A Golden Age That Never Was; DOWNSIZING DEMOCRACY; HOW AMERICA SIDELINED ITS CITIZENS AND PRIVATIZED ITS PUBLIC by Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg; WHERE HAVE ALL THE VOTERS GONE? by Martin P. Wattenberg

In: Dissent: a journal devoted to radical ideas and the values of socialism and democracy, Band 50, Heft 2, S. 104

Abstract

On this shaky foundation they propound a thesis at least a little more promising. It is that America's elites have lately learned that they can conquer the world without bothering about citizens at all. 'In one public setting after another,' Crenson and Ginsberg write, 'government disaggregates the public into a mass of individual clients, consumers, and contributors,' leading to 'new and nonparticipatory ways of doing business.' Elites have exploited that development to counter a structural flaw within the old model: namely, that a mobilized citizenry cannot be controlled. With pesky citizens out of the way, the powerful can defend their interests in less risky ways--in courtrooms, 'by manipulating administrative procedures,' through privatization. Citizens are left subject to a 'personal democracy' of individual access to government services and redress--which is, to these authors, always bad. This is a bit of a creepy theory as well. Because personal democracy is not all bad, any more than their golden age was all good. Not as ridiculous as when they move on to the true villains of the piece: you and me. Their account of the post-Progressive progressives begins with a mangled and bizarre genealogy of what they think describes the 'New Politics' of the late sixties and after. In actuality, the New Politics was a failed attempt at electoral realignment--the recognition and mobilization of a potential new political majority in which a new class of humanistic professionals made up but one part, alongside minorities, disillusioned youth, the new public service unions, and so on. Crenson and Ginsberg instead remember the New Politics as a greedy, antidemocratic cartel. Post-sixties, the American government become more and more the plaything of issue-driven ideological entrepreneurs, funded by the Ford Foundation, whose only true constituency was a media elite that disastrously fell for their specious claim to speak for the 'public interest,' and whose only accomplishment was 'the delegation of government tasks and public funds to nongovernmental institutions likely to be staffed by fellow practitioners of the New Politics--nonprofit social service agencies, legal services clinics, public interest law firms, and the like.' These are today's democracy-downsizing elites: 'Having established their political influence ... the liberal heirs of the New Politics were understandably reluctant to place it at risk by issuing appeals for mass activism. They were likely to flourish politically in a low-turnout environment.' Other parts of his research focus on the United States. The stuff on the effect of negative ads is great. The favorite plaint among politicians is that such ads depress turnout (the bromide serves them well because it focuses attention away from the cracks in the political system itself). Wattenberg proves that the very premise is drivel: The most-cited work on the subject is based on controlled experiments, not actual election data--which in fact shows that the more respondents remember ads, the higher their turnout is. Also impressive is his debunking of the argument, presented, among other places, in these pages by Ruy Teixeira, that greater turnout wouldn't help the Democrats and the left generally. The problem with studies propounding this conclusion, Wattenberg demonstrates, is that they overgeneralize from presidential election years, where a big electorate more closely matches the actual opinions of the general population. But it is the low-turnout ones in between where non-voting distorts ideology the most. In 1994, 30 percent of people without high school diplomas voted compared to 62 percent with college degrees; 'If turnout rates had been equal among all education categories,' Wattenberg concludes, 'the Republican share of the vote would have fallen from 52.0 percent to 49.2 percent'--for 'registered nonvoters in 1994 were consistently more pro-Democratic than were voters on a variety of measures of partisanship.' It's an argument with a bonus: armed with it, you get to credit not Dick Morris for Clinton's 1996 reelection but simply a routine increase in turnout from 1994.