Profile Richard Crossman

"THAT'S THE fate of the iconoclast-you can be used to defend precisely the evils you are attacking, mused the R?. Hon Richard Crossman, Cabinet minister and former Oxford classicist, "It's the bump of irreverence which saves you." So broke off the most subersive sentence ever uttered by a Godkin Lecturer as its author paced around his suite in the Dana Reed House last Wednesday. It indicated the agnostic flavor so prominent in this year's Godkin series, modestly entitled "Bagehot Revisited."

The bump of irreverence, accorded only to Walter Bagehot and J. Kenneth Galbraith is Crossman's highest accolade for a mortal. He apears at first to be a genial but waspish don. He has attached his name to a string of monographs and collected essays- Plato Today. The God That Failed, New Fabian Essays. and The Government and the Governed. His current identity as one of the most powerful politicians in the Wilson Cabinet pokes through the do??sb mannerisms: the gray hair parts in the middle, the glasses slide down his nose, the fingers clench in good podium style, the wrinkles of the mouth detect a sly grin. The Opposition must think him a sassy socialist.

This celebrated legatee of the Fabian Left tradition calls himself "a socialist but not a determinist" and confesses his "primary interest in power problems" He shed with relief the academic life to become a party professional after the War. "The Labour Party has been my life since 1957 (when Gaitskell died) I adore it. Before '57, I was in exile on the left wing of the party during the ascendancy of A?? and Gaitskell. For 19 years. I quarreled with the leadership."

Appropriately enough, then, Richard Crossman has become a power theorist. The Godkin Lectures glorified the consolidation in the British polity, but they cast a wistful sidelong glance at the American courts and Constitution. "The British need more rule of law, not less." Corpsman wished to clarify the advantages of the federal system and written constitutions. Laws and courts could defend the public from a grasping bureaucracy.

In Britain, the minister himself takes on this judicial function and polices his own department. Though he was once responsible to Parliament for his conduct, the party system ended that. Only the remote possibility that he would harm the party's success in the next general claxon would deter his abuses.

A judicial check on power Crossman would approve, but never a legislative one. Here his case for the separation of powers stops short, for a legislature gets in the way. Washington political life would be "absolutely unbearable" for Crossman-too much fragmented power. The weakness of the two-party system suggests also a larger futility to American politics. "The one advantage of British politics." he argued, "is the ideological flavor to party divisions. That ideological dimension is missing here, and I wouldn't be in politics without it."

According to Crossman, the basic decisions of British government occur in party conclaves. Congress makes policy, but Parliament simply registers the program of the party in power. "Some people still regard the House of Commons as if it could do things." he said. "But the Commons is merely the place where things happen. Nothing we do there alters the program. Good, bad, or indifferent, the whole mandate is carried out line by line."

THIS FUSION of powers-the "efficient secret" which Crossman finds so admirable-leaves the British people defenseless before the government. No Supreme Court, no legislature. The voter must count upon the ideology of the governing party. The heavy programmatic content of British politics, said Crossman, rescues the ministry from the amoral exercise of power. The Godkin Lectures keyed on personal and party power: the ideological restrictions on its use seemed almost an after-thought. But in The New Fabiun Essays, Crossman analyzed the pitfalls of pragmatism. It is direction-less-ideology begins where pragmatism fails. He could say, therefore, without embarrassment: "I love power, but power to do something."

Ideology seems like a 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" and an alarming distaste for constitutional limits on executive power.

By "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.

Far 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 of the voters and the party leadership."

His skepticism of the masses, justified somewhat, wrote off the surest (if slowest) engine of social change. Even if programs come out of a vacuum, they still require public cooperation to make an impact. A broader perspective on power would include society-how societal constraint and 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.

As a member of the Cabinet since 1964, Crossman has grown old comfortably with the party nexus of Labour infighting. In the party, not in Parliament or on the hustings, he established his political prominence-"climbing up the scale of preferment" since 1957. He runs in a wonderfully safe district, which "would elect the backend of a jackass" if it wore the Labour label. "It's a very humbling thought," added Crossman. "They're not voting for me, they're voting for the machine. That is what left wing politics is all about."

Crossman's evaluation of power politics reflects his own successful career. "Of course, you need luck to make it. If Gaitskell hadn't died. I would be very embittered about the system. I'd have spent my life being a Left wing critic."

He was puzzling on this point last Wednesday in the Dana Reed House. "Of course, the Left will accuse you of selling out. They should." Long pause, then a malicious grin. "What I stand for at age 63. I would hardly expect from myself if I were 20."