Political Advocacy and Its Interested Citizens: Neoliberalism, Postpluralism, and LGBT Organizations

Political Advocacy and Its Interested Citizens

AMERICAN GOVERNANCE:

POLITICS, POLICY, AND PUBLIC LAW

Series Editors: Richard Valelly, Pamela Brandwein,

Marie Gottschalk, Christopher Howard

A complete list of books in the series

is available from the publisher.

Political Advocacy and Its Interested Citizens

Neoliberalism, Postpluralism, and LGBT Organizations

Matthew Dean Hindman

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2019 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hindman, Matthew Dean, author.

Title: Political advocacy and its interested citizens : neoliberalism, postpluralism, and LGBT organizations / Matthew Dean Hindman.

Other titles: American governance.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2019] |

Series: American governance: politics, policy, and public law | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018015435 | ISBN 9780812250671 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Pressure groups—United States—History—20th century. | Pressure groups—United States—History—21st century. | Sexual minorities—Political activity—United States—History—20th century. | Sexual minorities—Political activity—United States—History—21st century. | Political participation—United States—History—20th century. | Political participation—United States—History—21st century. | Cultural pluralism—United States—History—20th century. | Cultural pluralism—United States—History—21st century.

Classification: LCC JK1118 .H48 2019 | DDC 322.40973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018015435

To Brooke, who encouraged me to dedicate this book to our cat, Walter

CONTENTS

Introduction. The Advocacy Era

Chapter 1. Beyond Who Governs?: Interest Group Representation in the New Gilded Age

Chapter 2. Our Sunday Best: Homophile Citizenship and Identity Building Before Stonewall

Chapter 3. From the Closet If Necessary: The Dawn of the Advocacy Era and the Circumscription of Political Participation

Chapter 4. Promiscuity of the Past: Gay Advocacy and Gay Sexuality Pre- and Post-AIDS

Chapter 5. Acting Up in a Time of Crisis: ACT UP and the Limits of an Interested Citizenry

Conclusion. An Interesting Dilemma

Appendix. Research Methodology and Archival Data

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

The Advocacy Era

In 1988, a political advocacy group called the Human Rights Campaign Fund (HRCF) commissioned an audit from the Third Sector Management Group (TSMG), a little-known organization designed to help interest groups meet the challenges and responsibilities of the nonprofit sector. With a membership of about ten thousand, HRCF sought guidance about how to become a more effective political advocate for their constituencies of lesbian and gay Americans. In the face of what TSMG described as a less active and more costconscious government, increasing competition for foundation and corporate funding, and growing service needs and delivery costs, the nonprofit advisement company asserted that organizations like HRCF would need to adapt to new economic and political realities and, by extension, new industry standards. Central among these new standards, it explained, were four basic imperatives: constituency services, public presentation, marketing, and fund-raising. In short, TSMG—itself an organization funded by private companies including Exxon, the Ford Foundation, and the Washington Post Company—counseled HRCF to take on more conventionally corporate functions.¹

Of course, HRCF was not the only organization struggling to navigate the challenges of political advocacy in the Reagan era. Nor, for that matter, were these standards completely new. Advocates representing women, racial minorities, and other historically disadvantaged groups had long understood the value of strong public relations, effective fund-raising, and robust channels of communication between themselves and the communities they served. Yet the Reagan administration’s fiscal austerity added an additional hurdle to a long list of obstacles facing minority communities—a list that included discrimination, social scorn, public health crises, and more.

Despite these challenges—and also because of them—a professionalized, nonprofit model of political advocacy steadily gained traction.² In many cases, these nonprofits—like HRCF—sought to harness and redirect the radical verve that had characterized the protest movements of the 1960s. The new generation of political advocates, though, typically took a pragmatic, state-sanctioned approach to political engagement. Where funding allowed, they employed a paid staff of strategists, policy specialists, and lobbyists.

