciting communal life for a growing number of people." When modern conservatives attack "big government," they overlook this aspect of the Great Society-as do many liberals when they defend the welfare state. By themselves, the experiments in participatory democracy were not hugely expensive, so they could be implemented by fiscal conservatives of either party. At a minimum, the War on Poverty provides a worthy point of departure for people who hope to involve more citizens in self-government.

p56
In the early 1970s, public-interest groups wielded considerable power in Washington, just as consumer advocates had influenced Congress around 1912. Nearly 100,000 households gave "at least $70 a year to three or more of the following: Common Cause, Public Citizen, ACLU, public television and public radio, and environmental lobbying groups." Senator Abraham Ribikoff (D-CT) observed, "instead of the big lobbies of the major corporations dominating the hearings process, you have had practically every committee in Congress according 'equal time' to public interest people." In 1969-72, David Vogel writes, "Congress enacted the most progressive tax bill in the postwar period, transferred the primary authority for the regulation of both pollution and occupational health and safety from the states to the federal government, established the Consumer Product

Safety Administration, and banned the advertising of cigarettes from radio and television." Most of these changes were advocated by "Nader's Raiders," the hundreds of volunteers and lawyers who staffed the Center for the Study of Responsive Law.

But the dominance of public-interest groups could not last for long. Vogel writes: "It took business about seven years to rediscover how to win in Washington." With their enormous advantages of wealth and discipline, they appropriated the tactics of the public-interest movement, including the "sponsorship of research studies to influence elite opinion, the attention to the media as a way of changing public attitudes, the development of techniques of grassroots organizing to mobilize supporters in congressional districts, and the use of ad hoc coalitions to maximize political influence." Industry lobbyists were as successful in 1978-81 as public-interest activists had been a decade before.

For every Common Cause or MALDEF, there were now scores of trade groups, professional associations, and corporate PACs, each with a large budget. By 198O, public-interest groups were able to attend only half of all federal regulatory proceedings, and when they were present, they constituted less than 10 percent of the witness lists. There is no evidence that they have gained influence since 198O, but their enemies have. Today, almost one-fourth of the 15 million businesses in America belong "to some kind of business, professional, or trade association." Five of the richest counties in America are Washington suburbs, in part because of all the legal, political, and technical experts who are employed by economic interests. Meanwhile, conservative think tanks have increased their budgets as much as tenfold, their research supported by large corporate grants.

p57
In the interest group liberal regime of 1940 or 196O, there was little deliberation about the common good; political strength and money usually carried the day. Nevertheless, workers had considerable influence, because the Democratic Party and labor unions were powerful negotiating blocs. By and large, rank-and-file members of these huge organizations trusted their leaders to tell them how to vote and when to strike. Although this trust could be misplaced, it was often salutary. To acquire political information is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive, so most people don't participate at all unless they are guided by trusted institutions.

One set of institutions, political parties, suffered when the campaign-reform and civil-service bills of the early 1970s struck at their main sources of power: fundraising and patronage. Meanwhile, unions lost members rapidly as a result of mechanization, foreign competition, and weak labor laws. Workers and middle-class consumers did gain the support of lobbies such as Common Cause and Public Citizen, but these groups had far less power than the old party structures. In 1994, just 2.8 percent of the population said that they were members of "some group like the League of Women Voters, or some other group which is interested in better government." By contrast, almost one-third of nonagricultural workers had belonged to unions in 1953, and 47 percent of voting-age Americans had identified themselves as Democrats. The rise of organizations like Public Citizen could hardly compensate for a 50-percent drop in union membership or a 25 percent decline in support for the Democratic Party. Given their low levels of public support, the new representatives of workers, citizens, and consumers did not have much clout.

Finally, the Progressive reforms of the 1970s failed because they did not complete the job that reformers set themselves: getting money out of politics. Congress exempted itself from the system of partial public financing that it imposed on presidential candidates. Also, private groups could establish political action committees, or PACs, that could collect money and pass it on to candidates. This meant that corporations could make legal campaign contributions for the first time since the Progressive Era, albeit using PACs as intermediaries. To make matters worse, the Supreme Court overturned much of FECA in its Buckley v Valeo decision of 1976. The Court found that campaign spending and political contributions were forms of expression that enjoyed First Amendment protection. Therefore, a limit on campaign spending would violate constitutional rights. Citizens also had the right, according to Buckley to spend unlimited sums on their own campaigns. However, the Court upheld two kinds of limits: on the amount that each person or PAC could contribute to any candidate, and on the total annual contributions by each citizen or PAC. The Court found that these provisions were justified, since they prevented corruption and the appearance of corruption without unduly reducing free expression.'

