ne of our central political myths is that democratic governments have no interests of their own, but merely respond as best they can to the political pressures brought to bear upon them.
We will never have truly accountable government until we disabuse ourselves of this idea. Not only the incumbent politicians and office holders (who, being human, have selfish interests like the rest of us), but the organizations of a government and the institution as such all pursue a variety of objectives with no electoral mandate.
Governments also spend formidable amounts of public money to conjure a mandate for policies and programs, desired by themselves, for which there may or may not be a spontaneous, democratic demand. An example might be the "war on drugs" policy recently savaged in the Citizen
It is fairly clear by now that this policy is counterproductive in just the same ways and for just the same reasons that the prohibition of alcoholic beverages was counterproductive in the twenties. Its main result is to swell the prison and criminal population, run up the street price, nurture a vast illegal industry and make the people hanging on to a piece of the action, "of market share", in this business exceedingly rich.
Nonetheless, I doubt we can expect repeal of these futile laws any time soon. From politicians to police, too many agents and agencies of government have a stake in leaving them in place. No one is prepared to admit that substance abuse is a social issue, beyond the reach of policy.
The lust of bureaucracies to expand and bureaucratize was pointed out forty years ago by C. Northcote Parkinson. The need of government as a whole to be seen to be doing things is less well understood. It must interfere in people's affairs in order to justify its interference. Somehow, it must collect the means to mount the show that seems to justify its own existence.
Therefore, it must tax to the limit of the public's endurance, to the pointwhere further tax increases will actually decrease its revenues. It must find loot it can distribute in patronage, to buy the loyalties that it needs (of those fundamentally loyal to no one but themselves) without which it cannot keep itself in power. It must make itself seem necessary to everything so that no will notice how little positive power it actually has.
By positive power I mean the power to solve real problems, to make something better than it had been. Governments actually have very little of this. But, from the perspective of government as we know it, the dearth of power to effect positive changes is not a serious problem. In fact, the fundamental inability of government actually to help matters confers a needed absolution.
Those who govern are sustained, in office and in their lives, by an acceptance of their fundamental powerlessness. They habitually console themselves by remembering that politics is the art of the "possible" and then reminding themselves of just how little is possible. As politicians seek "photo ops", opportunities to look good in public, so government as a whole is more concerned to look good than actually to do good. Policy itself is something of a "photo op."
But please do not understand this piece as an attack on government. I am not an anarchist. In part, because of the actions and inactions of governments in the past, but from many other causes as well, the world today faces several possible disasters that will never be averted, any number of lethal quarrels that will never be contained and soothed, without more and better government than we have ever seen; more honest, competent, truly public-spirited government than we have any idea at present how to install and run.
This leaves me with little enthusiasm for the coming election, but I am not entirely without hope. "Men and nations have been known to behave wisely," Abba Eban once observed, "after they have exhausted all the alternatives."