Four More Years of Richard Perle?

As a social anthropologist I observed the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the rise of powerful, close-knit circles that filled the leadership vacuum and seized large chunks of state-owned wealth. These exclusive groups resemble the neoconservative or "neocon" core of 10 or so players who helped push the United States into Iraq. The rise of this neocon power circle – and its continued prominence within and without the second-term Bush administration – signals troubling changes in American governing and policymaking.

The Eastern European former apparatchiks and the American neocons share many characteristics. They specialize in blurring state and private interests and spheres. They are skilled at skirting both the government's rules of accountability and business codes of competition. They have created new norms that make bureaucracy more like business and business more contingent on government.

In "The Power Elite," written a half century ago, C. Wright Mills noted that three interlocking prongs of power – corporations, the military and the political elite – were diminishing the authority of elected officials. That trend is stronger today. The outsourcing and privatization of government functions in the name of efficiency and cost savings have led to the delegation of more authority to private entities and new opportunities for strategically placed groups of actors to co-opt public policy agendas.

This was certainly the case in Eastern Europe. After the revolutions of 1989, when states began divesting themselves of state-owned resources, informal groups worked in and around the crumbling systems to grab state-owned firms and other resources at fire-sale prices. Players soon learned that wearing multiple hats was the most effective modus operandi. In Poland, officials often presented visitors with two or more sets of calling cards – their official government ones, and cards naming their position in an NGO or consulting firm, sometimes even one that did business with the public office they headed. Schooled under communism in dodging the overbearing state, "mafias" and "clans" positioned themselves at the state-private nexus of activity to mold the emerging system to their advantage.

I call these exclusive, informal factions "flex groups," for their ease in playing multiple and overlapping roles and conflating state and private interests. These players keep appearing in different incarnations, ensuring continuity even as their operating environments change.

The flex groups' activity in unraveling communist states was more intense than in stable societies such as the United States. However, with the outsourcing of government functions flex players are now becoming a fixture in American politics, too. Today, consulting firms, NGOs, think tanks and public-private partnerships are doing more of the work of government than do civil servants. They write budgets, manage other contractors and make and implement policy. While government contracts are on the rise, driven in part by the demand for military, nation-building and homeland security services, the number of civil servants available to oversee them is falling. Clinton-era efforts to streamline bureaucracy have further decreased the government's oversight capacity.

The resulting labyrinth presents openings for flex groups to co-opt public policy portfolios and dilute effective monitoring and study of alternative policies. It also makes the flex group mode of operating attractive to an impatient administration. Cohesion and activism make it effective and an asset to a president, except when it becomes a liability. The neocon core, with a long-held strategy for American policy toward the Middle East, had just such an appeal. The group not only had goals that coincided with those of the Bush II administration, it also had a ready-made strategy to achieve them.