If you’ve read this blog at all, you’ve noted my disdain for what I call the “SkyBox” political culture we’ve created.
Moxie saw a taste of it Tuesday night, at the victory party for Gray Davis:

Davis’ speech was really very gracious and all the poor homeless folks they let into the hotel really seemed to enjoy the balloon drop and ice sculptures.
But really — while I had a good time — I wasn’t overly impressed.
What *would* have impressed me is if the Dems had said, “oh no….we’ll forego the 15 ice sculptures of the California bear.”
One would have been more than enough to satiate the public’s craving for an out-of-style yet opulent party decoration. Seeing more than a few on every floor of the Democratic HQ’s really bothered me. I would have been very impressed indeed had Gray Davis said, “Take that money and donate it to a social service. If we can’t find one of those have your assistants round up some homeless guys. Take them for dinner at Sizzler and put ’em up at a Holiday Inn for a night. We’re for the poor after all.”
And that’s what struck me most.

My first job out of grad school was as a legislative aide in Sacramento. It was just what I thought I wanted to do, and to be sure I learned a lot and actually got to do some cool stuff. There are several laws in CA that are there because I thought them up and made them happen.
I’d pretty much planned on politics as a career through most of college; I speak well, people seem to like me, and I desperately wanted to make the world a better place.
Oh, and I wanted to have my name written on that better place as well.
Working in politics was exhilarating. Powerful people would take my call … me, a young, inexperienced kid right out of grad school. I got to sit in front of legislative committees and argue with older, powerful people, and sometimes win.
And I was immersed in a community of people just like me. I had a team, even if we were sometimes rivals and even opponents.
And I could have stayed there in all the intervening time, going from administration to administration, from legislator to legislator, occasionally stepping out to work in a think tank or lobbying firm, and maybe, if I was good at it and played my card right, stepped up and ran for office myself.
And many of my peers did just that.
Thomas Kuhn wrote a groundbreaking book a number of years ago…The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in which he examined the sociology of science; the ways in which ideas propagate as groups within the scientific community gain prestige and power.
What we need to do is to look at politics and policy in a similar light; a number of books have, and I’ll list some titles (and would be interested in seeing more). But here’s the short, Armed Liberal version:
Politics in the U.S. has always been interest-group driven. The power of the interest groups was checked, in part by the inefficiency and limited scope of government, which made very few fights worth taking on, and the cost of taking those fight on relatively high. For the most part, rational investors looked elsewhere.
But in the post-WW2 world, we began to see the scope of government expand; first in the military sector, and then in infrastructure, and then in healthcare, and so on until regulation began to interpenetrate the economy pervasively.
That made investment in government extremely profitable, and legal, in that instead of influencing procurement decisions (obviously illegal), businesses could profit by influencing policy and regulation.
The increasing complexity of laws, policies, and regulations meant that you needed a group of people who knew them and who could navigate the process of creating and interpreting them. They became professionals, and more so began to see themselves as professionals.
Socially, they became increasingly isolated, as professionals often do, because the work is involving and demanding and to a large extent social – it demands interaction with others, so your social and professional lives begin to blend and become indistinguishable.
And suddenly we have a political class, often self-selected as college students or younger, who have structured their entire adult lives around the demands of this system and their hopes to succeed on its terms.
Please note that what I’m describing is ‘content-neutral’; it applies to Rockefeller Republicans, Blue Dog Democrats, and everyone in between. The investments may be made by individuals…Howard Hughes was a huge investor in this sphere, and profited from it…or by corporations, here ADM is a good current example…or by labor unions or environmental groups.
But you need to think of our government as investor-driven, and management-driven. Obviously, we the customers can force change. But while our power is great, it’s channelled by the managers and investors, who…among other things…manage us by choosing who we get to vote for.
I’ll add more later today, in two broad areas:
So what’s the problem with this?
So what can we do about it?