A Government in Disarray Drifting Toward Accidents

DURHAM, N.C. — Six years into the Reagan Administration, a scandal at the top wakes the country to what has been going on since day one of this presidency. The revelation that we have a juvenile government in Washington naturally arouses righteous indignation. But the moralistic solution--throw the rascals out--falls short of what must be done. If the United States is to recover from the collapse of public trust at home and abroad, we had better face the facts and restore reason to politics.

The facts are harsh. The odds of a last world war, triggered by accident or design, escalate daily. The restless Third World bangs against the bars of their debtors prison. The environment degenerates from Mother Nature into Typhoid Mary. Human rights violations continue to spread throughout the world.

These life and death challenges confront us at a time when the position of the United States in world politics is radically weakened. Whatever our solutions, they will have to be implemented by the most adroit and insistent diplomacy, for we can no longer tell even our allies what to do.

Economically, our relative position in world trade has plummeted; we have to haggle over cars and oil and textiles with nations we used to think of as our dependents. They are beating us, as the trade deficit shows. Financially, we are more and more encumbered with debt to foreigners. Diplomatically, we are one among many nations thrashing around to meet whatever crises arise, such as famine, terrorism, drug hustling, illegal immigration and the like. Our mammoth budget deficit saps our international power and, despite our sum total affluence, more than 30 million Americans live in poverty. Thus we face not only the challenge of thinking up solutions but the harder one of putting them into effect. Intellectually and politically, we should be concentrating our nation’s best brains and leading talents on these tough issues.

There is one and only one instrument plausibly capable of addressing these problems: the government of the United States. Yet seldom has that bundle of institutions been in such disarray as it is today. The Congress is atomized--a mammoth collection of committees whose members occasionally meet in the same building. The original constitutional role of the Congress was clear enough: to debate the major issues confronting the republic and to pass laws to solve them. But Congress does not debate. What happens on the floor in plenary sessions is not persuasive discussion among attentive representatives, with a view to developing legal solutions. Such deliberation as does take place goes on in increasingly specialized committees, a process of analytic pluralism which renders synthesis virtually impossible. The Congress cannot even rationally write and pass a budget, to fulfill its bedrock function of determining who pays for what. Whatever utility the Congress may have as a prep school for lobbyists, a breeding ground for presidential candidates, or a funder of international travel, it is no parliament. The political parties in Congress have not succeeded in collecting members for unified action or for bridging the gap between Congress and the people. In other words, the core institution of American democracy, the assembly of representatives elected to deliberate rationally and act decisively for the general welfare, does none of the above. What Congress does manage to produce in the way of law does not get treated as law by the rest of the government. The Congress has repeatedly passed laws which the bureaucracy then ignores or distorts. Money appropriated is rechanneled or impounded. Programs for human rights, civil rights, welfare and other purposes are put in the hands of bureaucratic chieftains adamantly opposed to the laws they are supposed to implement. The attorney general does not believe Supreme Court decisions are determinative. He is the leader of opposition to civil liberties in the United States.

The chief justice, presiding over a court whose split votes have become normal, seems to believe that rights are secondary to the will of majorities. The President uses the veto, meant as an exceptional measure, as a normal one, and encourages violations of the law against aid to Central American revolutionaries by private U.S. paramilitary forces. Thus confidence that solutions arrived at and agreed upon by Congress will be translated from potential law to actual law is washed away.

