August 25, 2006
Elephants and Donkeys, Again Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:30 PM EST Fred Smoler writes, “In this regard, I was a bit startled when John Steele Gordon described The New Republic as in effect a hardcore left-liberal magazine (I do not recall his precise words), because I have recently been advised to spend more time reading TNR by friends who thought that various heretical remarks suggested I’d feel comfortable there.”
I am not aware of ever having described The New Republic at all on this blog. A search on my name and that of the magazine yielded nothing. Perhaps my memory is as faulty as the search engine, however. I may have once described The Nation as being a hardcore left-liberal magazine, but I don’t think there would be much dissent from that description of it.
I will confess to finding most discussions (or raging knock-down, drag-out fights) regarding political theory to be monumentally boring. First I find most of them to be utterly disconnected from the real world, and I lose interest real fast when angels start dancing on pinheads. Second, so many of them involve people who are emotionally invested in one side and regard the other side as infidels or worse. Jonathan Swift made wicked fun of this sort of politics in Gulliver’s Travels, where he described Lilliputian politics as passionately divided between those who cracked their boiled eggs on the big end and those who cracked them on the small end.
It may come as a stunning surprise to the chattering classes, but most people are bored by politics. Some simply ignore it and never even vote. Some decide early on that they are of one party or the other and think no more about it. Some pay attention in election-year autumns or to really hot races. But most, I think, regard one of heaven’s most charming attributes to be the fact that there is no politics there, at least not since Satan got the boot.
That’s one reason why I think the new proposal (in Arizona, if I remember correctly) to have a lottery, awarding $1 million to some lucky voter in hopes of luring new voters to the polls, is so asinine. Why on earth would we want to lure people who don’t give a damn into the voting booth? They are effectively voting by not voting.
I think this is why primary elections seem so often to be dominated by the fringe of each party rather than the center. Only the true believers turn out for them, with very distorting results. So I wonder if the Louisiana system shouldn’t be copied more widely. In that state—not exactly famous for being in the forefront of political reform otherwise—there are no primaries at all. Everyone runs in the general election, and if no one gets 50 percent of the vote, there is a runoff between the top two.
Party apparatchiks hate the idea, which, of course, is not the least of its virtues.
|