This basic story has been widely noted, and it has taken many names. According to one account, middle-class, suit-wearing legal advocates led a minority rights revolution.³ According to another, a new liberalism took hold, marked by the emergence of citizen groups focused on quality-of-life concerns rather than redistributive ones.⁴ More broadly speaking, the United States experienced an advocacy explosion that increased the number, influence, and visibility of nationally active interest groups.⁵ These terms each gesture toward one aspect or another of the same historical phenomenon: professional, nonprofit advocacy groups working to secure rights, protections, and political incorporation diversified Beltway politics, contributing to a thriving, competitive, and policy-savvy advocacy universe. In fact, between 1981 and 2006, the number of politically active organizations with a presence in Washington, D.C., more than doubled, with particularly high rates of growth among identity groups, public interest groups, and social welfare organizations.⁶

This book offers a new interpretation—or, more modestly stated, examines an underexplored aspect—of these developments. Stated most concisely, the chapters ahead analyze how the U.S. advocacy explosion impacted not only how Washington came to understand and incorporate various group interests but, just as important, how interest groups encouraged citizens to understand themselves. As interest groups carved a space within the political process for themselves, they instructed their members, followers, and constituents on how best to serve as effective and industrious political claimants. In doing so, these organizations demonstrated a need for strong advocates and for attentive and dutiful constituencies willing to support and advance group interests.

Centrally, then, this book does not seek to explain which strategies are most effective or which policy goals hold highest priority. Rather, it interrogates processes of interest group representation in order to explain how interest groups advance group interests, frame American citizenship, and, perhaps most important, link these two goals. As many scholars point out, political representation involves a process of constant negotiation between represented groups and the individuals and organizations that represent them.⁷ This process shapes how both representatives and their constituencies understand their roles within American politics.

Interest group representation engenders, in short, what I refer to as interested citizens. I invoke this term not to describe a mass political awakening; that is, I do not claim, as one standard definition of the term interest goes, that advocacy groups piqued the concern, curiosity, or enthusiasm of social groups in a manner that political parties or other channels of political engagement could not. Rather, this book’s central and titular concept refers to an ideal-type—namely, the ideal-typical citizen that emerged from processes of interest group representation as it developed throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. This process helped create and foster coherent political identities and interests; it cultivated bounded forms of political participation; it mobilized standards of public conduct seen to befit the most worthy claimants of the American pressure system. In short, interest group representation has molded group-specific political interests that are intelligible to, and feasible within, our contemporary social and political landscape. To become an interested citizen, then, is to digest and metabolize these apprehensible and attainable political interests rather than some set of utopian, subversive, or impracticably egalitarian political objectives. To become an interested citizen, moreover, is to advance these interests in a way that respects the prevailing individualizing and economizing trends of the American political process, as well as the juridical framework that keeps it afloat.

Today, more than 1,600 organizations speaking for diffuse public constituencies—including single-issue ideological groups, professional associations, racial and ethnic groups, and more—maintain a presence in the nation’s capital.⁸ These nonprofits utilize professional management techniques to mobilize support. They identify viable strategies for organizational growth. They strive to maintain strong public relations. They fund-raise. In short, after years of practice and many growing pains, today’s advocacy groups exploit the languages, strategies, and professional skills long employed by economically privileged groups. Organizations like HRCF have demonstrated that histories of disadvantage and marginalization do not preclude groups from entering the political fray. Indeed, within ten years of its audit, membership at HRCF—which later changed its name to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC)—grew twenty-five-fold, to 250,000. Years later, boasting millions of followers on social media, an operating budget measured in tens of millions of dollars, and a ubiquitous and recognizable logo widely viewed as the preeminent symbol of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movement, the organization has not stopped growing. Though the magnitude of HRC’s growth is particularly extraordinary, it nevertheless stands as part of a broader pattern of historically disadvantaged groups expanding their presence as part of Washington’s pressure system. The details and contours of this development—including, notably, the types of citizens that these groups have sought to create, elevate, and activate in order to gain a foothold in Washington—are critical to understanding both contemporary political advocacy and its many critics.

Do Interest Groups Disperse or Consolidate Political Influence?

The story of the U.S. advocacy system’s growth and diversification is not a linear, sanguine tale of social progress, particularly as many forms of inequality that have long plagued the United States stubbornly persist. While terms like minority rights revolution and new liberalism describe how new groups entered the policymaking arena, observers of corporate interests describe a political awakening of corporate lobbying and an unseen revolution of business interests that also penetrated Washington during the 1970s.⁹ While this book does not focus squarely on how business interests grease the wheels of American government, Big Business’s political emergence is by no means tangential or irrelevant to the development of interested citizens. Indeed, as business groups increasingly succeeded in their advocacy endeavors, nonbusiness groups learned from, and adapted to, the business community’s successes.

