One of the great dangers for democracies is special interests: smallish groups of citizens focused on influencing some aspect of government’s behavior. By investing time, information and money on their specific issue, they’re highly effective at getting their way. On every level of government, they’re tails wagging their dogs.
Some special interests cause egregious harm. Though they are the-ones-who-must-not-be-named, it wouldn’t take fifteen minutes for a college-educated adult to list most of them. On the other hand, there are probably one or two that the same person would find shocking. In addition, there are thousands of pressure groups that by themselves don’t do too much harm, but which collectively impose enormous overhead and debilitating constrictions on all of our groups. And that’s what’s happening. Special interests are dragging us toward disaster.
Decades ago President Nixon took it upon himself to speak for the “the silent majority.” But why are we silent? Because we’re disengaged. He could have more aptly labeled us the disengaged majority. The majority must remain disengaged for the success of special interests. (And it’s not really us-versus-them. Even members of special interests are disengaged on other issues. So for example, a lobbyist from the coal industry totally ignores the prison guard unions’ work to make us yet tougher on crime.)
We bring the propensity for others to become special interests on ourselves. When a person says they’d like to get more involved in public affairs, we’re as likely as not to urge them to take on an issue that effects them personally. We’re implicitly asking them to behave as a special interest.
But as global leaders the goal is to come to public affairs holding ourselves responsible for the whole. What if we came to public affairs as generalists who deliberately choose to focus on issues for which we are not a special interest? Special interests don’t like it when someone that doesn’t have a personal interest shows up at “public” meeting . They’re wild cards. Special interests don’t want witnesses to the sausage-making.
So that’s what we need to do: take interest in issues in which we have no personal interest. Become “public advocates.” The interested parties will tell us that we can’t do that. They just don’t want us to.
It doesn’t take too many public advocates to balance the efforts of a special interest. Public advocates have the advantage of the moral high ground. And as long as a public advocate keeps from being framed as personally interested they can keep that high ground.
So as a leading citizen become a public advocate. Take an interest far from your personal interests. Choose something that doesn’t make you mad. Join ranks with other public advocates. You’ll prevail.
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