The Menace of Fanatic Factions

By Frank Trippett

"Liberty is to faction what air is to fire." When he wrote those words, James Madison clearly expected the faction-ridden nation he helped found to go right on producing special-interest groups constantly pressing for advantage. But even the prescient co-author of the Federalist papers might be amazed at the abundant fulfillment of his vision by Americans of the late 1970s. The nation has entered a period of ascendant factionalism, a time when the larger desires of society can scarcely be heard for the insistent clamor of its numberless segments.

It is the era of the strenuous clique and the vociferous claque, of artful pressure groups and willful activists who effectively control many things by veto and filibuster. Factions of all sizes and configurations, alike only in self-service and single-mindedness, tend to dominate virtually every salient issue of the day, be it abortion, water conservation, nuclear power or the location of bridges and expressways. Draw an issue anywhere and contenders will rally on both sides, or several sides, shouting up influence out of all proportion to their numbers. These days every political and social issue tends to be seen as a consuming cause, and Americans who throw themselves into public controversies increasingly tend to become single-issue champions -- crusaders.

Groups pushing one cause only are growing both in number and political importance. They tend, in a time of fading political parties, to dominate the debate of all problems and often prevail in the resolution. They have become the undertakers for the professional politician's career and the manipulators of legislative bodies. What they cannot achieve by law they are often willing to achieve by defiance. They have, most of them, an aversion to cooperation, conciliation and compromise.

Historically, the U.S. has been at pains to make sure that small factions are not pushed around by any overbearing majority. Today, such is the fragmented atmosphere of public discourse, that it is sometimes hard to remember that majority will or consensus exists, and, indeed, these seem to crystallize less and less often nowadays. When truckers dislike a nationally mandated speed limit, they turn into an instant faction and willfully protest the law with massive slowdowns. Los Angeles motorists, irritated by an experimental expressway lane for car poolers, defeat it not with persuasion and argument but by circumventions and defiant traffic blockages. It has become commonplace to see popular sentiment disdained, frustrated and sometimes decisively defeated by willful factions of minuscule size.

What members of these factions forget is that they are citizens not of a cause but of a country of many causes. The adamant attitude that gives some motorists victory on the expressway may well propel some other faction to triumph on another issue -- environment, conservation, name it -- in a way the motorist might deplore.

Take the gun-control issue. Though polls have long shown overwhelming popular support for handgun registration and regulation, opponents repeatedly triumph in state legislatures and Congress. Thus the pro-gun lobby, embodied in the National Rifle Association, stands as a pluperfect example of the single-issue factions. The N.R.A.'s traits and methods -- passionate, uncompromising zeal combined with keen organization and ruthless skill at pressure tactics -- are widely copied.

Thoughtful resolution of many a current national issue has been thwarted or confounded by single-minded groups. Dissatisfied with different particulars of President Carter's proposed energy policy, extremists against decontrol ganged up to block it -- or any reasonable compromise -- for 18 months. Zealots on both sides have also muddied the real issues surrounding the Equal Rights Amendment. Small bands of protesters and a few smart lawyers have tied up construction of nuclear-power plants, although polls repeatedly show that two-thirds or more of the public favor them. The maneuverings of a confusing profusion of factions have put off any meaningful overall doctoring of the almost universally criticized tax system; the tax reduction bill that was emerging from Congress last week was, not surprisingly, a hodgepodge of revisions sought by a miscellany of special-interest factions. The public credo of the new factionalism is as self-centered as the private philosophy that pervades the so-called Me Decade: Do-it-my-way-or-not-at-all.

This fanatical attitude and the vindictiveness that goes with it have given rise to the one-issue politics that is conspicuous in this election season.

Too many voters decide for -- or more often against -- a candidate on the basis of his stand on a single question.

For example, New York Governor Hugh Carey's future may well ride not on his respectable record in office but on his stand against capital punishment. Single issues, and particularly those heavy with questions of social value and morality, are deciding political destinies in more and more jurisdictions. Such a trend can only narrow the scope of debate and diminish the already insufficient willingness of leaders to give thought -- and voice -- to the question of the larger general welfare.

The rise of factionalism has occurred right along with some general diminishing of the traditional American respect for the sensibilities of others. Under the reign of permissiveness (made possible only by the acquiescence of a majority of Americans), a handful of pornographers flaunt their wares heedless of the public incidentally offended, and pimps herd their whores along city streets with the same tyrannical disregard for those they might offend. It has become commonplace for owners of gigantic transistor radios to lug them onto public transportation (against taste and some city laws), blaring as though the world were a private concert hall. Under the skin they are kin to the nudists who invade public beaches from time to time to exhibit what a great many people would as soon not see. Such segments of society may not amount, technically, to factions, but they surely display a kindred do-it-my-way arrogance. The same spirit has suddenly turned smokers and non-smokers into acrimonious adversaries in many places.

Large and small pressure groups or activist groups are exercising their new muscle legally even when they stray beyond the bounds of civility, as they frequently do. Nobody questions their right to behave as they do, and even critics who recall with distaste the triumph of the zealous temperance crusade that, in 1919, got the Prohibition amendment passed could cite occasions when dedicated dissident groups have served the nation's higher interests admirably. Indeed, today's factional enthusiasm is usually tracked to two such instances: the civil rights movement and the anti-Viet Nam War movement.

Both were launched by numerical minorities, both ultimately succeeded and both taught the larger American public lessons about the efficacy of organization, demonstration, passionate dramatics and exploitation of the mass media. The tacticians of those movements, dealing with fateful and fundamental issues, could plausibly justify using every available technique, including civil defiance. The trouble is that not only the techniques but the fervid spirit of the rights and antiwar movements are being adopted for general application in almost all social and political controversies. Some groups of Long Island residents howled and demonstrated effectively for a while against the Concorde's landing in New York as if it were a fresh incursion into Cambodia. In North Carolina, where wets and dries fuss interminably over the issue of legalizing liquor by the drink, all partisans tend to hurl themselves into the fray as though life and death depend on whether brown-bagging survives or goes by the boards. When the zealous spirit prevails, all perspective seems lost.

Burgeoning factionalism has a healthy side: it draws fresh people into public activity. Yet no matter how well it satisfies particular narrow causes, sooner or later it must damage larger public values. Eventually, as Political Scientist Norman Ornstein of Washington's Catholic University puts it, "You have too many decision makers and too many groups trying to exercise a veto over decisions, and with that you reach a paralysis in government." In the extreme, there could be worse things than paralyzed government. There could come a breaking of that basic spirit of accommodation and mutual respect that, in the final analysis, is the very heart of American democracy -- but not an abstract matter of "goodness." Everybody's self-interest is ultimately undermined when the capacity for give-and-take and conciliation erodes.

-- Frank Trippett

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