Silence from Below

The important change, rather, is outside the Beltway. Elites may not be misrepresenting the masses, but the people seem to demand less from government than they once did. In part, they participate less. Since 1960, voting turnout has fallen, especially among lower-income people, and unionism and other organizing by the less privileged have ebbed. And in part, people make fewer new demands than formerly. No popular movement has arisen to challenge inegalitarian trends. Ordinary Americans are less likely to insist that government do more to facilitate their lives. The elderly recently obtained a Medicare drug benefit from Congress, but that was the exception.

Not every policy change stems from public passivity. Some recent cuts in antipoverty spending reflect evidence that programs were ineffective. Some cuts in Social Security and Medicare were forced by exploding costs not faced in earlier eras. Reduced public demand comes out, rather, in the Reagan and Bush tax cuts and the failure to enact new social benefits, such as universal health care, that exist in other rich countries.³

Why have public pressures abated? The report raises this question but fails to answer it, instead preferring to moralize about the change and blame it on the system. This aristocratic stance, where all responsibility rests with the elite, contradicts the democratic values that the authors claim to serve.

Is Inequality to Blame?

In part, the authors attribute falling engagement to inequality itself. They stress that people who do not participate typically have fewer resources, such as education and income, than those who do. To say, however, that this explains lower participation goes too far. Only in giving money to politicians is income or wealth decisive. Every other form of participation depends partly on education and income but even more on civic skills, the proclivity to be politically engaged, recruitment by other people, and interest in the issues.⁴

Furthermore, to say that engagement is deterred by collective action problems is no answer. Perhaps no single individual can influence public outcomes enough to make political effort seem rational, yet those who do participate feel amply rewarded, if only because they satisfy civic values.⁵

Failures of Government?

The report also blames popular disengagement on government. Faced with growing inequality, supposedly, ordinary Americans can “become increasingly discouraged about the effectiveness of democratic governance, spreading cynicism and withdrawal from elections and other arenas of public life.”⁷

The report also endorses research arguing that public policies can shape participation through “policy feedback.” Allegedly, broad programs that confer generous benefits, such as the GI Bill or Social Security, promote more political engagement than recent, more meager social programs.⁹

Successes of Government

A better explanation for political withdrawal is the very success of government in promoting expanded opportunity in recent decades. In the past, ability was distributed far more equally than income or opportunity. When individuals with brains and energy were denied fair opportunity, they were receptive to egalitarian public policies. But after the 1960s, chances to get ahead became more equal, detaching the fortunes of children somewhat from those of their parents.¹¹

At the other end of society, the poor have become politically weaker. Formerly, people with low income might simply have low-paying jobs, but they retained the ability to join unions and parties seeking egalitarian change; such workers were the core supporters of the New Deal. But today the vast majority of steady workers, at any wage, are above poverty. The remaining poor tend to have problems besides low earnings—especially, single-parent families and an inability to work consistently. Those patterns—not clearly due to the economy or government—deter participation in either the workplace or politics.¹³

The nation's prosperity also calms popular unrest. Ordinary Americans, as the report notes, care a lot less about economic inequality than they do about equal opportunity. Most people ignore the rich, provided that they have a fair chance to get ahead themselves. It was not inequality as such but distress and especially high unemployment that sparked the aggressive movements of the populist era and the 1930s. But the nation has enjoyed more secure employment recently—only the recession of the early 1980s recalled the severities of the Great Depression.

The report assumes that economic inequality should inspire discontent, but the opposite is true. America's low wages promote far greater job creation than in Europe, where labor markets are more highly taxed and regulated. In Europe, earnings may be more equal, but fewer people can get jobs at all. Americans complain about low pay, but as long as they are working they are unlikely to march on Washington. In the United States, easy employment is the opiate of the people.

Bountiful job creation also explains the rapid immigration the nation has seen in recent decades, and this too drives participation down. The Hispanic population has grown by close to four times since 1972, while Asians have more than doubled since 1987. In 2002 those groups comprised 14 and 4 percent of the population, respectively.¹⁴

Parallels with Poverty

Just as the report blames nonparticipation on a lack of resources, so in the 1960s and 1970s most experts blamed poverty on social conditions outside the poor themselves. Largely, working-aged parents and their children were poor because the adults did not work regularly. Nonwork in turn was correlated with low skills, minority status, disincentives to work created by welfare, and so on. Most experts thought that government had to push back those “barriers” before the poor could work and get ahead. The analysis was deterministic, defining the poor as the passive objects of outside forces, including government.