In part as a result of the dominance of business lobbies and the concurrent spike in economic inequality, many scholars question whether interest groups function as effective representatives for historically disadvantaged groups. The growth of the interest group system, after all, has accompanied the troubling emergence of a New Gilded Age, marked by growing disparities of income, wealth, and political power. Income gains over the past several decades have disproportionately accrued at the top 1 percent (and particularly the top 0.1 percent) of the income ladder.¹⁰ Economic mobility has stagnated.¹¹ And as the advocacy system became more expansive, it also became more expensive; recent decisions at the U.S. Supreme Court—including most notably the controversial ruling in Citizens United v. FEC—have exacerbated this decades-long trend of increasingly costly American elections.¹² These developments appear especially troublesome in light of recent empirical findings demonstrating that policymakers more closely follow the political preferences of economic elites than those of average Americans—results that suggest, perhaps, that the United States is more plutocratic than democratic.¹³

Taken together, these findings indicate that although the nation has witnessed an apparent dispersal of power via an advocacy explosion, it has also experienced a consolidation of power and sociopolitical privilege. What are we to make of these seemingly contradictory trends? And why has the inclusion of new voices in Washington not produced a more substantively equal society? Certainly, the political incorporation of various minority groups into processes of governmental decision making should, according to our lofty democratic expectations, help redress past injustices. Yet governing practices aimed at inclusion and political incorporation in and of themselves offer no assurances of just or egalitarian outcomes. In this respect, we ought to examine the nature of this inclusion and incorporation. Have the very terms of inclusion and political incorporation been built upon inegalitarian grounds? Have our representative institutions actually helped cultivate some of the very problems that have fostered a New Gilded Age?

This book answers these questions with a qualified yes. While my opening vignette about HRC’s acclimation to a corporate model of political advocacy offers a snapshot of a long-forgotten, behind-the-scenes, banal event within the organization’s history, it also evidences a change in how advocacy organizations began to relate to, mobilize, and communicate with constituents. This change is most pointedly marked by the economization of citizenship, in which civic efficacy merged with consumerist ideals and market-driven sensibilities. Thus the advocacy explosion that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s and had blossomed by the 1990s not only engendered more—as well as more professionalized—advocacy but also served as part of a transformation of opportunities, incentive structures, and channels of political engagement for members of various social groups. In short, the advocacy explosion changed how disadvantaged citizens (among other groups) experience political representation. Geared toward pragmatism and professionalism, this representation privileges and perpetuates forms of civic action that are most welcomed by the prevailing corporate ethos. Rather than swim against the most tempestuous and disquieting currents guiding American political and economic life, the most successful leaders and organizers swam with these currents in an effort to connect their communities to the levers of power of American politics. In doing so, they have not reversed the current, but they have helped more types of citizens swim in troubled waters.

The argument that advocacy organizations generally favor some citizens over others is a lesson with strong grounding in feminist scholarship—and in particular intersectional feminist scholarship—which has long held that our governing institutions privilege some voices over others owing to multiple and cross-cutting layers of marginalization.¹⁴ Indeed, the arguments presented in this book are largely indebted to this line of research. Scholars concerned with intersectionality and marginalization, after all, seek to amplify the voices of those who have long been rendered voiceless even by the representatives and institutions claiming to speak for them. Over time, what Ange-Marie Hancock calls intersectionality-like thinking has given rise to greater efforts to render the invisible visible.¹⁵ In doing so, we can also bring fresh perspective to what has already been visible. That is to say, a focus on who (or what) has been disempowered may also bring new scrutiny—and perhaps a new label—to the social and political forces that disproportionately empower some expressions of citizenship over others.

Interested citizens, I will argue, have become primary actors of political engagement, particularly for historically disadvantaged and minority groups. Interested citizens stand in marked contrast to individuals, groups, and movements that seek to disrupt prevailing economic rationalities or promote utopian ideals. I explain how interest group actors endeavored to mobilize an interested citizenry throughout this book by documenting how and why they created ideal-types, mobilized them, and put them to use. Moreover, I explain the impact of this mobilization upon the political identities, participation, and conduct of historically marginalized constituencies. I argue that advocacy groups, acting within and through the incentives of neoliberal governance—a widely discussed and provocative concept that I unpack throughout the chapters ahead—worked to mold constituencies capable of competing and thriving within an increasingly money-saturated advocacy marketplace. Stated differently, as new governing principles created new standards of civic engagement, nationally active interest groups became instrumental to the process of acclimatizing citizens to the new and evolving rules, incentives, and expectations of contemporary citizenship.

