In Print: Center Stage By Gary C. Woodward

The United States is one of the world’s great open societies. But it is also a nation with relatively low levels of political interest and participation. Millions of Americans simply opt out of participating or even observing the political process. We declare “landslides” when less than 30 percent of eligible voters bother to cast their ballots. And party identification and activism is at an all-time low, replaced in part by relatively small cores of activists and others motivated by single issues, such as abortion, tax reduction, or gun control. Even with relatively high levels of grassroots activism in the intensely fought election of 2004, just under 60 percent of eligible citizens showed up to vote. As Murray Edelman has noted, “nonvoters constitute a larger political grouping in America than the adherents of any political party.”

A study by the Pew Research Center at the start of the 2004 campaign season provided some sobering conclusions about the state of the nation’s polis. Focusing specifically on news usage by a cross section of Americans, the center’s findings confirmed a stark level of disengagement:

There are many explanations to account for this paradox of low interest in a time of informational richness. The parties themselves may be reluctant to expand the voter base beyond specific target groups. But the most frequently cited reason is that Americans feel unempowered. With politics a distant mediated reality, many citizens seem to feel like spectators curtained behind a glass wall. By defining politics as conflict among parties, professional politicians, and “special interests,” we have seemingly stripped away a sense of direct membership in a larger community. We are not citizens but “targets” to be motivated with self-serving political ads and direct mail appeals. Our vote is often understood as simply a confirmation of prior polling. And, depending on which member of television’s “chattering classes” is talking, we have been either “duped” or “educated” on the issues. With voting treated as just another form of manipulated consumer behavior, it is little wonder that many do not find it rewarding. As Don Slater notes, “The political sphere, it is frequently argued, has given ground to the private sphere as the place in which questions of purpose and meaning are pursued, and this private sphere is in turn dominated by an essentially consumerist self-understanding: We come to relate self to society through notions of private choice among needs-satisfying commodities.”

From this perspective, questions of the “public good”—what is useful for the larger society—are often ignored in favor of materialist and personal standards. Needs tend to trump social “goods” as determinants of attention of inattention, involvement, or disinterest. In a political campaign, relevant appeals are based on what a politician can do for the voter, not for the society. Hence, the stock query issued by a challenger in a political campaign “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” assumes that self-interest is the primary measure of civic virtue. Such political narcissism accounts for the near-exclusion of issues from our public discourse that are not directly anchored to the holy grail of tax reduction. Tax policy is especially governed by a ruthless vehemence that makes even the most cash-starved governor the Antichrist for even suggesting new forms of “revenue enhancement.”

We are cynical for other reasons. In 2000, a muddled electoral system in Florida and elsewhere failed to yield a clear presidential victor. The anomaly of the Electoral College system gave the second-highest vote getter the White House, sending the candidate with the largest plurality home. In addition, increasingly rapid cycles of governmental activism and inaction, accompanied by their corresponding rhetorics of hope or despair, have left a majority of Americans with doubts about the abilities of civil institutions in general and the federal government in particular “to do what is right.” Jimmy Carter campaigned in 1976 on the hopeful theme that he would produce “a government as good as its people.” Ronald Reagan defeated him four years later by noting that government itself was the problem. And, although that was not the view of Bill Clinton, Reagan’s distrust of government again became the official norm after 2000.

This distrust of government is fueled by the common idea that organizational units—ranging from governments to corporations—are fundamentally flawed. It is an article of faith today that organizations in postindustrial society are usually inadequate to the task of addressing problems that are subtle and complex. When was the last time you saw a film or television program that featured solutions to life’s problems managed by an organization? ... [C]haracters in prime-time melodrama must typically be the agents of their own salvation.

Similarly, governmental and corporate bureaucracies have been analyzed, deconstructed, and dismissed as necessary but imperfect vestiges of advanced societies. They are the ones held responsible for voting tally miscounts, corrupt investment funds, and $100 screws built into $25 million airplanes. Exceptions are made for innovators and groups that have bucked the tide: the federal government’s Head Start program; Internet giants eBay, Google, and Amazon. But few Americans are willing to be counted as defenders of organizational life—a fact that feeds an antigovernmental bias and undermines the credibility of most political discourse.

Journalists in particular are perceived to have their own problems. Most studies of American confidence in key institutions place national journalists in the cellar with lawyers, behind even Congress and state government. Low levels of credibility are reflected in what appears to be an endless and largely futile debate about the alleged political biases of specific outlets. The titles of recent best sellers indicate this trend, ranging from Bernard Goldberg’s Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distorts the News to Eric Alterman’s What Liberal Media? The Truth about Bias and the News. Many Americans probably also sense that most popular television outlets have placed their news operations in the uncomfortable position of pandering for audience ratings while trying to address the nation’s informational needs. Every time a morning news show “shills” for its own network’s latest reality series, the message is received.

For the restless viewer, all content tends to be measured by its ability to conform to its imperatives for visual stimulation and amusement. Postman has noted that “entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television.” Americans are “the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.” Anyone who has observed an otherwise thoughtful politician trying to form a thirty-second campaign message or seven-second sound bite senses the problem. In the world of television, political agents must compete with a funhouse of clowns, fools, singers, aliens, and talk show confessors. An earnest discourse of ideas is easily ignored by distracted viewers used to entertainment that alternately rewards the trivial and punishes introspection.

There are no easy remedies for the decline of confidence in American political institutions. Influential observers such as Schudson see some compensating advances, such as less dependence on political parties in favor of activists motivated by specific issues. But... a number of patterns that contribute to public suspicions are firmly entrenched, including the deep partisanship of Congress and the tendency by the press to report political messages in terms of their strategic objectives rather than their substance.

The Decision to Opt Out