But education, training, minority rights, and work incentives were all improved, and work levels did not rise. So in the 1980s and 1990s government started to require welfare adults to work as a condition of aid. It also spent more on wage and child-care subsidies. Beginning in 1994, those steps, coupled with a superb economy, drove the majority of recipients off welfare, mostly into jobs. The report ignores welfare reform, but along with the economy, it was the chief force that moderated trends toward inequality in the 1990s, because it drove up work and earnings at the bottom of society.¹⁷

In the 1980s and 1990s, policy makers disbelieved the academic research linking poverty to various disadvantages. In statistical models, poverty might have many causes, but the explainers were often conditions that the poor could change, and much variation was left unexplained. So if government enforced work, behavior could change, and it did. The poor, it turned out, were paralyzed, not by a lack of freedom, but by too much of it. Alongside new benefits, they needed an obligation to work.

In the epitome of reform, seen in Wisconsin, welfare adults faced immediate and unyielding demands to work, but they were also lavishly subsidized to work. Far from diminishing the public sector, the reform was a governmental triumph that in some ways expanded the welfare state.¹⁸

Should Participation Be Enforced?

Just as in the 1960s and 1970s government extended new benefits and rights to the poor without expectations, so in promoting participation it has assumed the whole burden of change. Since the 1960s, blacks have been fully enfranchised, then provided with “majority minority” election districts. Restrictions on registration and voting were eased. Government also helped fund higher education levels, which should also have raised voting turnout. Just as in earlier social policy, government sought “barriers” to remove. And yet turnout fell. It is time to stop blaming nonparticipation on outside impediments. Very likely, political withdrawal is not due to inability to participate, but rather to a lack of obligation to do so.

Should nonvoters be required to vote, as welfare recipients have been made to work? Australia and Italy already mandate voting. On the one hand, doing so flouts the idea that participation is self-motivated. On the other hand, we enforce other civic duties, such as paying taxes and serving on juries. In addition, union leaders and community activists could put more pressure on people to join their organizations, the better to pressure employers and governments for concessions. Such bodies rarely grow just by opening doors; there must also be positive suasions to join.¹⁹

To raise participation requires challenge, not solicitude. The 9/11 attacks dramatized this. When the World Trade Center collapsed, egoistic New Yorkers changed in an instant into dutiful citizens. They took the injured in off the street, flocked to the disaster site offering to help, and donated rivers of blood. Nationwide, distrust of government fell sharply, as the report notes, while civic attitudes surged, at least briefly.²⁰

Good behavior must be enforced, not just facilitated. That implies treating the disengaged as something more than victims. The responsibility for nonparticipation must be divided between them and society. The moralistic voice, which the report aims only at the elite, must be turned on the political free riders as well. “What people seem to want … is the power to participate, not the hard work of actually doing so,” remarks Derek Bok. “In the end … people do get the quality of government they deserve.”²¹

The report asserts that, through research and advocacy, political scientists can promote wider participation. But as the community organizer Saul Alinsky always said, democracy cannot be given to people—they must achieve it for themselves.²²

The Question of Competence

A hidden issue in the report, as in other discussions of social problems, is the competence one attributes to those with the problems. The apparent debate may be about the fairness of the opportunity structure, but often the real issue is about how able people are to exploit the opportunities they have. The more resourceful one finds them, the more willing one is to hold them responsible, at least in part, for the problems and their solution.

Traditionally, American politics assumed that formal political rights were enough to give the people leverage. That imputed to them the competence to advance their own interests. The report, however, adopts the protective stance typical of academic poverty experts: “[L]ess-advantaged Americans vote less because they lack the skills, motivation, and networks that the better-advantaged acquire through formal education and occupational advancement.”²³

Academic solicitude may seem realistic in an age when the worst-off have more trouble functioning than they once did; after all, even the better-off today experience politics mainly on television. But to lower expectations clashes with the norms of citizenship in our heads, which are much more demanding. Those conceptions go back to the hardier Americans who first built this country, then fought in its wars, at home and abroad, for the next two hundred years. To suggest, as the report does, that the less fortunate are barred from influence by inequality, when the vote and civil liberties are still available, is something our ancestors would not understand.

To recover democracy, government must assume greater competence in lower-income Americans than the elite finds comfortable. We would rather lay the burden of change on ourselves than on the less fortunate. We believe in our own abilities; we are less sure about theirs. But unless some minimal capacities are expected of the less privileged, change becomes unimaginable, and a caste society will emerge. To prevent that, we must say to those at the bottom (to paraphrase a famous political maxim): Don't get down, get even. Only if the masses act is the solution really democratic.

To use English terminology, democracy is the creation of the Roundheads—citizens below the elite who assert a belief in the individual, independent of class, and insist on an egalitarian politics. The Cavaliers are those who believe in a hierarchical polity in which by nature they are destined to rule and others to follow. America's founding was a great victory for the Roundheads; the Civil War was another.²⁴