When the dust settled, presidential campaigns were covered by a stringent set of rules, but congressional candidates had to contend only with disclosure provisions and contribution limits: they could raise and spend as much as they wanted. Since special-interest money could no longer flow into presidential races, contributors formed PACs and turned their attention to congressional campaigns. Between 1974 and 1976, there was a five-fold increase in the number of business PACs. Unions also increased their contributions, but at a more modest rate: from $6.3 million to $8.3 million.

The new campaign-finance regime struck a final, fatal blow at political machines. Everything that party bosses had done to accumulate power had cost them money, which they had raised from special interests. With stringent limits on party fundraising, the earmarks of the old system quickly disappeared: gone were most of the old smoky back rooms, party hacks, ward heelers, powerful partisan clubs, and slush funds. In 1950, city bosses had hand-picked congressmen, and national party leaders had chosen their presidential nominees. By l990, there were hardly any bosses left, and party chairs were figureheads. However, candidates could still raise money from private sources and spend it in the marketplace. As a result, the traditional cast of political characters was soon replaced by a new one: PAC directors, political consultants, independent pollsters, fundraising experts, and incumbent politicians with huge personal war chests.

I will return to a detailed critique of the new system in chapter 4, but its unsavory features are not hard to spot. Above all, money still undermined the basic principle of fairness. Organized workers and corporations both wielded substantial influence through their PACs. In 1974, Ben Albert, an AFL-CIO public relations director, said: "we are having no problem with the law. We function very comfortably with it." However, consumers, tenants, and patients had no PACs, so they had very little clout compared to manufacturers, landlords, and hospitals. The poor and unemployed certainly had no way to make large campaign contributions. Finally, rich individuals, unlike unionized workers, could make personal contributions to supplement business PAC money.

Progressives, faced with this situation, would have demanded basic reform, aimed at replacing all large private contributions with small donations and public matching funds. However, the Watergate Babies had learned to thrive under the new system. They enjoyed reelection rates of close to 100 percent, in part because of a huge advantage in fundraising. Starting in the early 1980s, they became the chief defenders of the status quo. Led by Representative Tony Coehlo (D-CA), the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, House Democrats approached business with the following argument. They pointed out that they were the majority party, having controlled the House for all but a few of the past fifty years. Therefore, business was wasting its money giving to Republicans. Business PACs would be foolish not to contribute to Democrats as a way of increasing their access, goodwill, and influence. The PACs complied, and money gradually eroded the lines of ideological demarcation, precluding real debate about many economic issues. As Robert Reich wrote before he became secretary of labor:

The Democrats ... lost their identity not because Americans became more respectful of wealth and power or more convinced trickle-down economics would actually work (polls show widespread opposition to capital gains breaks for the rich), but because Democrats became dependent on the rich to finance their campaigns.... It Is difficult to represent the little fellow when the big fellow pays the tab.... Democrats have come to sound like Republicans because they rely on the same funders to make the same contacts as the GOP.

To make matters worse, after 1984 private money returned to presidential campaigns with a vengeance, thanks to both parties' exploitation of a loophole in FECA. Starting in 1976, general-election candidates who received public funding were supposed to accept no private money at all. But the Federal Election Commission ruled that individuals and PACs could contribute to parties, which could spend their money on generic, "party-building" activities that would benefit their candidates. By the mid-nineties, this so-called soft money, laundered through party organizations, flowed at the rate of hundreds of millions of dollars in every election cycle.

p61
... congressional Democrats resisted reform, clinging to their privileges, and the Clinton administration failed to challenge them. The administration refused to disclose the size of the intelligence budget and delayed releasing classified documents. Campaign-finance reform, lobby regulation, and new ethics rules all died in Congress. Clinton's first chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), David Wilhelm, tried to raise money in a populist fashion, soliciting small donations from a wide base. He raised $9 million in contributions of less than $200 each, but the fundraising campaign cost the committee $8 million. Shaken by the Democrats' defeat in the 1994 House elections and the "Harry and Louise" commercials that had helped to sink his health-reform bill, Clinton listened to his consultant, Dick Morris. Morris planned a massive polling and broadcast campaign, which would cost the DNC $1.5 million every week. But the party had almost no funds. Top administration officials scrambled to raise money, using disreputable intermediaries, offering nights in the Lincoln Bedroom, and accepting illegal contributions from foreign donors.