Focusing on nonprofit advocacy from roughly 1950 to 1990, much of this book centers upon the emergence and trajectory of interest group representation for those who were first known as homophiles, then lesbian and gay citizens, and eventually LGBT and queer (or LGBTQ) peoples. Using this movement as an exemplar of broader trends taking place within the American advocacy system, I chronicle the role that nationally active advocates played in creating an LGBT political constituency out of what had once been widely thought of as deviant, immoral, or neurotic sexual behaviors. Often considered the quintessential identity movement, the LGBT political community is, in part, a product of the advocacy era.¹⁶ Once a group lacking a social identity and political voice, the LGBT community has blossomed into a movement that asserts itself as an empowered bloc of policy-active constituents. Yet what may appear as a story of steady or even rapid progress—a story of a path from the closet to K Street—is actually a complex account of the interplay of strategy, compromise, in-group conflict, marginalization, and the subdual of alternative forms of representation. While this book is not principally a historical narrative about the LGBTQ movement, significant portions of this narrative help illuminate the basic themes most central to the emergence of an interested citizenry.

From Pluralist Expectations to Postpluralist Critiques

The perspective on interest group representation outlined above suggests that organized interest groups serve as incomplete, inadequate, or ineffectual representatives in the face of consolidated political power and spiking inequalities of wealth. Such a perspective contrasts with how scholars once viewed interest group politics in the United States. Those who view interest groups as indispensable vehicles of democratic representation often look first to James Madison’s Federalist 10, which explored the destructive yet inevitable influence of factions within free societies. According to Madison, of course, liberty unavoidably gives rise to faction, with republican government best able to control factions’ most harmful effects. A long line of twentieth-century scholars including, notably, Arthur Bentley, Robert Dahl, and David Truman would follow Madison in confronting this question about the role of groups. These authors, who came to be known as pluralists, argued that dispersed groups, rather than grand majorities or secretive cabals, govern. According to Bentley, for example, individuals are of trifling importance in interpreting society, as politics takes place in the social activities that give rise to groups and group interests.¹⁷ Whereas Madison argued for the necessity of constitutional protections to safeguard against majority tyranny, twentieth-century pluralists largely sought to expose majorities as nonexistent.

Though the pluralists made no claims to a mechanistic or deterministic account of the political process, they did portray intergroup competition as an organic and perhaps natural process, with latent groups organizing to fend off threats (or potential threats) whenever circumstances demanded it. This laissez-faire form of pluralism presented the American political system as self-regulating and self-correcting because of the natural tendency of groups to defend their interests when threatened.¹⁸ This approach viewed power and authority as dispersed among various actors within a system of controlled competition. In Dahl’s terms, the United States governed as a polyarchy—or what Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page would later describe as majoritarian pluralism—with power neither as centralized as under an oligarchy or dictatorship nor as atomized as under direct democracy.¹⁹ Thus competition among groups served as a proxy for majority opinion, and it therefore tended to benefit average citizens reasonably well.

Assuming a liberal framework of individual rights and liberties—and in contrast with C. Wright Mills’s view that a power elite dominated politics—the pluralists described an open political system whereby a diverse marketplace of interests prohibited the rise of a tyrannical monopoly over political power and policy influence.²⁰ Pluralism, then, came to serve as both a descriptive account of American democracy and a democratic ideal toward which Americans ought to continually strive. Interest groups and advocacy organizations, of course, served as the natural manifestations of these ideals, and they provided the primary vehicles through which Americans could exert influence in a just and judicious manner.

