The relation of man to state is a timeless problem, one that provides a sturdy bridge from Plato to the Michigan Survey on elections. But in our day, we tend to deal with this problem very differently from our more philosophically-minded forebears. We see man not as an abstract moral being, but as voting man, electoral man. And the state, instead of being conceived as an essentially constitutional or legal structure, is approached as an enclosure of voting interests, each based upon some overriding social, economic, or ethnic objective. The consequences of this change in perspective are enormous.
I think it can fairly be said that Plato or Aristotle would have found no great difficulty in conversing with any subsequent Western political thinker down through the first decade or two of the present century. Even in the early 1930’s when, as an undergraduate, I studied political theory, the mental passage from such men as Harold Laski, Ernest Barker, and A. D. Lindsay back to the Attican philosophers was not a difficult one. There was still a common area of discourse. But how different the picture has now become!
Three current political studies1 make plain how far from the classical tradition we have moved in recent years. As in so many current investigations of this kind, we see the ancient problem of the individual and the state translated here into a series of concrete questions—who participates in politics, when, how, why? We see something else too—quite apart from the profoundly different manner of treatment—something of much greater consequence to us as citizens: how far the reality of 20th-century political behavior in a democracy differs from the expectations of classical democratic theory as it arose in the 18th century. I shall have more to say about this discrepancy later, after we have seen what these three books tell us about our present-day democracy.
Voting studies began in this country with Charles E. Merriam’s pioneer work in the 20’s and now include—to name only a few of the principal works—Paul Lazarsfeld’s The People’s Choice, Bernard Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and Robert McPhee’s Voting, and Angus Campbell’s own The Voter Decides. These books throw a good deal of light on the demographic and social factors involved in American voting. From them, we have learned which socio-economic groups are most likely to vote, and that non-voting is generally higher among women, Negroes, non-union members, lower-status (by occupation, income, or education) groups, Southerners, rural inhabitants, etc. We have also learned, though less precisely, of some of the social processes involved in casting a vote or in refraining, such as group identification, status obligation, and role perception.
Much of this has always been known to working politicians, however indistinctly and parochially, but the unquestionable net impact of systematic research has been to sharpen professional hunch; and research is at least one of the reasons accounting for the emergence in both parties of the so-called New Man of politics. Why should philosophical and moral issues receive any kind of impassioned emphasis in a campaign when it can be shown—and shown by the academic intellectuals themselves—that the beliefs of a candidate are, finally, of less importance than the “image” he presents to “key” groups? According to a news report, Senator Kennedy’s first act following his acceptance speech was to distribute to state leaders carefully prepared sets of analyzed electoral data from their respective areas (the Republican candidate may be presumed to have done likewise). And behind this act of one of the New Men in politics, lay a good deal of work by the New Men of research in the universities.
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The American Voter, the latest and certainly the most massive, of the voting studies, is a product of the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center. Working with data gathered from nationwide interview samples in three presidential elections—1948, 1952, and 1956—the Survey staff, under Dr. Angus Campbell’s direction, has made a bold effort to determine the preferences and attitudes which were crucial in the mind of the voter at the time of his final choice of a presidential candidate. The staff analyzed voter perceptions of parties and candidates, conflicts between attitude and loyalty, motivations toward voting, the impact of party identification, the relation of preferences to ideologies, etc. The study contains much on the social and economic contexts of voting (though little that is new) and much on the relation of voting to changes in the political system. It confirms what many now know, and what Ostrogorski prophesied many years ago, that in a democracy political parties tend to replace such traditional associations as social class, religious affiliation, etc., in providing stabilizing anchorages for public life. The study further shows beyond any reasonable question how weak and fluctuant social class is today as a determining factor in voting choice. The chapters concerned directly with how voters perceive ideological issues are fascinating, if depressing. Surely, not even in one of the new African states could there be a greater disparity between the real issues and what actually moves the voters. Remembering the glee with which H. L. Mencken seized upon Middletown’s disclosures of American community life, one can only suppose that the Sage of Baltimore would be ecstatic over the revelation of some of these pathetic interviews as to the state of at least a part of the American mind. He would have taken the revelations as final proof of the idiocy and impossibility of democracy—wrongly, of course, for, rationalist that he was, Mencken never learned that liberal democracy does not primarily rest upon what its individual citizens believe and are motivated by, but upon such non-ideological factors as social institutions and traditions.
