By Peter SchragGov. Arnold Schwarzenegger likes to complain about the pernicious influence of “the special interests” (almost always with the definite article). If you parse the context carefully, he seems mostly to mean public employee unions – the teachers, the prison guards, maybe the nurses and firefighters who’ve beaten him in some costly ballot fights and wag a lot of tails in the legislature.
But of course, the special interests are not just the public sector unions. It’s hardly a secret that they also include a long list of other people and groups some of whom are among the governor’s best friends and biggest backers.
Among them: energy companies and utilities, banks, insurance interests, home builders and the real estate developers, the medical industry, retailers, the liquor industry, big agriculture, Silicon Valley, the movie industry, builders and contractors and hundreds of professional, trade and commercial associations, the political parties, and the Chamber of Commerce, all advocating for their programs and budgets and/or against regulation of their activities.
Put them all together and, one way or another, they represent almost everybody in the state several times over. Yet even including them all, the governor would still be only half right. “Special interests” aren’t the largest cause of the state’s problems.
What’s missing in this picture is the public interest. In California, particularly, who speaks for the public interest? How many Californians these days are even aware that there is – or should be – such a thing? At least since the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, Californians – and most other Americans as well – have become increasingly wedded to a market ideology rather than the communitarian ethic generated in World War II that continued to drive the state through the generation following.
Madison believed that in checking one another, no “faction” would ever become dominant. But as we’ve also learned in California, the mutual checking often means that while no one prevails, nothing gets done.