February celebrated the 30th publication anniversary of David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest. All 1,000 + pages of it.
That timing, coincident with Texas Spring Primaries, suggests we reconsider the state of America. Where has it been, where is it going? No matter who wins the war, will the culture of addictive consumption continue? Will the incessant colonization of consciousness by screens creating needs and anxieties, pitching the pleasure of purchase, the agony and ecstasy of artful deals ever go blank, if only for a moment of relief?
As that rhetoric shows it is a tough slog to say anything noteworthy about our politics. They are not immune to the transactional lifestyle, the cult of the commodity. No “new and improved” here. As Tom Waits said, “Step right up” and buy a lottery ticket at the bazaar.
As America shifted into high gear in the 1950s, postwar boom and television, political scientists observed disturbing symptoms. Party identification, their best predictor of voting and mass involvement, declined. Independents tended to vote less, less consistently and less predictably when they did. They were more likely to choose based on images, personalities and sales pitches of individual candidates. As for candidates, they turned away from party activists who knew where to find votes and toward paid consultants who knew where to find money and ad buys. The consultants learned how to redistrict so incumbents could pick their voters. Some voters reinforced the trend by choosing to live in their most politically compatible zip code.
Fewer elections were decided within 52%-48% margins; more within 60%-40%.
Turnout — measured as the percentage of eligible voters who actually registered and voted — had declined throughout the 20th century, resurged in the 1930s, then declined again after World War II. It spiked in 1960 (Kennedy v. Nixon) then declined again.
Walter Dean Burnham, who held an endowed chair at the University of Texas in Austin, had worked at Harvard with V. O. Key Jr., an Austin native and author of the magisterial Southern Politics in State and Nation (1949). Burnham’s 1965 article in the American Political Science Review, “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe,” is an intricate historical analysis packed with hard data and disciplined interpretation. It respects his mentor, Key’s judgement in the The Responsible Electorate: Rationality in Presidential Voting, 1936-1960. Policy outcomes in this period reflected the preferences of those who had voted. In other words, the parties aggregated the preferences of their members and nominated candidates who campaigned for those preferences. Voters listened and voted accordingly. Winning politicians then used their party majorities to do in government what they said they would do in their campaign.
Burnham, however, was concerned about the growing proportion of the eligible electorate who had not voted. More precisely, his counting and analysis concluded that the “core” electorate was 44%, the “peripheral” was 16%, and those “outside the political system altogether” were 40%.
That 1965 conclusion still works today. In fact, the core’s share is even lower. Our largest political party is a coalition of nonvoters and occasional voters. Burnham wanted the missing half to find its way back into a political universe where they would be welcomed by a share of the American workers’ productivity.
Otherwise, “the legitimacy of the regime” is questionable and the alienated half might be mobilized by “totalitarian appeals.” Those appeals might make sense in the fog of late monopoly capitalism, its relentless chaos, instability and uncertainty.
Maybe a rational policy of an economy that works for everyone, that redistributes America’s wealth fairly is the real deal. Maybe “affordability” is the new and improved brand with the highest return in the marketplace of ideas.
Or maybe not. Remember when some of us thought we were entering the Age of Aquarius? Turns out, as Wallace would put it, we still live in the endless Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.
Tom Denyer has resided in Bandera County since 1979. His favorite Hill Country plant is the Sycamore Leaf Snowbell. His endorsement in the U.S. Senate Democratic Primary is “both.”
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