After a brief period of preeminence within political science, pluralism—at least in its laissez-faire form—came under attack from nearly all traditions of political research.²¹ (To contemporary readers, that pluralism reached its zenith during the 1950s—an era remembered for its cultural uniformity and its harsh social and political repression of women and minority groups—seems ironic indeed.) Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action leveled perhaps the most prominent and damning of the early rational choice critiques, asserting that individuals are prone to free ride due to conflicts between their individual interests and their interests as members of groups.²² Other critics looked to the stark imbalances of political power to critique pluralist ideals. E. E. Schattschneider penned the locus classicus of this flourishing tradition, famously claiming that the flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper class accent—now an obligatory quotation across scholarship seeking to understand the dynamics of group politics in the United States.²³ Schattschneider’s quip, damning though it appears, may actually understate the nature of bias in the American system, as economic class provides only one lens through which to view disparities of influence.²⁴

Yet just as scholars began to expose this mismatch between pluralist ideals and the realities of group representation in the United States, many new voices entered the interest group system in the 1960s and beyond. While these newcomers did not overtake traditionally advantaged groups, they nevertheless diversified the policymaking arena amid an advocacy explosion—noted above—that witnessed a nearly fourfold rise in national associations from 1959 to 1999.²⁵ Within this reconfigured civic landscape, protest movements gave way to (or, at least, began to supplement) professionally led campaigns to lobby government, galvanize public opinion, and influence elections.²⁶ As Kay Schlozman, Sidney Verba, and Henry Brady put it, the Beltway now includes an astonishing number of organizations representing an astonishing number of interests.²⁷ Since the 1970s, a large majority of Americans have held membership in at least one such organization.²⁸ These trends have led to a revitalization of scholarly interest in group politics—and group-centered theories of political behavior—after a brief period in which such studies had disappeared from political science like an exiled monarch.²⁹

Despite this renewed interest in the study of groups, scholars of interest group politics continue to look at Washington’s advocacy climate with a critical eye, and few would argue that we have arrived at a heavenly or harmonious balance of power. Indeed, our scholarly outlook is no longer pluralist but postpluralist.³⁰ That is, many scholars generally accept the idea that group interests and identities remain vital to understanding American politics, though the consensus view suggests that interest groups have been ill-equipped to deliver influential political incorporation for historically disadvantaged groups. In other words, postpluralist scholarship acknowledges that Americans often view themselves as members of various groups and organize themselves on that basis, though it also suggests that these organized interests tend to reflect and even perpetuate long-standing inequalities even as they seek to redress them.

Schematically, we may divide postpluralist critiques into two broad categories. The first tradition focuses primarily on the proportionality of disadvantaged groups within the interest group system. Taking Schattschneider’s repartee about pluralism’s bourgeois accent as a starting point, this camp contends that despite the growing number and visibility of organizations representing the disadvantaged, imbalances in resources, access, and other markers of political influence persist. Thus while the scope of the system may have expanded, the bias remains the same. In other words, although the inclusion of more voices in the wake of the advocacy explosion produced a higher decibel level in Washington, as Kay Schlozman and John Tierney noted in 1983, the voices of business and professional groups continued to overwhelm the voices of historically disadvantaged constituencies.³¹

A great deal of recent scholarship has further elucidated the contours of upper-class bias, particularly regarding the dominance of business interests. Schlozman and her coauthors of The Unheavenly Chorus, for example, largely corroborate her earlier findings about the scope and bias of the pluralist chorus, noting that more than half—53 percent—of all Washington-based interest groups represent business lobbies.³² Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s Winner-Take-All Politics further explicates the interest group system’s lack of proportionality, documenting Big Business’s organizational counterattack upon the regulatory state during the 1970s. As part of this counterattack, corporate public affairs offices grew in number, as did the number of registered lobbyists and corporate PACs.³³ Further adding to this story, Lee Drutman notes that by 2012, businesses spent a whopping $34 for every dollar spent on lobbying by unions and public interest groups combined.³⁴

The second (and oftentimes more critical) camp focuses on the lack of responsiveness on the part of advocacy organizations themselves. In other words, there exists a principal-agent problem of interest group representation in which agents (interest groups) may neglect the preferences or interests of their principals (social groups, organizations, or other such constituencies).³⁵ Largely echoing Robert Michels’s iron law of oligarchy, Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward have become the standard-bearers of this critique.³⁶ In Poor People’s Movements, Piven and Cloward argue that advocacy organizations tended to abandon an oppositional politics in favor of (largely symbolic) attention from elites.³⁷ Others have echoed this critique in the postmortems of the Black Power movement. In his now classic book Black Awakening in Capitalist America, for example, Robert L. Allen describes how wealthy philanthropists—particularly the Ford Foundation—co-opted black militants in the 1960s precisely by funding militant organizations, exerting outside influence and control, and deradicalizing them by using them to promote capitalist economic principles and mainstream electoral channels.³⁸ Such a growing symbiosis between nonprofit liberal foundations and indigenous organizations has, as Dylan Rodriguez notes, helped collapse various sites of potential political radicalism into nonantagonistic social service and pro-state reformist initiatives.³⁹ As the national advocacy realm grew in both size and diversity, then, protest was adopted as part of a middle-class advocacy repertoire.⁴⁰

