What might The Reader make of John B. Judis as thinker/writer? Below is a review of his ‘The Paradox of American Democracy: Elites, Special Interests, and the Betrayal of Public Trust’
For someone to assert today, as John Judis does in The Paradox of American Democracy, that there actually is a noble American tradition of stewardship of the public interest that can be taken at face value is arresting. Judis has been associated for years with The New Republic, and an earlier book of his, Grand Illusion: Critics and Champions of the American Century (1992), had at its center one of the magazine’s founders, Herbert Croly (also the author of the Progressive Era manifesto The Promise of American Life). In his new book Judis argues for a revival of Croly’s view that a powerful federal government should tame the excess of unbridled capitalism.
In Judis’s retelling of American history, more than a century has passed since we abandoned the idea that we could live in an innocent world without government. The notion of “big government” as a late-twentieth-century development at odds with the American tradition is, he says, a distortion by business and the Republican Party. The truth is that at the end of the nineteenth century, as the United States developed a national industrial economy, and as the previously mighty political parties faded, business corporations and their lobbyists in Washington began to dominate the political system, and the public began to look to government to curb their power. Fortunately, Judis says, a major new element appeared to help counterbalance the power of business: “elite” organizations.
Judis traces the formation, the rise, and the fall from influence of this elite. He has constructed a highly detailed and unfamiliar history of public policy research organizations, such as the Institute of Governmental Research (now the Brookings Institution), the American Association for Labor Legislation, the National Civic Association, the Twentieth Century Fund (now the Century Fund, the underwriter of Skocpol’s book), the Russell Sage Foundation, the Committee for Economic Development, and the Ford Foundation, among others, and discusses the effect they have had on government policies like the Social Security Act, the Wagner Act, and the establishment of the Rural Electrification Administration.
The difficulty with Judis’s schema, and it is considerable, is that his concept of an “elite” does not yield to precise definition. In Judis’s view, the qualities of an elite are public-spiritedness, intellectual honesty, and a commitment to rising above personal interest. In the past, he writes,
The elites and elite policy groups advocated the development of policy based on fact and knowledge. They nourished public trust in government by defending and explaining complex decisions that the ordinary voter did not have time to study. And they have carried forward a tradition of disinterested public service against the venality and corruption that interest groups have often encouraged in public life.
But there is no sure test of whether a person or an organization is a member of this elite. Judis’s definition would seem to be roughly similar to that of what people have been calling, since the late 1950s, “the Establishment,” but that term doesn’t have a precise definition either. If there is such a coherent group, within it there is both more internal disagreement about policy and more personal ambition than Judis allows for.
His account of the history of American elites begins during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the Progressive Era, which came into being substantially because of the elite’s disapproval of the Gilded Age. Although Judis concentrates largely on research organizations, he also sees the hand of the elite in the creation of objective journalism and professional philanthropy, in faith in the truth and power of social science, in the Protestant Social Gospel, and in an internationalist foreign policy. One might say that any time a group of rich or influential people organizes in an effort to move the government in a more socially responsible direction, and presents itself as expert and nonideological, it seems to meet Judis’s defining test for an elite.
Although the elite is impossible to pin down, it is also impossible to present Judis’s argument without using his terminology. He says that every liberal period in the twentieth century has coincided with an elite influence on government. During the Theodore Roosevelt administration, pressure from the elite helped to create the early regulatory agencies like the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission. In the Twenties the influence of the elite faded and pure business-lobbying groups like the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce rose in its place, but during the New Deal the elite came back and helped to bring about legislation that created the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Social Security system, and stronger labor unions.
The early harbingers of the decline in the power of the elite, Judis tells us, were the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 and the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947—the former empowering business to challenge government’s regulatory authority, the latter enormously strengthening the hand of employers in their competition with labor—both of which effectively diminished the mediating role that the elite should play. But the elite’s power, according to Judis, didn’t fully break down for a couple of decades. During the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, foreign policy was controlled by patrician “wise men” and in domestic policy the Republicans accepted the major tenets of the New Deal—Judis reminds us that Eisenhower pushed through major increases in the minimum wage and Social Security. John F. Kennedy was the grandson of an ethnic political boss who had been elaborately socialized into the elite. In a speech Kennedy stated one part of the elite’s creed: “The fact of the matter is that most of the problems…that we now face, are technical problems, are administrative problems.” As late as the 1964 presidential election, elite influence was strong enough to generate overwhelming support in the business world for Lyndon Johnson’s presidential campaign.
Judis’s admiration for the presence of an elite in political life is conditional on its adhering to his kind of politics—government as a countervailing force to business. Therefore he sees the late Sixties and Seventies as having weakened the elite, because many elite organizations embraced liberal causes that he would consider secondary, such as affirmative action and improving conditions in the inner-city ghettos. He says, for example, that the appointment of Franklin Thomas as head of the Ford Foundation in 1979 meant that “business had won its decade-long struggle to emasculate the Ford Foundation.”