Yet when we pass from the careful assembly of the descriptive, statistical material to what purports to be new and distinctive about The American Voter, namely the authors’ conclusions as to the controlling attitudes of voters in the last three presidential elections—we find their work far from convincing. Naturally, how valid such conclusions will seem depends upon the stock one places in even the most valid interviews and polls; upon the trust one puts in a voter’s actually knowing his own real reason for choosing one man rather than another or even that he will give the reason to an interviewer (how many of the Americans for whom Roman Catholicism was an important issue in the 1960 campaign will ever admit, or know themselves, how greatly their final choice was determined by this issue?); and, finally, upon one’s judgment of the feasibility of analyzing motivations of large population segments out of interviews and re-interviews. Though I have called The American Voter a bold enterprise, it is also a frequently naive and obscure one. For not satisfied with the level of explanation to be found in the demographic and sociological analyses of voting, the authors set themselves to a study of what they call the voter’s “cognitive map of the political scene.” They do this through a conceptual device referred to as “the funnel of causality.”
Behind these pretentious terms lies the effort to get inside the voter’s mind as it hovers poised over the choice of a presidential candidate, and to assess the range and relative pressures of determining influences. The authors’ “funnel” is a methodological device for separating remote influences (the objective socio-economic ones) from the most immediate ones. Immediate influences—to be found in the individual’s perceptual organization—are those attitudes and motivations which, irrespective of all background factors, impel the voter finally to choose as he does. Throughout the study, the reader is left with the clear inference that however useful socio-economic data and conclusions may be, reality is “internal” and psychological, and that only when we have begun to embark on motivational and attitudinal analysis are we on the royal road to knowledge.
The failure of this book is the failure of most psychological analyses of institutional behavior. They just do not come off. For all the plausibility of the given method—plausible, that is, when described for us in advance—we do not end up with anything particularly striking or even relevant to the stated intentions. What we find repeatedly in The American Voter, once it leaves the sociological road, is a set of lectures on what motivational analysis is and what more it can offer than sociological analysis. But when the study comes to translating homiletics into conclusions relevant to the materials at hand, the reader feels like Kafka’s hero in The Castle. The answer keeps receding: over and over we are told what motivational analysis has produced for us in preceding chapters, or what it will offer us in later ones, but no matter how carefully we read (and Survey prose is seldom a thing of clarity), we somehow never end up with anything that is very pertinent.
What I am getting at is perhaps best illustrated in Chapter 15 where, in a general discussion of agrarian political behavior, we have a section excitingly entitled “The Motivational Roots of Variable Political Behavior.” At its outset we are told that the peculiarities of farm behavior lie not in farm life but in “the motivations and dispositions of the farmer as actor.” At its end we are told that we have now come full circle from motivational condition to variable behavior once again. But if there is anything between these promising and reassuring words that in fact does go beyond demographic, sociological, and historical material, I myself could not find it in three readings.
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Passing from The American Voter to Alexander Heard’s The Costs of Democracy is like passing from flat and frequently swampy lowlands to one of the peaks of the Rockies. Professor Heard has consulted thousands of documentary sources, interviewed hundreds of politicians, and worked with dozens of assistants. Yet the firm hand of the author is to be seen on every page. Here, thank heaven, is proof that a formidable subject can yet be approached successfully by an individual scholar—not have to be hunted down by a pack and then tortured electronically. In addition, unlike so many of the technicians and mechanics today doing political research, Professor Heard is a genuine political scientist. That is, he has read books, not merely research memoranda.
