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- <text id=90TT1352>
- <title>
- May 21, 1990: In Praise Of Low Voter Turnout
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1990
- May 21, 1990 John Sununu:Bush's Bad Cop
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- ESSAY, Page 88
- In Praise of Low Voter Turnout
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p>By Charles Krauthammer
- </p>
- <p> Washington, it seems, is a city in decline. History has
- taken up residence in Budapest and Tokyo, Brussels and Seoul.
- After a brief spurt of prominence and wealth owed to the
- Depression, Hitler and the cold war, Washington, we are told,
- has lapsed into a somnambular state.
- </p>
- <p> This is an exaggeration, but not too far from the truth.
- Government has grown huge, and a presidential hiccup can still
- panic the stock market, but Washington has far less impact on
- the direction of America and the world than it did a generation
- ago.
- </p>
- <p> The marginalization of Washington is sometimes taken as
- proof of American decline. Nonsense. With the implosion of its
- only superpower rival, America stands alone in the world, its
- relative power--which the decline theorists insist is the
- only relevant measure--unsurpassed. (One reason, for example,
- that hostages are being released is that the thug regimes of
- the world realize that suddenly there is only one superpower
- left and they had better warm up to it.)
- </p>
- <p> The marginalization of Washington reflects not the decline
- of America but the decline of politics. In the West--and it
- is soon to be true in the East, now that they've got the easy
- part, revolution, out of the way--history is not made by
- politics. It is made by economics, by demographics and, above
- all, by science and technology. Politics lubricates, corrupts
- mildly and takes a slice of the action. But it does not create
- new worlds as it did, horribly, in 1917 and 1933 and,
- blessedly, in 1946-49 when the U.S. established the structures
- of the postwar world. Politics has become, like much of life,
- maintenance. The house is built; Republicans and Democrats
- argue now over who is to repair the roof and how to pay for it.
- </p>
- <p> Moreover, the great political debates are over. The romance
- with isms, with the secular religions of socialism,
- egalitarianism and totalitarianism, is dead. The fierce battles
- over whether, for example, the U.S. should lead the crusade
- against communism are finished too. American politics is no
- longer about bearing any burden in defense of liberty. American
- politics is about the Clean Air Act.
- </p>
- <p> This is not to deride clean air. Clean air is important, and
- the clean air bill now working its way through Congress is a
- quite satisfying triumph of democratic compromise,
- smog-producing Detroit working out with smog-ingesting Los
- Angeles a political arrangement that the whole country can live
- with. But the great dichotomies of war and peace, left and
- right, good and evil are gone. Politicians still try to use
- these categories to carry the fight, but no one believes them.
- </p>
- <p> This triumph of apolitical bourgeois democracy has been a
- source of dismay to some. They pine for the heroic age when
- great ideologies clashed and the life of nations turned on a
- vote in Congress. On the contrary. I couldn't be happier that
- the political century is over, and that all that's left is to
- shuffle cards on the cruise ship. The great disease of the 20th
- century was the politicization of life. The totalitarians, left
- and right, showed the way, politicizing everything: economics,
- education, art, religion, family life. Not even genetics could
- escape politics. One remembers with disbelief not just Hitler's
- eugenic lunacies but also Stalin's designation of Lysenko's
- crackpot genetics as official truth, enforced by secret police.
- </p>
- <p> After such a century, it is a form of salvation, of social
- health, for politics to be in acute and precipitous decline.
- As a Portuguese ex-leftist said of his country's recent
- renaissance, "Portugal's success is that its politics no longer
- dominate everything."
- </p>
- <p> At its headiest, the aim of 20th century politics was the
- transformation of man and society by means of power. This great
- project--politics as redemption--has ended in failure on
- a breathtaking scale: not just economic and political but also
- ecological, spiritual and, not surprising for an enterprise of
- such overweening hubris, moral. The deeper meaning of the
- overthrow of communism is the realization that man can shape
- neither history nor society by Five-Year Plans, and that
- attempts to contradict this truth must end in the grotesque.
- The revulsion with politics reflects the view that when
- politicians go about tinkering with something as organic as a
- poor family or a rural community by means of a federal welfare
- program or an enormous dam, the law of unintended consequences
- prevails.
- </p>
- <p> George Bush's great good fortune is that he is a man utterly
- incapable of vision at a time when the people do not want
- vision and do not need it. Vision is for Khomeini and Castro,
- for Jesse Jackson and Pat Robertson. Happily, if only for now,
- Americans will have none of it.
- </p>
- <p> Which is why when almost every pundit wrings his hands in
- despair at low voter turnout--some even feel obliged to
- propose creative schemes to induce people to vote--I am left
- totally unmoved. Low voter turnout means that people see
- politics as quite marginal to their lives, as neither salvation
- nor ruin. That is healthy. Low voter turnout is a leading
- indicator of contentment. For a country founded on the notion
- that that government is best that governs least, it seems
- entirely proper that Americans should in large numbers register
- a preference against politics by staying home on Election Day.
- </p>
- <p> A few weeks ago, a producer from public television came to
- ask my advice about planning coverage for the 1992 elections.
- Toward the end, she raised a special problem: how to get young
- adults interested in political coverage. I offered the opinion
- that 19-year-olds who sit in front of a television watching
- politics could use professional help. At that age they should
- be playing ball and looking for a date. They'll have time
- enough at my age to worry about the mortgage and choosing a
- candidate on the basis of his views on monetary policy.
- </p>
- <p> To say that, of course, is to violate current League of
- Women Voters standards of good citizenship. Let others struggle
- valiantly to raise the political awareness of all citizens. Let
- them rage against the tides of indifference. They will fail,
- and when they do, relax. Remember that indifference to politics
- leaves all the more room for the things that really count:
- science, art, religion, family and play.
- </p>
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-
-