Umm...just to raise a theoretical point: can political actors 'properly' be reduced to the utility-maximalizing of 'individuals,' responding to all situations in terms of their "strategic" calculability, without regard to the "legitimacy" of ends? There used to be a notion of "public interest" as the constraining function of political actors, whereby, no matter how mediated through "representation", the general interests of each and all were to be taken into account in forming capacities and programs of collective action that could only be legitimated in the public light of such "universality". That thoroughly differentiates public political action from the motives and rationale of private gain and their supposed equilibria, in that the former constitutes "authority", which the latter lacks, and derives from motives of "honor" rather than the mutual influence of wealth. That was part of the point of Arendt's rather quixotic conception of political action: that it could never be (reduced to) a consideration of utility.

The prevailing ideology of administration-friendly economists is "public choice theory." This argues that political actors have a personal utility function which is necessarily at odds with the public welfare function.

Public choice takes the same principles that economists use to analyze people's actions in the marketplace and applies them to people's actions in collective decision making. Economists who study behavior in the private marketplace assume that people are motivated mainly by self-interest. Although most people base some of their actions on their concern for others, the dominant motive in people's actions in the marketplace-whether they are employers, employees, or consumers-is a concern for themselves. Public choice economists make the same assumption-that although people acting in the political marketplace have some concern for others, their main motive, whether they are voters, politicians, lobbyists, or bureaucrats, is self-interest. In Buchanan's words the theory "replaces... romantic and illusory... notions about the workings of governments [with]... notions that embody more skepticism."

In my opinion (which obviously could be wrong), the problem with introducing this analysis is that it applies with equal force to the impact of allowing a vacuum in the public space for corporations to act. The one difference is that PC theorists can simply insist that the poor behavior of corporate surrogates of the state, are merely conforming to the demands of the market.

ADDED LATER: Can political actors 'properly' be reduced to the utility-maximalizing of 'individuals,' responding to all situations in terms of their "strategic" calculability, without regard to the "legitimacy" of ends?

If I understand the question properly, I would have to answer, "Using the premises of economics, absolutely." Personally, I believe that the moral reductionism of economics is generally unrealistic, but not because economists have an excessively jaundiced view of human character.

Yes, "public choice theory" is very much to the point. Not only must it deny the public functions of the political and the distinctive constraints that imposes on the behavior of various political actors, willy-nilly, by disaggregating political processes into the dispersed perspectives of individual actors, (whether the "individuals" are understood as singular human agents or organizations), but it must narrow the diverse criteria and weightings that go into political deliberation to fit into a "linear" and univocal model of calculative "decisions". As with any theory, the question is what features or aspects of reality does it adequately capture and explain and what features or aspects does it rule out of consideration. No one in their right mind would deny that political actors are self-interested, usurp as much as "constitute" "authority" and are liable to corruption, inefficiency, and programatic dysfunction, but it's questionable that those liabilities are necessarily, "essentially" the case, without considering the broader complexion in which political affairs take place. (And the anthropology of atomistic, self-interested, externally related individuals, as prior to the communities and institutions that form them, is thoroughly implausible.) So it's doubtful that such a perspective and its analyses are simply bracingly skeptical,- (since skepticism would entail a questioning of presuppositions, including its own),- rather than dogmatically cynical. With respect to the failure of public governmental functions at several levels in the event of Katrina, the analysis of that failure in terms of the individual positions within the governmental structure and their strategic interrelations, in the absence of consideration of the public function and responsibilities that make for those structures and positions in the first place, has the effect of obviating the very criticism that it makes, that is, of making public criticism of political authorities tautological.

Part of what Arendt was getting at in OT was the collapse of any sense of normative politics, (which, for her, was rooted in human self-limitation as the condition for constituting a "human" world). Totalitarianism was not the apotheosis of politics, but rather anti-political, the ultimate falsification and destruction of any possible political "world". But the point is precisely not that a political "world" can be judged in narrowly moral terms. (That would be to render it, indeed, "superstructural".) The point is that any such world must involve the extended set of conditions that render any consideration of individual and collective well-being, (or eudaimonia, "well-spiritedness"), possible. One way to consider the notion of political legitimacy is to reduce it to the minimum level of trust necessary to sustain any given set and level of social relations. If such trust can indeed be reduced to a minimum, then not only does a "political vacuum" open up, but the very insecurities, with their attendant anxieties and resentments, thereby engendered can be harnessed to that "vacuum" precisely through phantasmagorias of "trust". Without conflating it with totalitarianism, such an anti-political motivation,- (since the regulatory force of politics is conceived as inimical to the expansion of business interests),- has been part of the rightwing/corporate ascendancy over the last generation, whose fruits we are now in the process of reaping.

Thank you James for your thoughts on this calamity and those many links to other information/opinion. I am not too far from bilmon's state of being incapacitated by a decidedly 'Heart of Darkness' mood. Surely it will pass and I will be able to do more than commend you for the good work you do.

I am not too far from Billmon's state of being incapacitated by a decidedly 'Heart of Darkness' mood.

Yes. In my case, I'm looking at the political behavior of this country with a different attitude from Billmon's; he seems to believe, if I understand him correctly, that he thinks the policy that has to be abandoned to prevent a sort of "Polandization" of SW Asia is the occupation of Iraq. He formerly thought the Usonian national character wouldn't allow this, and now he thinks it would. He formerly thought the authorities of this nation were, however corrupt and vicious, not the totalitarian fanatics responsible for this sort of thing.

Unlike Billmon, I never harbored the thought, however furtively, that there was some sort of cultural distinction that spared us this capacity for cruelty. In fact, I doubt Billmon ever did either; I think he just supposed that, absent our own experience of defeat in WW1, Weimar hyperinflation, predatory foreign occupation, and so on, it was still a long ways off.

In fact, I've long suspected that our leaders are driven by a universal reluctance to accept that our industrial system is due for massive, sweeping, irreversible overhaul. Those days of the "blessed" lifestyle we all know so fondly, are really numbered.

My long dark crankcase of the soul comes from the sense that I personally am not emotionally robust enough to face this sort of truth. For, being as I am, I must either fling myself with all my strength at the danger, or be crushed with remorse that I did not. The really profound, spirit-crushing futility of insight is the thing that's got me, gentlemen.

I see that my reference to 'Heart of Darkness' did not lead to Bilmon's 'Karma' piece. No matter. His heart is in the right place like yours James and I'm not in the mood to make distinctions between your (and his) attitudes regarding America's political behavior. Too scholastic for me.
No, I'm in the mood for a primal scream.

No, I'm in the mood for a primal scream.

Word.