My predecessor as Web Editor at the Washington Monthly, Ryan Cooper, has a book review in the latest issue of the magazine. He takes a look at the work of political scientists Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox: Running from Office: Why Young Americans Are Turned Off to Politics.
Generally speaking, he wasn’t too impressed with the book. Mainly, this is because he believes the authors have misdiagnosed the problem. To begin with, young people are always less politically engaged than their elders, so where’s the evidence that the Millennials are less engaged than previous generations? More to the point, though, widespread disenchantment with contemporary politics isn’t restricted to any particular age group, and the cause is not so much hyper partisanship or stupid media coverage or ridiculous campaign finance laws. The problem is the Republican Party.
The problem with parliamentary-style politics in America is that, most of the time, our national political structure requires a great deal of compromise to function at all. Periods of single-party rule, as in 2009-10 when Democrats controlled the House, Senate, and presidency, are very rare.
When it comes to ideological struggle, Republicans are far, far ahead in organization and political coherence, and they have used it to hold up the Democrats at every turn. Literally on the night Obama was inaugurated, Republicans pledged to conduct a campaign of maximal obstruction, and proceeded to obliterate the previous record for Senate filibusters. That hysterical partisanship has not been simple childishness from Republicans, but a conscious political strategy to create dysfunction for which they would not be blamed.
Given all of this, the bitter dysfunction and negative media coverage documented by Lawless and Fox are by and large the product of ideological struggle rather than some extra-political and cultural happening. It’s what occurs when a unified, disciplined, ruthless party operates in a presidential democracy that was carefully constructed to require lots of compromise.
That strategy is indeed worrisome—it led Republicans to repeatedly threaten national default to obtain policy concessions—but short of amending the Constitution, there won’t be any changing it.
Nonetheless, Cooper found at least one gem in the book.
The authors do, however, offer one rather interesting proposal: creating an app that would contain a comprehensive database of all political offices throughout the nation. One major barrier to young people’s entry into the American political system is its sheer scale and complexity, and such an app could be extremely handy for political organizing and make it easier for this cohort to engage in politics.
At some point, Millennials will run for office and even hold most of the offices in this country. I won’t be surprised if they build new tools, including cool apps, to assist them in their tasks. What would benefit them more than anything else, though, is not having to deal with a nihilistic and aggressively obstructionist party that doesn’t want the government to do anything. So, Millennials’ first task, if they want good, interesting, government, is to overwhelm the conservatives at the polls.
Cooper gets that, even if the authors of this book do not.
The problem is not that we have the wrong kind of politics.
The problem is that we have too much politics.
Your conclusion is pretty close to the opposite of Cooper’s.
My point was that numerous areas of life that ought to be free from politics have become contaminated by it: law, medicine, science, the arts. This is the real hallmark of totalitarianism. The problem is not that “faction X has too much power” or “faction X has a bad pseudophilosophy”: the problem is that there are factions. This is unsurvivable.
we’ve survived factions for over 200 years, why is this time any different?
We didn’t survive.
since I’m typing this, I tend to disagree
Actually, I agree in part. In the sense that at least at the national level there is too much focus on the politics of everything and it just turns even committed voters off. Therefore the only folks who go to the polls are far more likely to be older voters like me who have an ingrained habit of voting.
Making it easier to vote will help and a national election day is certainly one way to increase voter participation. Good luck with that, though, with the GOP. They will never willingly make it easier to vote.
Yes, voting is a habit. One shared by that minority of the population that shows up for every local and state primary and general election. One factor that reduces voter participation in local elections is the high mobility rate of Americans. One doesn’t acquire a knowledge of local political issues and investment in a local community quickly. Add in the fact that a high percentage of local communities have always been or have been made economically unstable which in turn forces many to move out of the community.
Presidential elections have become simplified to personality contests with a few issues thrown in to sway the less rigidly partisan voters. Issues that seemingly anyone can grasp. (Although most don’t have anywhere near a full grasp of them.) Thus, voter participation rates are higher in presidential general elections (by more than 10% and as much as 20% higher).
that and there are way too many election days
all elections should be folded into federal election years
State and local elections are held in off years so that the focus can be on state/local issues and candidates and not have those drowned out by national issues.
A bigger problem is elections with only one candidate.
I know why it happens the way it does, but it doesn’t work. If we can focus on all the candidates every 2 years it will work better.
If mid-terms are low turnout, local elections are so much worse
Most people only concentrate on President.
what point are you arguing?
That throwing everything from President to Mayor and County Board on one ballot is a bad idea. The public doesn’t have enough attention span.
In that vein, what do you do with that list of 170 judges up for retention?
