4.0 out of 5 stars
What Kind of Presidential Candidate to Vote for?, January 27, 2012
Thomas E. Patterson, professor of Government and Press at Harvard University, in his essay "The Vanishing Voter" approaches a puzzling problem of the ever-decreasing public involvement in the Presidential (and other) elections over last decades. Not only a 70% involvement into elections of the eligible population usual for XIX century, sometimes shooting to 85%, had slipped to a miserable 50%, but also a participation of the groups, once deprived from the voting rights, and had been fighting for a long time to acquire those rights, after short spikes, fell even lower than the overall, already low level.
Neither the increasing percentage of the people with the higher education, which was considered as a one of the factors boosting the participation; nor the victory of the Civil Rights movement on mid 60s; nor the Motor Voter Act, which dramatically increased accessibility of the voting made any significant change to this trend.
Does this falling interest of the public in participation in the political process diminish its health and legitimacy? Or vice versa, something is really broken in the American politics which discourages a desire of the citizens be associated or even tainted by the participation in the process?
Some analysts advocate - neither of these. Contrary to the alarmists, they say, a low turnout of the electorate means a healthier state of the governing affairs. Having a "good government" rather than having a good voting is "the fundamental human right", writes the columnist George Will in his essay "Defense of Nothing". He points out that the huge voter turnout contributed to the fall of Germany's Weimar Republic, and enabled the rise of Nazis to power.
The common wisdom of the potential voter of the end of XX - beginning of XXI century has become the realization that there is no significant difference between the major political parties, and that the elections are get rigged somehow that there are always no good candidates to vote for.
Some researchers, for example Larry Sabbato, propose an array of changes into the electoral procedures to correct the voter-manipulating practices. These measures extend from the simple shrinking of the electoral season which length dulls the voter interest and involvement; or eliminating the "front-loading" when the few, often low-populated agricultural states, like Iowa and New Hampshire, which happen to conduct their primaries and caucuses first, dictate the rest of the country the choice of the candidates; to dividing the electoral vote proportionally to the popular vote, like Nebraska and Maine do, or abolishing the Electoral College altogether.
However, originating from the premise that the more democracy is in Presidential elections the better, this point of view misses the important point of the American governing system, which is based on the ancient tripartite Indo-European social views.
Aristocratic Nature of the Presidential Title
The Indra's epithets of the heavenly Warrior-King: `alone', `on own wills' are augmented by the Latin `sodalis' - `member of secret society', which alludes obviously not only to the President George Washington's membership in the Free Mason Society, but a general position of a Monarch as a mere administrative position of the First Aristocrat among other equals.
Don't mistake the Asiatic customs of Despotism with European Limited Monarchies. Charles Montesquieu postulates a clear distinction between them. He devotes the entire book XXX of his treatise "The Spirit of the Law" to dissect arguments of the two academic researches of Henri de Boulainvilliers and Jean-Baptiste Dubos, which lay in the foundation of the ideological war between Fronde and Luis XIV in XVIII century. The former argued that the French King's power comes from the voluntary grant of it by the nobles of the Frankish tribes after the conquest of Gaul, and the encroachments of the Luis Absolute Monarchy on rights of Aristocracy are illegal. Dubos' work, a more thorough, but less candid, stated that there were no Gaul conquest, but the gradual diffusion of the Frankish people, and the authority of the King comes not form them, but inherit the Roman Emperor status. Montesquieu scrupulously collects the missing evidence for the Boulainvilliers' work, and make conclusion, that methodically inferior to Dubos', his work nevertheless expresses a more correct view on the origins of power of European Monarchs.
It was then, but what kind of `secret society' or supposedly non-existing any more aristocracy allegedly backs up the Presidential power? The Sunlight foundation, examining data from the Federal Election Commission and the Center for Responsive Politics, shows that the tiny percentage of very wealthy Americans are funding a large chunk of congressional and presidential campaigns:
In the 2010 election cycle, 26,783 individuals (or slightly less than one in ten thousand Americans) each contributed more than $10,000 to federal political campaigns. Combined, these donors spent $774 million. That's 24.3% of the total from individuals to politicians, parties, PACs, and independent expenditure groups. Together, they would fill only two-thirds of the 41,222 seats at Nationals Park the baseball field two miles from the U.S. Capitol. When it comes to politics, they are The One Percent of the One Percent.
Despite the illusion of the slogan "The Land of Opportunity", the recent report of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development demonstrates that the index of social mobility in USA 2 or 3 times lower than in most developed countries, tying only with Italy and yielding the last place to Grate Britain with its official aristocracy. Which effectively means that the probability of a son of financial tycoon becoming a tycoon, and a son of janitor remaining a janitor is much higher in US and GB, than in other developed countries.
