Invisible Government and Democracy in the United States Today

Abstract

M t j 'EANING OF Realistic study of social affairs today makes it increasingly evident that government, as the general system of authoritative social control, has two basically important, natural aspects: (a) the more concentrated, official, part; and (b) the more diffused, unofficial, and part. In the United States, the former is made up of the publicly chosen and established officials and agencies. The invisible part of the government, far less obvious but no less real, is made up of those more private, organized pressure groups that are continually working for the public assistance of their interests. Chart .r illustrates the more common distribution of functions in the invisible government in this country. Connected with each of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches in the different governmental areas, national, state and local, are the hordes of private and informal agents, bosses, advisers, fixers, attorneys, spies, and accomplices, that make up the special agents of the invisible government,-the functional interest pressure groups. The Democratic Evolution of Invisible Government. As social evolution increases its speed today, we are becoming more keenly aware of these parts of the government. They are powerfully affecting the course of affairs, and they are not under adequate and orderly control. The phase of social control in which they always center is in the struggle of the less privileged members of the community for larger rights of social membership, against the conditions of general ignorance and the usual alarmed resistance of the more privileged and comfortably fixed groups. Throughout the world, and especially in the West, the gradual extension of the right to vote for general public officers by increasingly larger groups of the population has been the common indicator of the growing national union and democratic relationships. Consider, for example, the advances of the suffrage in England: (i) the granting of Magna Charta, 1215 (admitting the greater barons definitely to the visible government); (2) The Bill of Rights, i689 (marking the rise of the lesser nobles and commercial gentry); (3) The Great Reform Bill, 1832 (the rise to power, in the Industrial Revolution, of business enterprise, with transition from aristocratic to more plutocratic leadership); (4) granting of national suffrage to the city