To Judis (perhaps more than to his readers) there is a razor-sharp distinction between elite organizations that seek to influence public policy and business organizations that function in similar ways. In the Seventies, while the former were fading, the latter were rising. The villain of Judis’s book is Irving Kristol, who, he thinks, was responsible more than anyone else for persuading business to adopt the methods of elite organizations, such as publishing serious journals and creating think tanks—but to promote, in the guise of public service, a pure lobbying agenda whose central goals are tax cuts and a reduction in the federal regulation of business. New conservative institutions in Washington like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation gained power, and so did old-fashioned lobbyists. The conservatives successfully purveyed the ahistorical idea that “big government” is antithetical to the American tradition.
It is amazing how dramatically American attitudes about government and business have changed in a generation. In one poll result Judis quotes, 76 percent of Americans in 1964 said they could “trust the government in Washington to do what is right,” while in 1992 only 29 percent did. The percentage of Americans who agreed with the statement “the best government is the government that governs least” went from 32 in 1974 to 59 in 1981. The percentage of college freshmen who said that being “very well-off financially” was one of their highest goals went from 41 in 1968 to 76 in 1987. Judis, who is particularly interested in the struggle between business lobbyists and elite organizations in Washington, implies that much of the national turn to the right can be attributed to the efforts of Washington lobbyists for business and of their Op-Ed and think-tank allies. Surely it isn’t that simple, and there was some element of public opinion moving in a more conservative direction on its own, without manipulation by business. Judis exaggerates the extent to which “K Street,” Washington’s rue des lobbyistes, runs the country.
It may be useful to regard Judis’s notion of the elite less as a way of explaining the course of American history and more as a description of the self-consciousness of some Washington liberals and of their political style. Liberal elite politics entails stating an overall commitment—no doubt sincerely felt—to the public good, which is defined as something apart from ideology or self-interest, and then pursuing specific goals privately, in the company of other experts. Judis’s history shows how, over the past hundred years, some people with these convictions have, indeed, often had an effect on federal policies—for just one of many possible examples, the role Paul Hoffman of the Committee on Economic Development played in the passage of the liberal Employment Act of 1946. But it is a big leap from there to the position Judis implies at the end, that a liberal resurgence now would require a newly empowered elite. The group is too diffuse and it lacks independent power, and anyway, there is no guarantee that it would take the positions Judis would like it to.
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Reader, I have repeated the paragraphs of the above long quotation of Nicholas Lemann review, my apologies! I’ll repeat that first paragraph:
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For someone to assert today, as John Judis does in The Paradox of American Democracy, that there actually is a noble American tradition of stewardship of the public interest that can be taken at face value is arresting. Judis has been associated for years with The New Republic, and an earlier book of his, Grand Illusion: Critics and Champions of the American Century (1992), had at its center one of the magazine’s founders, Herbert Croly (also the author of the Progressive Era manifesto The Promise of American Life). In his new book Judis argues for a revival of Croly’s view that a powerful federal government should tame the excess of unbridled capitalism
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Perhaps Mr. Judas, at age 82 , considers himself a part of an ‘elite of the present’? enough so that he feels that this is an acceptable introduction, to his latest intervention/corrective!
As still another war rages between Hamas in Gaza and Israel, a debate has revived between critics and defenders of Israel about whether Israel is a “settler-colonial state” created by émigrés over the objection of the native inhabitants. The debate has implications for the way people view Hamas’s October 7 attacks against Israelis, but it is also relevant to understanding what the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is really about and how it should or can be resolved.
Those who describe Israel as a settler-colonial state contend that Jews are interlopers in what was Ottoman and British Palestine; they think the Hamas attack and Israeli reprisals have to be understood in that “context.” As a long-term solution to the conflict, they advocate the “decolonization” of Israel. At the extreme, this could mean a Palestinian-dominated or even Islamic state (buttressed by the right of all refugees to return). But most Americans who voice the slogan “free Palestine from the river to the sea,” including Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, advocate a secular democratic or binational state, in which Jews and Palestinians would have equal rights. In either case, Israel would no longer be “the nation state of the Jewish people,” as Israel’s Knesset decreed in 2018.
The opposing position, which is commonly held by many pro-Israel organizations, including AIPAC, the American Jewish Committee, and the Anti-Defamation League, as well as by many liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, is that Israel is definitely not a settler-colonial state but is instead the reincarnation of the ancient home of the Jewish people. The pro-Israel groups insist that Israel’s Jews are entitled to live in a Jewish state by virtue of their heritage and of the antisemitic violence they endured in Europe, culminating in the Holocaust. At one extreme, Israel’s revisionist and national religious parties, and some sympathetic Republicans in the United States, contend that this state should stretch from “the river to the sea.” But most American liberals, while vehemently rejecting decolonization, favor a “two-state” solution in which a Palestinian state, composed of the West Bank, would adjoin Israel.
My contention is that both sides of this debate, which pit, roughly speaking, anti-Zionists against pro-Zionists, are wrong. The opposing stances obscure the nature of the conflict and the possibility of its resolution. My argument, based on the research I conducted in writing my 2014 book, Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, is that Israel was founded as a settler-colonial state but that this indisputable fact about its origin doesn’t justify either particular terrorist attacks or what is called “decolonization.” The ideal solution to the conflict would be two adjoining states, but for the foreseeable future, no solution of this kind is in sight.
That ‘elite of the present’ can only chatter in the patois of self-congratulation, framed in the ersatz knowledge of the technocrat!
Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer.
'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
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