BOOKS
Who Took The Body Out Of The Body Politic?
There are many suspects. One is the press.
The Vanishing Voter: |
In the 1920 presidential race between the Republican Warren G. Harding and the Democrat James M. Cox, voter turnout hit an all-time low — 52 percent, a precipitous decline compared to the nineteenth century, when turnout typically exceeded 80 percent. The historians Arthur M. Schlesinger and Erik McKinley Eriksson sounded the alarm, deploring the "creeping paralysis, the apathetic attitude [that] has spread over the body politic."
Their wake-up call appeared in the October 15, 1924, issue of The New Republic under the title "The Vanishing Voter," which I found on a rainy day in the New York Public Library. "One trembles to contemplate the direction of this heart-line of democracy in future elections," Schlesinger and Eriksson wrote. After the long, hard fight for universal suffrage, the right to vote, which had been "so desirable when beyond reach, had become: ‘Like to the apples on the Dead Sea's shore; All ashes to the taste.'"
These days, America's voting problem is worse. The Bush-Gore election turnout in 2000 was 51 percent, a slight improvement over the even lower Clinton-Dole voter performance in 1996. The 2002 off-year turnout was a paltry 39 percent, and that was the highest in twenty years. Turnout for primaries ranks lower still. Moreover, voter participation by those age eighteen to twenty-four is in the 15 percent range and shrinking, an ominous indication for the future of our democratic governance. The United States today also has an alarming class gap in voter participation. The turnout rate at the bottom of the income and education scale is only half that of the top, a pattern unheard of in Europe and found elsewhere only in less developed countries.
Almost fourscore years after Schlesinger and Eriksson published their "Vanishing Voter" warning, a valuable new book of the same title, by Thomas E. Patterson, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, sounds the alarm once again. Patterson's concern that too many citizens still fail to vote and lack interest in their government is bolstered by impressive evidence gathered from 97,797 interviews, conducted throughout the 2000 presidential election campaign in an effort to find out how much attention people gave to what the candidates were saying — how much day-to-day involvement they had with the campaign, how much they thought and talked about the election, and how much they followed it in the news. The answer, it turned out, was not nearly enough.
Why does America's "heart-line of democracy" beat so faintly? One principal culprit, according to Patterson, is the increasingly poor campaign performance of the nation's press. He calls it the news media's "politics of anti-politics." He blames attack journalism, cynical reporters, shrinking radio and TV coverage, and the proliferation of nasty campaign commercials. In 1924, Schlesinger and Eriksson did not even mention the press as bearing any responsibility for the public's worrisome stay-at-home rate during elections. They put the primary blame squarely on the political parties and the candidates. "Stay-at-homers were relatively fewest," the historians wrote, "when sharp and exciting issues marked the campaigns," a fact that "runs counter to the common assumption [even then] that the average American is more interested in magnetic or spectacular personalities in politics than in basic principles." In past elections, where there were no clear-cut issues, compelling political personalities "left the electorate relatively unmoved."
The historians in 1924 also blamed the public's diminishing interest in politics on "the conditions of complex modern life . . . the frantic, overorganized, spectacular, urbanized, machine-driven world we live in today," which, they said, had the effect of pushing political campaigns from center stage to the sidelines. In earlier times, "a political rally had all the romance and dramatic interest of circus day and they celebrated the occasion with barbecues and torchlight processions. Voting was a diversion as well as a duty . . . and the relative merits of parties and platforms were discussed with keen zest."
Today, television is completing the job of crowding out politics and political campaigns. At first, the new medium was indeed the magic box that reawakened the public's engagement in civic affairs. It brought home to millions the excitement of gavel-to-gavel coverage of the presidential nominating conventions. Audiences were thrilled to see the first televised presidential debates in 1960. No one then could foresee that television's seductive sitcoms, pseudo-reality shows, sports, movies, action drama, soft news, and stock market reports would dethrone election campaigns as the nation's primary source of "sport and spectacle," which is how Alexis de Tocqueville described America's campaigns in the early eighteen hundreds.
The massive Vanishing Voter surveys in 2000 confirm the increasingly negative impact that today's media have on voter attitudes and participation. "‘Disgusted with politics' came out at the top of the nonregistrant list and second on the nonvoter list," Patterson writes, thanks in large measure to the media's negative, dismissive, self-aggrandizing, arrogant, aggressive, and diminishing coverage. In the 2000 campaign, for every minute that Bush and Gore were seen speaking on network news shows, the reporters covering them talked for six minutes.
Still, no matter how justified Patterson's harsh criticism is, the lion's share of the blame for voter apathy and absence belongs to the flaws in the election system itself, as Schlesinger and Eriksson wrote so presciently seventy-nine years ago. "No private commercial concern today is so careless of its public's good will," they said, "as is the government when it conducts an election." And Patterson in his book focuses on a laundry list of problems with the system: There are more House districts where incumbents run unopposed than have truly competitive elections. Flagrant political gerrymandering distorts election districts and drains races of competition, the lifeblood of politics. Professional consultants turn campaigns into mud-throwing contests in which too much money chases too few votes. Sharp issues have their edges ground down in order not to offend designated constituencies. Candidates are advised to bury their own clear convictions in the effort to capture undecided voters. Registration is still too difficult in most states. The Electoral College virtually cuts voters out of the campaigns in "safe" states and distorts the end result. And campaigns last so long they produce apathy and voter fatigue.
Patterson's clearly written book offers a menu of sound, if somewhat predictable measures to help solve these problems: Abandon the Electoral College. Turn Election Day into a national holiday. Allow same-day voter registration. Encourage journalists to talk less. Reserve a good deal of free airtime for candidate debates, candidate interviews, and candidate messages. Tone down journalistic cynicism and preening. Shorten election campaigns to reduce the tedium factor. Unfortunately, it is unlikely we'll see any of these reforms happen in our lifetime.
Schlesinger and Eriksson had a sense of urgency about the public's declining civic engagement back in 1924. "No stone should be left unturned to develop a spirit of dynamic citizenship and to cure those conditions which are basic causes," they wrote. They pleaded for "clearly defined issues" to restore drama and public interest to politics. "The schools can do much more . . . . The press, the radio, the pulpit, the universities, the labor unions, the chambers of commerce . . . must work as never before with the conscious purpose of restoring politics to its position as one of the major concerns of American life . . . . If the people cannot be cajoled or coerced into taking an interest in their own government," they concluded, "the United States will be confronted with a still more serious problem, that of refashioning the government along lines that will . . . violate many cherished historic ideals of the nation."
Almost a century later, Patterson makes the same plea. How much longer can the world's leading democracy continue to function as a democracy while so many of its voters vanish and so many of its citizens ignore the affairs of their own government?
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