Tuesday, June 12, 2012

The Central Problem of American Democracy

As in communities across the country, we had an election here on June 5th in San Luis Obispo County.  Thirty-nine percent of registered voters actually cast ballots.  This means that just over 19.5% could have determined who the next County Supervisor will be in a given district, or whether or not a proposition imposing a tax on cigarettes passes.  The news wasn't much better across the state or across the country.

If you go all the way back to 1960 and look at turnout in Presidential elections, the highest turnout
was in 1960, the year JFK was elected.  The fact that he was a Catholic was a big controversy back then.  In fact, it may have been the central controversy of the election.  An awful lot of people got riled up.  You'd think, then, that perhaps the turnout was above 75% or even higher.  But no, it was
just above 63%.  In our most recent Presidential election in which the first individual of African-American heritage was a candidate--another point of controversy--the turnout was just above 58%.
You have to wonder what it would take for our turnout to rise above 70%.

When you look at these numbers, you can't resist the basic arithmetic that less than 30% of the registered voters in America can determine who becomes President, what kind of economic policy will be put forward, what kind of foreign policy, who is likely to sit on the Supreme Court, immigration policy, education policy--and other matters of great consequence to every living person in this country...and in most of the world.  And that 30% does not even have to be informed.  It only has to be motivated.  Given the absurd amounts of money allowed to be legally pumped into our political system, it is not hard for corporate or other interests to sway with marketing and advertising just enough people to carry an election, with the same kind of approach used by agencies that represent food, detergent, cars and technology companies--short, catchy phrases and flashy images that have little or nothing to do with the challenge of making a sound voting decision.

Since 9/11, it has become fashionable to make fun of the French.  But the French just had an election for their top position and the turnout was above 70%!  In Peru, the turnout generally runs upwards of 95% because you cannot get a driver's license if you don't vote.  Over the last year, we have regularly seen the looks of joy and the huge turnouts in countries in the Arab world exercising real voting rights for the first time.

I could marshal more examples but I think the point is pretty obvious.  We trumpet to the world that we are its greatest democracy yet a large segment of our citizenry is, for various reasons, asleep at the wheel or willfully not participating.  So when you feel like screaming at the people in your local government, or in your statehouse or in Washington, think again.  If you're going to talk to anyone, maybe it should be the neighbors or friends who tell you they never vote.  After our 2000 Presidential election, who can claim that votes don't matter?  How can we have a government of, by and for the people when the people don't vote?  What does it say about a person's integrity if they fail to vote but love to complain about the way things are going?  Even worse, what does it say about a person's integrity if they have never voted and then run for office, as happened in the last gubernatorial
election in California?

Obviously, it is also important that we cast informed votes, that we actually relish the responsibility of learning about what is going on in our country and voting for real people rather than deeply wounded people with grandiose dreams of self-gratification, and for real issues rather than those pumped up by special interests. When you look at the kind of people our founding fathers and mothers were, it is easy to imagine that their vision of America two or three hundred years after the Declaration of Independence was a society of highly engaged, fully informed, community-focused individuals reveling in their freedom, exercising it robustly and spending much of their leisure time in discourse and actions with friends and neighbors designed to make the common good even better. Given that they were thoughtful, educated people, we can imagine their thinking of our future much like the grand discussions in the Greek polis of ancient times--the original democracy--where all the men (alas, even the Greeks had not discovered equal rights) were vitally engaged in discourse that was passionate yet civil.  In my own nearly two-year experience on an Israeli kibbutz, in my early twenties, I saw this in action only with women fully empowered.  The "asifa" was the meeting of all adults in the community.  There were brilliant, articulate debates over what served the greater good. 
I'm not saying it was perfect.  After all, the members were human.  But by and large, this was exactly the kind of respectful, committed engagement our founders must have dreamed.

For the moment, I leave it to you to think about why a significant portion of our populace does not vote.  No doubt, there are different reasons for different segments that may have to do with socioeconomics as well as educational, religious and cultural factors.

But how do we avoid the conclusion that the lack of informed participation in American democracy is our great hypocrisy and great shame?  Do we think the rest of the world doesn't see this?  More importantly, this failure to fully engage is probably the prime contributor to the conviction many of us have that the citizenry does not control the nation's destiny in today's America, that we are certainly not being led by the best and the brightest our society can produce and that our national ethos and essence are gradually leaking away into the sands of history.  To put it more bluntly, there is an old saying, "Use it or lose it."  We're not using it, so we're losing it.

C 2012 Bob Kamm