The Costs of Democracy is a study of campaign finance considered as a necessary, if often abused, form of political participation in democratic society. It deals with the effects of money on elections; the sources of campaign funds, including business, labor, reform, and even underworld groups; the means by which money is raised; the effects of money on the structure of political parties; the uses and functions of campaign money; the varied laws and regulations concerning this money; and, finally, some of the author’s ideas on measures that might prove feasible for improving the whole situation. Mr. Heard never pretends to knowledge or information that he doesn’t have, and his whole study is set in a context that is as imaginative for the reader as it will be useful to the legislator. Here, one has the unmistakable feeling, is authentic American democracy, revealed through a steady glass, and presented in words that are hard and true.
We discover that the real costs of political campaigning have not soared steadily upward, and are not notably high as compared with other nations. The widespread belief that the party with the most money will, for that reason, win is not borne out. Big givers show up significantly in both parties, although the Republican party has generally drawn the largest single contributions. The labor movement is not a bottomless source of funds when enemies of labor are running for office; though it can be of crucial importance in some communities, it most often plays only a minor role.
Why do people give? Expectation of special favor bulks small as a reason. The answer, at least for individuals, stems from the same forces which impel them to political participation in general. The active participant is almost always a giver, while the passive or alienated participant is not. Corporations, especially large ones, show a healthy regard for both parties, and there are instances of those which give to both parties simultaneously.
Underworld influences on politics are by no means negligible, and Mr. Heard does not blink them away. His dispassionate (and remarkably detailed) treatment of this entire subject can leave one considerably uneasy. Yet the underworld is also a competitive world, its major figures and influences come and go, and only rarely does the criminal control of politics of a city or region become complete, and never permanently. We are reminded that in areas where underworld influence has been highest, it has still been possible for men of the stature of Wagner, Lehman, Ives, Dewey, Paul H. Douglas, and Adlai Stevenson to reach the heights.
Mr. Heard’s treatment of the political role of organized labor is equally illuminating. From the discussion here we get as much insight into the nature and distribution of labor leadership as we do into the nature and distribution of its campaign contributions. Mr. Heard is probably right in concluding that most concern over organized labor in politics stems from its novelty. Labor for so long was a thing of ideals and the aspirations of the “downtrodden” that its handling of fairly vast sums of money in ways common to business enterprise, still tends to be a slight affront to many people.
Although the economics of our political campaigning is considerably healthier than we are wont to suppose, and although much of our political unhappiness is the result (at least according to the British) of striving for impossibly high standards, nevertheless there is, in Mr. Heard’s opinion, much that should be done. He proposes governmental cash subsidies to the parties and candidates, tax incentives at all levels to dignify and encourage political donations, community drives akin to those for charitable and religious purposes, and statutes designed to achieve effective disclosure of campaign finances to limit an individual’s aggregate contributions and the role in campaign finance of powerful social interests.
Mr. Heard’s proposals are thoughtful, but he is himself among the first to concede that, given a democracy as farflung and heterogeneous as ours, the amount of change that can be accomplished by legislation is quickly reached. Apart, then, from a thoroughgoing shift in public attitudes, he concludes, no fundamental change can take place in the various processes of campaign financing in this country. “A governmental system that on principle seeks to represent a vast diversity of narrow concerns automatically foregoes a degree of cohesion, automatically handicaps itself ‘at the critical turning points’ of history.”
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The Alienated Voter is a slender but ambitious study of the Boston mayoralty election of 1959 when, in one of the most stunning upsets of Boston politics, John F. Collins defeated his opponent, John E. Powers. By using this event as his point of departure, Professor Levin, with the help of George Blackwood and Jason Aronson, has given us not only some useful insights into Boston politics but also into the central subject of the book as well, the alienated voter; that is, the individual who experiences the hopelessness of political participation, and either withdraws from it or exhibits other signs of rejection. The authors distinguish four types of political alienation: powerlessness, meaninglessness, the lowering of norms, and estrangement. “The extent to which a particular individual is affected by any one of these forms can be related to such variables as social class, age, and religion.” Lower socio-economic levels in Boston manifest, generally, a stronger sense of the first type of alienation—powerlessness—whereas upper levels, reacting in terms of higher cultural standards, are more likely to be impressed by the meaninglessness of the election. So conclude the authors.