Resemblance of the House of Lords of the British Parliament and the Senate in American Congress is not only formal. Even if we forget that, until the adoption of the XVII amendment at the beginning of XX century, Senators were not elected by the popular vote, having 2 seats per state regardless its population, gives the neo-aristocratic families of the "Mayflower" descendants an upper hand in lawmaking over the "nouveau riches" of the West Coast.
In general, when you hear deceptive, smoke and mirrors, terms "Federalism" or "State Rights", for all practical purposes, as The Other, Anti-Federalist Founding Fathers were arguing, you may replace them with the honest, straightforward expression "Aristocratic" (either centralized or local).
That is, speaking the IT language, "not a bug, but a feature", representing the Hamiltonian view on the permanent place of the "few and well-born" elites in the governing system. Idea of the direct popular Presidential elections got a light circulation on the Constitution Convention, but was quickly abandoned. Other possible solutions, such as elections by the Congress or the state legislatures were violating the trifold separation of powers too much, so the palliative of the Electoral College was adopted.
The original Electoral College schema, oriented on the independent representatives of the state legislative elites, casting their votes for the first and the next to the first choice of a candidate, in the chaotic clash of their wills and egos, was supposed to produce the unbiased, or, if you will, subconscious choice of the elite as a group. However, the plan didn't take into the account a possibility of the team play, the coordinated actions of party members.
After undisputed party-less elections of George Washington, the old-guard, pro-British, Federalist (say Aristocratic) party, got a new generation, pro-French, egalitarian rivaling Republican-Democratic party, lead by the idealistic renegade Thomas Jefferson, who didn't believe into the "magic" qualities of the "proper" structure of the government, but only into the freedom loving spirit of American people.
The stalled elections and the "Jeffersonian revolution" which followed them, introduced not only corrections of the XII amendment in the process of Presidential elections, but also brought masses into the focus of politicians. Elites had learned that the "turbulent and changing" masses might be harnessed by the more gentle party politics than by the original draconian procedures of the Presidential elections.
A decade later, President Andrew Jackson tried to convince Congress to abolish Electoral College, but the point of equilibrium was found when the states gave their gentlemen's words that they will tie their electoral votes to the popular ones. The parties were electing their Presidential candidates on the closed party conventions, and the populace was presented with the choice between two, may be quite different personalities, by belonging to the same caste.
This clockwork mechanism was functioning relatively flawlessly until the Chicago Democratic National Convention of 1968. Then, the egos and arrogance of the city mayor and party leaders led to the mass protests against the nomination of Hubert Humphrey, the unpopular candidate of the elites; a violent crackdown on the protests, and a scandalous trial of the activists known as the "Chicago Eight" case. The process had even overshadowed the first trials of Soviet dissidents, when not only eight Chicago protests activists were put behind bars, but also two attorneys who tried to defend them, making that really the "Chicago Ten" trial.
To alleviate the consequences of the disastrous convention, the McGovern-Fraser commission had worked out recommendations to make the nominee selecting process more open and more dependent from the popular opinion, leading to the current system of...
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Dated and Incomplete, September 15, 2008
It's unfair to read a book six years after publication and call it "dated," but unfortunately that is the reality for me. However, the trends portrayed within the book are still dramatic.
In 1990, 63% of Americans voted in the presidential election; in 2000 only 51% did. Meanwhile, the number of college graduates has risen, racial bars to voting have fallen, and registration laws have been simplified. (Roughly 10% of Americans cannot vote - eg. felons, compared to eg. 2% in the U.K.)
The "Vanishing Voter" is based on over 80,000 interviews during the 2000 campaign and reveals hints about the political sources of voter discontent.
Since many 1960 Southern voters were effectively barred from participating (poll tax; literacy tests) from voting, the clearest picture of what's been happening with turnout emerges from a look at non-Southern states only - 70% in 1960, 50% in 1996.
Bottom Line: The U.S. oldest continuous democracy, has nearly the lowest voting rate in the world. The shrinking electorate has come to include proportionately more older citizens, higher incomes, or hold hold intense opinions on issues like gun control, abortion - overall slightly favoring Republicans.
The decline can't be due to increased satisfaction with government. By the 1990s, only about 40% of major bills enacted were in line with what the majority said they wanted government to do; two decades earlier it had been 60%.
Negative campaigning is a problem. About 35% of "prominent" campaign ads in 1972 and 1976 were negative or attack ads; this rose to 83% in 1988 and even higher in 1996.
Interesting and important points are raised. Unfortunately, "The Vanishing Voter" does not tell us why this is happening.
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