Word: crossman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...feeble check on government, even to Marxists, and scarcely explains why the ruled defer to their rulers. Ceremony does explain. Legend, myth, and self-deception-the pomp of government-"siphon off dangerous emotions" and screen politics from public view. Cabinets, parliaments, and monarchy lacked the substance of power. Crossman wished to strip government of the Noble Lie and confront his audience with the garish clanking of the party machine. He may even have wished to demonstrate the drawbacks of the British system to Anglophile political scientists. But, as the Godkin series proceeded, he showed much affection for that "efficient secret...
...efficient secret" Crossman meant that the real struggle for power must usually be hidden. This phenomenon has no analogy in the American government. The U. S. Constitution sets out to sabotage the "efficient secret": the purpose of that document is to bring the struggle for power out into the open. Parties and party conventions flourish here, of course, but the basic decisions of government do not occur in them. They result from the all-too-public, often stalemated dialogue between the President and the Congress...
...from regretting power relationships, Crossman exhilarated in them. Prime Ministerial government was an arena for day-to-day survival in a contest of high stakes. "In the American Cabinet, they're officials. In the British Cabinet, each one of us is a potential prime minister. We could be dismissed by the PM at any time. In that context, you become tremendously aware of power relations...
...Crossman occasionally lapses into the same mechanistic liberal-realism which afflicted Bagchot's account of the English Constitution. He would discuss politics exclusively in terms of the management and the exercise of power. He would congratulate the masses for their "bovine stupidity" and then ignore them. True, the party machine introduces a popular element, though still at one remove, into the operations of government. But as the dynamic of social change, the party remains autonomous of the public in formulating policy. "All the new ideas come from the rank and file who are always out of tune with the majority...
...coercion generate power. The mass of the public may prove resistant to change, but that inertia is the critical variable. The public provides the climate, if not the specific cues, in which the government sets policy. That climate determines how well the ministry party pulls together on crucial issues. Crossman's focus would distort the decision-making process: consensus is needed in the party, coercion in the nation. He underestimates the multiple centers of power which prevail in a pluralist democratic electorate...