In 1994, the Democrats finally lost control of the House, not because they had failed to pass political reform, but because they had achieved little meaningful change of any kind. This failure, in turn, resulted from the sordid political system that congressional Democrats had permitted to flourish. Moreover, Republicans successfully portrayed the Democratic majority as corrupt, mostly by dwelling on relatively trivial issues such as the House Bank scandal. By refusing to change their ways, the Democrats left the Republican charges unanswered. Turnout among core Democratic constituencies was extremely low in 1994, because poor people and minorities saw nothing worth defending in Washington. However wealthy people voted in unprecedentedly high numbers, perhaps fearful of the I Democrats' health agenda. The result was a stunning victory for Representative Newt Gingrich and his House Republican acolytes

p63
... Republicans began a wholesale transfer of federal programs to the states. Most prominently, they replaced most federal welfare entitlements with block grants. They had economic motivations for these changes, which William Kristol described candidly. Block grants, he explained, were not the ultimate goal, since they might make "state and local governments . . . ever more dependent extensions of the federal octopus." Instead, conservatives wanted "real federalism, understood as part of a general program of relimiting government." This meant transferring power from the states to private citizens and corporations, once the federal government had "devolved" its authority to the states.

Thus, for conservatives, devolution was not just a way to reorganize government functions, shifting them from one level to another in the name of efficiency or accountability. It was rather a tactic in their war against the state. For fifty years, voters had supported a large federal government that, according to Kristol, had become self-perpetuating and "pathological." Conservative candidates had often won national elections, but they seemed unable to destroy this beast. In fact, an assertive national government had remained broadly popular: for example, voters revolted whenever politicians talked of trimming Medicare and Social Security. But Kristol wanted to kill the welfare state once and for all by changing the rules of politics. Indeed, this was his justification for the whole Republican reform agenda, including "a balanced budget amendment, term limits, tax and spending limitation at several levels of government, . . . and the privatization of government functions.''

But why would devolution undermine the welfare state? Why wouldn't each state and locality ultimately increase its taxes to make up for reduced federal aid? In short, why would giving power to the states produce the laissez-faire economic policy beloved of conservatives? Kristol argued that the federal government was unpopular but entrenched-that liberals won reelection only because powerful interest groups supported them. If the federal system were destroyed, no new welfare state would arise to replace it. This argument ignored the deep and abiding popularity of middle-class entitlements. But Kristol did not state another, more plausible argument. The smaller the unit of government, the less power it has to distribute wealth from rich to poor. Many affluent citizens already live across jurisdictional lines from the people who need government services the most. Those who still reside in states with large poor populations and traditions of social welfare would be free to move away if federal taxes dropped and states tried to pick up the burden. It is no accident that state income taxes are much less progressive than the federal system; indeed, the poorest fifth of the population pays 12.5 percent of their income in state and local taxes, whereas the richest percentile pays only 7.9 percent.

Thus there were conservative economic reasons to favor devolution. But transferring power to the states also has a Progressive rationale. State governments, some people believe, are "closer to the people." State legislators represent smaller districts than federal legislators; state capitals are physically closer than Washington; and state governments are smaller and easier to understand than the federal bureaucracy. Therefore, a welfare program administered by the states might be more accountable than the federal program it replaced. On the other hand, the federal government undergoes much more scrutiny than state governments do. The Washington press corps far outnumbers the reporters in any state capital. Perhaps, as power flows to the states, they will receive more critical attention, but it is inherently difficult to keep track of fifty separate governments. National television cannot begin to do the job; neither can news magazines or the New York Times. Thus it is by no means certain that devolution to state governments will produce more accountable politics. What is certain is that poor areas will receive less aid from wealthy ones.

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