I would at least want more people to have the choice. It’s easier to get people to polls when federal offices are on the ballot. The small amount of people who vote in local elections doesn’t allow for representative government. It just doesn’t.
It will be up to candidates to educate the voters
Everybody complains about their local government but nobody does anything about. One party local government is everywhere. In my town this year the ruling party even had trouble filling all the Trustee ballot positions. No, I didn’t vote. There were no ballot propositions and no opposition to anything.
Why didn’t I file and run for one of those Trustee positions? I’m no politician. I’d pull a Grayson for sure and get myself evicted from chambers.
Not about a limited attention span — it’s that Presidential elections suck up most of the political oxygen for two year. After which time everyone is politically exhausted.
Isn’t that another way of saying the same thing?
Not really. If public attention for presidential politics were limited to a few weeks — say eight for the primaries and six for the general — we’d have more time and mental space to pay attention to all the local elections that take place in the three non-presidential election years.
Many states had two-year gubernatorial terms and increased them to four only relatively recently — Arkansas in 1984, Kansas in 1974, Texas in 1972, Massachusetts in 1966, Maine in 1963, Ohio in ’57, Connecticut in ’48, New York in ’38. And of course all those states, plus others, were electing their lower houses biennially all along.
The mid-term election we know and love is a relatively recent phenomenon.
If forty years ago is recent.
The 18-year old vote is equally recent, or ‘recent’.
From EJ Dionne, in Why Americans Hate Politics:
Same as it ever was.
A re-write:
While Americans battled over the religious Right, Chinese industrialists won ever larger shares of the American market. While Left and Right argued about the Confederate Flag, the average take-home pay of all Americans stagnated. While Michael Dukakis and George Bush discussed Gay Marriage and whether a baker should be able to discriminate against a gay couple, the savings and loan industry moved inexorably toward collapse. While politicians screamed at each other about Commor Core, more and more children were being born into an urban underclass whose life chances were dismal. . . . While veterans of 911 continued to debate the meaning of the Iraq war, The Middle East neared collapsed and a new world–probably more dangerous and certainly less predictable than the old–was born.
Recasting the dysfunction of our 2-party political system as a growth opportunity for Silicon Valley is absurd. Want to boost participation with something innovative: a federal election holiday.
Strange, I seldom, if ever see reference made to running for office on the local level for first time candidates. My former state senator was one of the most respected and effective state legislators for years until she was gerrymandered out of office. She had served county government as elected auditor for several terms prior. Starting at the county level is easier, a helluvalot cheaper and leaves a person with invaluable experience in the reality of day to day politics. Also, the pay and benefits are usually not too bad. There are other rewards too. How’d you like to drive by the neighborhood fire station, library or school and be able to say to yourself, I helped build that?
As for the nifty new tech stuff, I’ll be test driving Nation Builder this summer for the local Democratic party.
You and I seem to have gotten on the same page. The weakness of local politics and voter participation. But it’s complicated.
This LATimes article — San Bernardino: Broken City — hints at how goo-goo local government is a long-term proposition. That a good guy like Patrick Morris as Mayor couldn’t reverse the rot promulgated through decades of bad (visionless) government.
Living here in a county where we have a 70%-30% disadvantage, it’s nearly a Sisyphean task to find anyone willing to consider running as an identified Democrat in local elections. Those who do are generally lucky to break out of the 20th percentile when the final votes are tallied. But we still get people who are willing to put themselves out there. At this juncture, it is just as important that people simply see and maybe become more accustomed to just seeing someone on the local ballot with “D” next to their name. This helps raise the profile of the local party and tells those closet Democrats out there that they are not alone; that there are other Democrats around them. In situations like we have, one has to take the long view of local politics, and recognize that the first step toward electing Democrats is getting the attention of those around you that the other side does not have a monopoly on the political landscape.
Millennials will be assholes like every generation before them. They will pay no attention to history and think they discovered Truth all by themselves. They will fall for every hackneyed cliche fed by cynical politicians. In short, they will be human beings.
Wake Up!
The reason politics is boring IS the GOP. But the reason why the GOP is so toxic is that they are at bottom anarchists. The modern GOP is devoted to the idea that collective, community action is not legitimate.
They keep telling us they want to drown government in the bathtub. Our failure to respond to their declared aims will, just as in the 1850s, lead the nation into cataclysm. They are simply hellbent on destroying the notion of government any way they can, and we’re fooling around with tax credits for community college. Our programs and policies are fine, but aren’t going to stop these people. We must speak to their ideas (as Sanders seems to) if we want to avert disaster.
I often think ‘politics’ is something that mostly doesn’t matter to most people most of the time. But boy howdy! when it DOES matter, it’s life-and-death…