The presidency--the crucial action point for addressing international problems--is currently in deeper disarray than the Congress. Heavily dependent on the character of the incumbent, that office is occupied by a personality who, like his predecessors William Howard Taft and Warren G. Harding, is an other-directed optimist, an easy-going smiler whose primary orientation is compliance with the collection of personalities who happen to be around him. That hypothesis is confirmed by the shifts in Reagan policies traceable to shifts in the composition of the group of top-level advisers who interact with him. The alternative hypothesis, that Reagan would turn out to be a rigid ideologue, is refuted in every major policy area from taxes to budget balancing, from agriculture to foreign policy and arms control. From the start, the character-rooted danger of a President of the Reagan type has been a drifting into accident--impulsive, irrational, immediate mistakes--rather than the obsessiveness of a Richard M. Nixon or Lyndon B. Johnson or the withdrawal of a Calvin Coolidge or Dwight D. Eisenhower. Now that this President, who feeds so heavily on approval, is a lame duck (thanks to the idiocy of the two-term limit) with no election in front of him, the danger of accident rises. No longer is he motivated to balance actions so as to win votes in an election. As his top assistants look for other jobs, he has only the judgment of “history” to look to, which in this case will reinforce his histrionic inclination. Conceivably, control of both houses of Congress by the other party will help check the accident-prone presidency, at least preventing a reprise of the death of 241 American Marines in Beirut. His erratic performance before, during, and after the Iceland meeting with Mikhail S. Gorbachev underlines the nature of the risk involved. The current Iran crisis moves matters to new urgency.

The first national priority for the remainder of the Reagan Administration, then, should be disaster-avoidance. The appropriate congressional committees should keep a close and steady eye on what White House Chief of Staff Donald T. Regan and company do, or what those who replace them are urging on this directable President.

But if we are ever to address seriously the major problems confronting the United States, we must bring reason back into American political life. Beyond a failure to deal in adult fashion with crucial issues, the greatest harm of the Reagan years has been the deterioration of public discourse. Aided by the irresponsible amnesiac titillations of television news, this President has undercut the tradition of common-sense politics as has no other President before him. Coming to power at a time when the public was tired of thinking and worrying about politics, Reagan played to the current political motive: the desire to sit back and watch instead of taking on a responsible part. He transformed an electorate into an audience.

From the start, he demonstrated disregard for facts, reasserting what he knew to be incorrect, casually brushing aside factual errors regarding matters of utmost political significance. Reagan invited the American public to join him in a mass theatrical experience, to suspend healthy skepticism and empiricism. Helped by a new generation of media managers, Reagan the candidate and Reagan the President made it nearly impossible for curious voters to reach past the posturing to the actualities. Reagan represents with near perfection a recurrent psychological perversion of democracy: the reduction of consent to sentiment.

Why do so many (by no means all) Americans like the man? Even as his job rating nose dives, his personal popularity holds roughly steady. A reasonable explanation is that the affection Americans feel for Reagan is analogous to the affection the English give their queen. Royal sentiment has little to do with public policy. People who like Reagan quite often have no use for, or even knowledge of, the changing policies he advocates. And as 1986 makes clear, the public does not go for candidates Reagan goes for, even if he keeps coming to town to hold their hands. This monarchical allegiance to the President goes back at least to Eisenhower and was born again in the Carter presidency, when people liked the President as a person but not what he was doing. To suppose that Reagan’s blessing of George Bush in 1988 will sell better than Eisenhower’s blessing (in public at least) of Nixon in 1960, is unrealistic. Reagan’s failure to get Americans engaged in real political activity--such as voting--demonstrates that he is not popular as a leader of the people into politics but as a player who takes his audience out of politics into the comforting state of fantasy, where anything goes.

It may well be that public disillusionment with Reagan as President will gather massive emotional force--the resentment of the betrayed enthusiast. But butchering the individual is neither necessary nor sufficient to turn the government around. So far, at least, the evidence does not point to Reagan as a Nixon, a White House plotter of constitutional subversion, but rather to Reagan as Harding, a manipulable rhetorician whose media persona resonates with temporarily popular sentiment. Now that he is no longer a candidate, his character is appropriately not the object of political calculation but of emergency control, especially by responsible congressional leadership which must rise to this sorry occasion.

It is impossible to organize personality out of the presidency. Therefore today’s presidential crisis--like so many previous ones--ought to concentrate national attention on the criteria for choosing the next President. On the other hand, it is impossible for congressional personalities, however decent and effective, to make rational policy through Congress’ shredded fragments. Minus a President with the character, skill, and vision to make that job work and a Congress organized to reason together, no one should be surprised to find, next time around, yet another collapse of trust in the government George Washington set in motion.