Political interest also carries over to engagement in community affairs. In 2004, 35 percent of the most politically interested Americans said they had attended a meeting about an issue affecting their local community, double the percentage among the apathetic. Slightly under one-fifth of apathetic Americans in 2004 said they had worked on a community problem in the previous year, compared to nearly two-fifths of those who were most interested in public affairs.

Political interest also enhances knowledge of public affairs, which political scientists such as the University of Michigan’s Philip Converse and political theorists such as the University of Maryland’s William Galston think is vital to democracy. In 2004, for example, nearly four-fifths of the politically interested knew the GOP was the majority party in the House of Representatives before the voting, compared to roughly a third of the apathetic. Three-quarters of the politically interested also knew the GOP controlled the Senate before the elections, compared to just over a fourth of the apathetic. Over half the politically attentive knew William Rehnquist was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, compared to just over a tenth of the apathetic.

If one can easily point to the salubrious effects of political interest, why write positively about apathy? There are several reasons, but chief among them is that, as the British scholar W. H. Morris-Jones noted over half a century ago, the expectation that people should be intensely concerned with political matters belongs “to the totalitarian camp and . . . [is] out of place in the vocabulary of liberal democracy.”

We often hear that “the personal is political.” Such sentiments more properly belong to totalitarianism than to the tradition of American democracy, which is based on the assumption that certain facets of life—perhaps sizable slices of it—are outside the public arena, and therefore not something the public ought to be interested in. In 1925, the journalist Walter Lippmann wrote that, after reading “standard textbooks used to teach citizenship,” “I do not know how anyone can escape the conclusion that man must have the appetite of an encyclopædist and infinite time ahead of him.” According to the textbooks Lippmann read, the citizen “is apparently expected to yield an unlimited quantity of public spirit, interest, curiosity, and effort.”

Is it possible that a portion of the choleric attitudes many Americans express today about politics stems from their perception that government is increasingly intruding into their private lives, where it doesn’t belong?

Perhaps there is something to be said for political indifference, after all. Almond and Verba left no doubt that the woman who left her children locked up in a room while she attended a meeting had used poor parental judgment. The “hot-eyed” ones, whether on the left or the right, leave many ordinary persons, who tend to be moderates, cold. Rather than being at each other’s throats, as notions of the “culture wars” imply Americans are, most people seem to keep what may be a healthy distance between themselves and goings-on in the public sector.

In attempting to explain, if not cheer, political indifference, one has to admit apathy runs against the grain of many social scientists, and especially political scientists, who live, eat, and breathe politics. To paraphrase something John Kessel wrote many years ago in an exchange in the American Political Science Review about issue-voting, “just as the Lokele drummers of the Congo refused to believe that Europeans did not communicate by drums,” so social scientists insist that most Americans must be intensely interested in government and politics, despite abundant evidence to the contrary. Confronted by any evidence showing widespread political indifference at the grassroots, the normal reaction among social scientists—including yours truly—is to look for deleterious consequences, which we almost always find.

The time may have come to hark back to something sociologists such as Bernard Berelson, political sociologists such as Seymour Martin Lipset, and political scientists such as Robert Dahl knew in the 1950s and early 1960s: Grassroots indifference to politics gave elites time to bargain and compromise, and that contributed to democratic stability.

Today we hear about gridlock in Washington, about how polarized the Democrats and Republicans have become. Red states, blue states; this terminology, which may be seriously misleading, can be traced back to the hotly contested presidential election of 2000. “I hate ____” (fill in the blank) is not very helpful in a large, diverse, democracy. The comradery in the 1950s between Lyndon Baines Johnson and Sam Rayburn, on the one hand, and Dwight Eisenhower, Everett McKinley Dirksen, and John Martin, on the other hand, is a dim, wistful memory.

Social scientists are well aware of the baneful effects of apathy. Perhaps the time has come to take another, less jaundiced, look.

Stephen Earl Bennett is adjunct professor of political science at the University of Southern Indiana.

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