Given that this broad and multipronged critique posits nonprofit organizations as bastions of middle-class antiradicalism, contemporary observers worry that today’s advocacy groups have neglected particularly disadvantaged subgroups and eschewed democratic governing procedures. Due to cross-cutting issues within groups—such as gender, sexuality, or race—as well as processes of in-group marginalization, interest group representation renders some group members silent, favoring instead those most easily incorporated into dominant institutions.⁴¹ In her survey of nationally active economic and social justice organizations, for example, Dara Strolovitch finds that interest groups tend to disproportionately advocate for relatively advantaged members of their constituencies, often to the disadvantage of intersectionally marginalized constituents.⁴² Such findings also apply to state-level advocacy organizations, which tend to underrepresent gender-based issues in particular.⁴³

As noted above, these concerns are at least in part connected to the constant search for funding. In the face of fund-raising imperatives, it is not surprising that advocacy organizations exude an abiding conservatism relative to the social movements and indigenous organizations from which they sprang.⁴⁴ Simply put, advocacy organizations must satisfy donors and adhere to a limited range of political objectives in order to ensure continued funding and nonprofit status.⁴⁵ As the title of a collection of essays on nonprofit advocacy concisely states, The revolution will not be funded.⁴⁶ Indeed, the very process of fund-raising tends to ensure that civic participation is linked more closely to purchasing power than to classically republican notions of shared rule.⁴⁷ Resultantly, interest groups have become little more than bodyless heads—a term that Theda Skocpol employs to suggest that professionally managed national associations have supplanted the more participatory civic associations of generations past.⁴⁸ The advocacy explosion, from this perspective, does not derive from an expansion of democracy in any meaningful sense. In fact, even nationally active progressive groups employing teams of enthusiastic canvassers utilize few, if any, grassroots decision-making procedures.⁴⁹ More pessimistically still, Schlozman, Verba, and Brady find that less than one-eighth of all organizations active in national politics are membership groups.⁵⁰ Taken together, scholarship on contemporary interest groups suggests that if the inclusion of new groups into Beltway politics has made pluralism lose its upper-class accent, the new drawl appears to be bureaucratic rather than blue-collar, studious rather than rebellious. The effect, this scholarship further suggests, is the demobilization of much of the American public.

Postpluralist analyses, in sum, focus intently on how the interest group system and the advocacy groups that comprise it have deviated from the pluralists’ heavenly ideals, namely, the ideals of proportionality and democratic responsiveness. My understanding of the interest group universe—including its biases and its role in creating an interested citizenry—both builds upon and challenges this overarching perspective. In doing so, I view advocacy in the context of several trends that have swept American political life, including—but not only including—the heightening forms of political and economic inequality sketched above. Additionally, historical forces of administrative, managerial, and representational authority have given rise to economic procedures, governing logics, and forms of knowledge that both reproduce this authority and delineate civic practices designed to uphold it. Put in simpler terms, broad economic and political trends shape how citizens understand their placement within the political system, and interest groups have come to serve a vital role within the story of this new and evolving political landscape.

Political Representation amid an Advocacy Explosion

The harshest critiques of the advocacy era tend to portray organized advocacy as beholden to political and economic power brokers. The result, according to critics, has been a nonprofit industrial complex, or a nonprofitization of activism, in which corporate interests and state power converge to co-opt political movements.⁵¹ Indeed, in this book I generally accept the premise, stated succinctly by Adolph Reed, that 1960s radicalism dissolved into pluralist politics, accepting, too, his qualification that this dissolution was neither natural nor inevitable.⁵² (Certainly, the radical spirit witnessed in the 1960s has not gone away entirely, as evidenced by the periodic emergence of groups like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and Antifa.) The dissolution of radicalism was, however, deeply structured by the ideas, institutions, and processes central to neoliberalism—a concept most basically understood as the drive to reduce the state’s role in administering social welfare and liberate the individuating, entrepreneurial ethos necessary for capitalist economic development.⁵³ In this way, neoliberalism at once minimizes citizens’ capacity for collective governance and instills a set