Who will protect the public interest?

By W.W. | IOWA CITY

EZRA KLEIN of the Washington Postsees labour's loss in Wisconsin as part of long-term trend in the erosion of union power, and is pessimistic about the possibility of a turnaround. Which raises a question:

[I]f you take labor's decline as a given, then another question presents itself: How do you limit the resulting corporate power over elections and legislators? And that's much more possible, even in a post-Citizens United world. There's legislation, like the Fair Elections Now Act, that could publicly finance elections. There's legislation, like the DISCLOSE Act, that could force so much transparency on corporate spending that it ceases to be an attractive option.

... [Tuesday] night showed that Democrats aren't going to get very far simply disputing Republican claims on this point. Rather, they should argue that all interest groups have too much political power, and unite behind legislation that would weaken them.

Kevin Drum sees a hitch in Mr Klein's suggestion:

Ezra himself points out the problem with this idea: as labor gets ever weaker and corporations get ever stronger, "Democrats will have to be that much more solicitous of business demands in order to keep from being spent into oblivion." So where does the backing come from to pass legislation that would weaken corporate interests? This is perhaps the big political/institutional question of the next couple of decades: what replaces labor as a broad-based, nationwide countervailing force against the power of business? The answer, unfortunately, remains elusive.

Matthew Yglesias intervenes to point out that corporate interests are not monolithic:

As the great metaphysician Mitt Romney put it, corporations are people and concrete political controversies often pit the interests of entire firms or sectors against those of others. This reality is somewhat obscured from view precisely by the fact that labor unions are so weak in the American private sector. But if there were a labor union representing the majority of rank-and-file insurance company workers, they'd have been leading the charge against the public option. The United Mine Workers stand up for the interests of mine workers versus mine owners, but also for the interests of the mining industry versus the broader public interest in preventing the coal industry from sapping the atmosphere's ability to absorb CO2 emissions.

I think the practical issue here is a very real, but substantially narrower one. Labor unions are a clear and consistent voice for progressive taxation and public services against high-income individuals' strong interest in paying less taxes.

That's a big deal. But the practical dynamics of countervailing forces in American politics are much more likely to pit sector against sector than "corporate interests" against labor.

Mr Yglesias is correct. I would add a few considerations.

First, in seeking to check the malign influence of corporations, it may be a mistake to focus too much on elections. Corporations often do their dirtiest, anti-competitive, rent-seeking work through the regulatory process. The manner in which corporations have influence on regulatory bodies, whether legislative or bureaucratic, may be entirely unaffected by campaign-finance reforms of the sort Mr Klein envisions. For example, publicly-financed elections won't bolt the revolving doors through which personnel from the regulatory agencies and the corporations they regulate pass back and forth.

Second, besides overlooking the diversity and rivalry of corporate and union interests, picturing politics as a battle between the opposing forces of big business and big labour badly overlooks the role of the beliefs and interests of ordinary voters. At its most cartoonish, the progressive vision conceives of voters as mere vehicles of class interest, or as dupes easily gulled by pernicious corporate propaganda that either is or is not counteracted by corrective anti-corporate propaganda. I'll just say that the truth is rather trickier than that, and that the determinants of public opinion are varied and complex. Our personal convictions and preferences are fixed at the convoluted intersection of native personality, ambient culture, level of education, faith, family structure, habits of media consumption, relations to the means of production, etc. Whatever the forces behind public opinion, public opinion matters, and it matters a lot. Policy is quite responsive to public opinion in democracies. If enough of us come to believe that we're exploited or harmed by this or that corporate interest, we can band together and exercise our democratic prerogatives to do something about it. Where does the backing come from to pass legislation that would weaken corporate interests? Well, where does the backing come from to pass legislation establishing same-sex marriage, or legislation banning late-term abortion? From the many millions of people who believe in it.

Last, I think it's important to acknowledge that efforts such as those in Wisconsin to weaken the power of public-sector unions is animated in no small part by the drive to improve democratic government by making it less sclerotic and more responsive. Reihan Salam points us to a revealing passage from a book by Mitch Daniels, the Republican governor of Indiana who abolished collective-bargaining for public-sector workers in his state:

In Indiana our actions were only secondarily about finances. It is true that the freedom to restructure departments, consolidate functions, and so on saved Hoosier taxpayers tons of money. But the principal motive, and equally important gains, came in the transformation of state services. There simply was no way we could have revolutionized our Bureau of Motor Vehicles (more on this later), our state parks, our prison system, or so many other services if we had been hogtied by the old union agreement.

Mr Daniels goes on to explain how limiting the power of public-sector unions allowed his government to transform an inexcusably ineffective child-welfare system into something much, much better:

Fixing the department required making thousands of organizational, process, and personnel changes. Hundreds of workers either were reassigned or, in some cases, dismissed for poor performance. The agency of 2011 looks totally different, and operates in a totally different way from its predecessor. If every one of these steps had required union consultation or signoff, as the old agreement provided, we would still be trying to take some of the earliest actions.

It seems to me quite misleading to characterise this sort of reform as having anything at all to do with weakening checks on corporate interests. Union and public interests can conflict, just as corporate and public interests can conflict. Checking union interests can promote the public interest in much the same way checking corporate interests can. To the extent that the Democratic Party is beholden to public-sector unions, it is constrained to promoting policies and reforms not inconsistent with the unions' interests in preserving the often dysfunctional and unsustainable status quo. There's a good reason you don't hear many Democrats complaining about having their hands so tightly tied, but many of them nevertheless realise that, as Walter Russell Mead puts it, "the power of public sector unions among Democrats is a power that inhibits Democrats from putting forward innovative, future-facing ideas (about schools, health care, and so on) and keeps them focused firmly on the defense of the past." Reducing that power frees Democrats to get really serious about making sure government delivers on its promises.