I have been reading or re-reading fine scholarly books about the way citizens relate to their national government.* These books provide persuasive empirical evidence, but I don’t think any is as perceptive as Ward Just in his Washington novels, such as Echo House, Jack Gance, and City of Fear.

A common theme is the shift from Washington as the seat of government to the modern city of dealmakers and negotiators. Ward Just (who was the Washington Post‘s lead reporter in Vietnam) certainly does not regard the old Washington as unproblematically benign. It was a city of power, and the powerful sometimes lacked wisdom and ethics. Yet their job was to govern. Their titles, their powers, and their paychecks were federal. They made big decisions that were public, subject to popular approval or rejection. For instance–and this is my example, not Just’s–in a mere two years from 1963-4, Congress passed and the president signed the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 (launching the War on Poverty and creating Head Start, Job Corps, and many other programs), the Food Stamp Act (institutionalizing food stamps as a permanent federal welfare program), the Federal Transit Act (providing federal aid for mass transportation), the Library Services and Construction Act (offering federal aid for libraries), the Community Mental Health Centers Act (de-institutionalizing many mental health patients), the Clean Air Act (the first federal environmental law allowing citizens to sue polluters), the Wilderness Act (protecting nine million acres of federal land), the Equal Pay Act (addressing wage discrimination by sex), the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (ending de jure racial segregation in the United States), and the Tonkin Gulf Resolution (rapidly escalating the Vietnam War).

Some of those bills were good. Some were very bad. But all were landmark statutes, widely publicized, driven by national political leaders and large constituencies, consistent with general philosophies.

That whole style of governance soon ended. In 1997-8, 70 percent of the issues Congress considered went nowhere at all, and The Washington Post decried “the barrenness of the legislative record” at the end of the session.

But that did not mean that the government stopped governing. Washington still faced innumerable choices about which activities and programs to fund, purchase, permit, require, measure, ban, and punish. Those decisions were no longer made in major bills, widely publicized, debated on the floor of Congress, and signed or vetoed by Presidents. Instead, the decisions were negotiated behind the scenes by people in and (mainly) outside the government. “Governance” now meant the regulations issued by administrative agencies, the determinations of administrative law judges, the outcomes of lawsuits against federal agencies, the appropriations bills, riders, and earmarks passed by congressional subcommittees, the policies adopted by federal contractors, and the memoranda of understanding (and even the unwritten agreements) that bound various “stakeholders.”

It was a city, then of dealmaking instead of lawmaking, where the least important people might hold elected or appointed positions and the real power belonged to well connected negotiators. Always awash with money, it was now a city in which turning private money into power was legitimate, professional. Meanwhile, expectations faded that anything really important would happen as a result. No more War on Poverty, but plenty of targeted tax breaks and regulatory negotiations.

In Jack Gance, Ward Just’s eponymous narrator recalls the end of the sixties:

The clamor and racket ceased, but the echoes were still in the ears of the population; many in the capital were ashamed and stricken, comforting each other as family members customarily do in times of great grief. It seemed that not everything was possible after all. The capital turned a sullen face to the country, stung by the accusation that it had failed and was unworthy of trust, that it had lost its nerve. That was the result of the flunked war and the squalid, inexplicable scandal, all of it so mercilessly public …

It was difficult to thrive on a civil servant’s salary in the new Washington. But opportunities were everywhere, most of them indistinguishable from government itself; it was the same work, the difference being that the money you got for it was colossal, and growing. The city was rich and it grew richer as its political authority declined. The flow of easy money became a flood , irresistible, saturating, and softening everything it touched.

*Theodore Lowi, The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States, second edition (New York: Norton, 1979) ; Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (University of Oklahoma Press, 2003); Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined its Citizens and Privatized its Public (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); and others.

Political discussion today is poisonous, but some people and organizations are trying to make it more substantive and constructive.

My friend Les Francis highlights several projects. Running to Govern is a group of “young, skilled political organizers and policy wonks who will labor only for candidates–Republican or Democratic–who are pledged to work toward solutions to our nation’s most pressing problems.” Les also mentions a bipartisan group of retired Members of Congress, including John Porter (R-IL) and our former colleague David Skaggs (D-CO), who are working together on proposals regarding “budget deficits, entitlement reform, infrastructure, and national security, the threat of terrorism, global competition and education reform.”

Finally, here is a highlight tape from “AmericaSpeaks: Our Budget, Our Economy,” this past summer’s national citizens’ deliberation.

Senator Susan Collins writes, “in modern times, I have not seen the degree of bitter divisiveness and excessive partisanship now found in the Senate.” That is probably an accurate description of the Senate and the country as a whole. We have sorted ourselves by party and ideology and are hurling outrageous invective across lines of political division. That is bad, not because politics should be polite and warm-and-fuzzy, but because bitter rhetoric drives people out of public life, whether they are contemplating a run for office or simply trying to follow the news. The field is left to professional advocates and interest groups. Also, when we are sharply and angrily divided, we cannot understand each other or work together even when our interests and values do overlap.*

So I agree that the present state of discourse is bad, but I do not share Senator Collins’ view that ideological moderation (her own declared philosophy) is the solution. Congress is tangled in invective because Americans are angry. Americans are in an especially bad mood because the economy is terrible. When the economy is poor, trust and comity fall because people naturally develop a zero-sum, suspicious attitude toward institutions and toward one another. See Eric Uslaner, The Decline of Comity in Congress (1997) for evidence.

At least part of the solution must be to improve the economy. There are at least three leading prescriptions. The federal government could cut spending to balance the budget, cut taxes to stimulate investment, or borrow to subsidize state governments and stimulate demand. I must say that I find the third option much more plausible than the first two, but all have supporters.

What we are actually doing, instead, is the “moderate” thing. The stimulus package was an even mix of tax cuts, direct federal spending, and aid to states. The amount of the stimulus was capped at about 2 percent of annual GDP. Meanwhile, states are cutting their spending by comparable amounts. The net effect is very close to a wash. That doesn’t fit any coherent theory of macroeconomics, but it represents a compromise that Susan Collins and a few other Senate “moderates” voted for. If it was poor economics, then moderation contributed to the economic crisis and prolonged an important cause of incivility.

What’s more, because the bill was such a compromise, no one can see clearly what theory was tested. Many Americans believe that the administration just tried a radical, leftist strategy, which is certainly not true, but we didn’t try supply-side tax cutting either. We muddled through the middle, and the results speak for themselves.

*Compare Federalist 60, in which James Madison criticizes Pennsylvania’s “Council of Censors” (which had met in 1783 and 1784) as overly partisan. He wrote: “Throughout the continuance of the council, it was split into two fixed and violent parties. … In all questions, however unimportant in themselves, or unconnected with each other, the same names stand invariably contrasted on their opposite columns. Every unbiased observer may infer … that, unfortunately, passion, not reason, must have presided over their decisions. When men exercise their reason coolly and freely on a variety of distinct questions, they inevitably fall into different opinions on some of them. When they are governed by a common passion, their opinions, if they are so to be called, will be the same.”