My day

Is our democracy in its final days?

The twilight of the New Deal

By the time I joined the Democratic Party in the early nineteen eighties, the long-term New Deal consensus, in spite of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society initiatives, was badly frayed.

The conservative and racist ideology that had led white southerners to oppose Roosevelt's programs lived on in enough of their political descendants to help Republicans pass Reagan's agenda, turning Johnson's War on Poverty into a War on the Poor. In the twenty-four years from 1968 to 1992, the Democrats suffered defeat after defeat, the presidency of Jimmy Carter, a conservative, southern Democrat, the only interlude. When the Democratic Leadership Council, the corporate wing of the Party, rose to dominance, it sponsored Bill Clinton, who became the DLC's first president.

The most important election statistics, of course, are the ones that tell us who won, but looking at how many people actually voted also reveals vital information. In 1960, 63.1% of voting-age Americans participated in the election that put Kennedy in the Oval Office. By 1984, the turnout was down to 53.1%. The fact that 46.9% of the voting-age population didn't go to the polls meant that Reagan had actually been re-elected by less than a third of the adult population. Drop-off continued. In 1996, it fell to 49%. In 2000, the figures edged up over the fifty percent mark to 51% and to 55.3% in 2004. The 56.8% that was regarded as a stunning figure in the 2008 election looks rather anemic beside the 1960 figure.

In Bowling Alone, Robert D. Putnam, a public policy expert, takes stock of a decline not only in civic participation but also in social activities as well. He writes, "For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago - silently, without warning - that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current. Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of the century."

How did this "rip current" affect political activity? Putnam answers, "On the positive side of the ledger, Americans today score about as well on a civics test as our parents and grandparents did, though our self-congratulation should be restrained, since we have on average four more years of formal schooling than they had. Moreover, at election time we are no less likely than they were to talk politics or express interest in the campaign. On the other hand, since the mid-1960s, the weight of the evidence suggests that we Americans, despite the rapid rise in levels of education, have become perhaps 10-15 percent less likely to voice our views publicly by running for office or writing Congress or the local newspaper, 15-20 percent less interested in politics and public affairs, roughly 25 percent less likely to vote, roughly 35 percent less likely to attend public meetings, both partisan and nonpartisan, and roughly 40 percent less engaged in party politics and indeed in political and civic organizations of all sorts. We remain, in short, reasonably well-informed spectators of public affairs (italics mine), but many fewer of us actually partake in the game."

Putnam concluded, "The rise of electronic communications and entertainment is one of the most powerful social trends of the twentieth century. In important respects this revolution has lightened our souls and enlightened our minds, but it has also rendered our leisure more private and passive."

He goes on, "The apotheosis of these trends can be found, most improbably, at the Holiday Bowling Lanes in New London, Connecticut. Mounted above each lane is a giant television screen displaying the evening's TV fare. Even on a full night of league play team members are no longer in lively conversation with one another about the day's events, public and private. Instead each stares silently at the screen while awaiting his or her turn. Even while bowling together, they are watching alone."

A sociological theory more fully explains the political malaise that Putnam uncovered. A phenomenon called "the iron law of oligarchy" fosters a divide that comes about between a political party's leaders and its adherents. According to this law, "once parties move beyond the fluid participatory structures that often accompany their formation, they inevitably become more bureaucratic and more centrally controlled, falling under the domination of a professional leadership. In this process the original goals . . . may also be replaced by more narrowly instrumental goals, including a concern for the maintenance of the organization."

It is not hard to make the case that the Democratic Party has fallen victim to the problems described above. Here in Massachusetts, the chairs of local committees are routinely told that their only task is to elect Democrats. Although delegates to both state and national conventions endorse platforms, the real agenda is fashioned in private between legislative leaders and the well-heeled lobbyists of the corporate elite.

Robert Michels, the German sociologist who developed this theory in the early 1900s, named three factors as key to what he believed was an inevitable development for political parties. One is the organization's "need to maintain an effective fighting machine," which eventually "develops its own vested interests and is able to control agenda and communications, manage internal opposition, etc."

He pointed out that a second factor, the characteristics of leaders, played a part, too. "They may be gifted orators, relish the psychic rewards of leadership, come to share the motivations and interests of a wider political elite, and thus tend to cling to power at all costs."

But the third component, the psychological transformation of the core constituency, is the most devastating to democracy: "the rank and file members of political organizations tend to be apathetic, are willing to be led, are readily swayed by mass oratory, and venerate the leadership."

Political parties are not the only groups that succumb to the iron law of oligarchy. As Michels pointed out, unions, too, fall under its sway. Many of us can also see that social movements tend to follow this pattern as well as civic organizations. Over time, the core constituencies in union locals, grassroots groups, and membership organizations become rubber stamps rather than forces that drive the action at the top.

In 1989, looking back over the nineteen eighties, William Winpisinger, retired president of the International Association of Machinists, wrote, "At the top, the Democrats demonstrated how far they had moved to the right by their determination to compete for the same 26 percent of the electorate that the Republicans represent." Winpisinger added, "Someone must speak for the other 74 percent." Clinton signaled whom it was he spoke for when he pushed NAFTA through Congress in 1993.

Now the Party, bankrolled even more by corporate interests, has increasingly ceased to work to fulfill the needs of grassroots America. Led by Barack Obama, Congress bailed out corporate America but left average Americans on their own when it came to dealing with dire financial problems created by Wall Street.

Politics is not a spectator sport. It is not, of course, a sport at all - or a pastime - or a hobby. It is a civic obligation, a responsibility of every citizen in a democracy. In fact, democracy is exercised through politics.

Alienation from the larger world is a dagger straight to the heart of a democratic society. Only a consciousness among all of us that the struggle for power is ongoing can prevent democracy from being stifled and gradually forgotten.