To distinguish types of alienation seems to me worthwhile; the four here coincide with those which other students of the subject—Melvin Seeman in particular—have constructed. On the other hand, I am not especially impressed with the effort in The Alienated Voter to relate these types to socio-economic groups. Any attempt to differentiate substantive social groups in the terms of so subtle a set of classifications—meaninglessness, normlessness, powerlessness, and estrangement—seems to me futile; there are too many terminological barriers, too many problems of meaning. Furthermore, I do not think the data really support such correlations. The subject of political alienation is an important one, but if it is to be distinguished from simple non-voting, I question whether its nuances can be reliably correlated with socio-economic characteristics.
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What, then, are we to say of the implication of these three volumes to the theory of the modern state? Under the democratic philosophy of the past two centuries, man has been regarded as basically a political being; one who, if but given the opportunity, would be stable, self-impelled, responsive to rational considerations, and finally, whose participation in the state could be taken for granted. Correspondingly, the political will of the people has been taken to be an independent reality, distinguishable from the other economic, religious, and social interests which made up society. These beliefs were the essence of Rousseau’s dream of the General Will.
Between the naturally free individual and the naturally free society the same relation was held to exist that the early Protestants had seen in the church invisible. Merely destroy the corrupters of public mind and morality, the argument went—kings, nobility, priests, the military, the great landowners, et. al.—and one would achieve the natural consensus on which democracy rested.
This image has proved to be powerful in the history of both European and American democracy. Quite apart from the legislative sterilization of European society that began with the Jacobins, we in America have ourselves seen innumerable efforts to disengage both state and individual from the entanglements of class, church, and economic ties. As Richard Hofstadter has emphasized, much of the essence of Populism and Progressivism lay in the belief that the prime strategy was the emancipation of both man and state from factions and conspiracies. Behind movements for the initiative, recall, and referendum, as well as for the primaries, lay a conception of man and democratic consensus that began with the Enlightenment.
But, on the evidence of these books—and much other political research—something quite different from the expected results has transpired. Man, far from becoming a self-impelled political being is, in fact, rather apathetic about political matters. The ideal democrat of early theory—socially aloof, economically disinterested, religiously neutral—is inclined, contrary to theory, to sit on his hands, and contribute neither time, money, nor vote. Further, from the point of view of political participation, the best citizen usually is the individual deeply committed to some economic, religious, or moral interest, someone for whom the chief end of democracy is the prosecution of an essentially non-political end.
Many of these consequences, it must be admitted, were foreseen a hundred and fifty years ago by those conservatives who argued that the good society cannot be conceived apart from man’s natural involvement in local community, parish, class, and economic institutions; that any effort to detach the political process from these—that is, from society—would culminate in the alienated or the fanatical. What in this country was called the “stake in society” theory argued simply that the best citizens were those who had economic and social interests which not only make political participation worthwhile but give it equilibrium, stability, and, to use a current idol, purpose.
To restate this argument is not to make a latter-day plea for the objectives of John Randolph or Fenimore Cooper. Any thought of making political eligibility legally dependent upon a “stake in society” is as intellectually grotesque as it is morally repugnant. I am only emphasizing that the relationship conservatives saw between social roots and political responsibility is demonstrable today. “No man was ever attached by a sense of pride, partiality, or real affection to a description of square measurements,” Burke wrote in a hostile criticism of French efforts to create new and more rational administrative areas. “We begin our public affections in our families. . . . We pass on to our neighborhoods, and our habitual provincial connections.”
Rousseau, it is true, dreamed of a time when citizens would be emancipated from all ties not strictly political—those which did not arise, that is, out of the political bond. “If the General Will is to be able to express itself,” he wrote, it is essential, “that there should be no partial society within the state, and that each citizen should think only his own thoughts.” I will pass over the totalitarian drift of these words. The only point I wish to make is that in any such polity the results would not be democracy as we understand it, but political fanaticism at one end of the scale and apathy at the other—with the vast majority of people falling in the second category. My experience with persons who sunder themselves from the normal relationships of society and become passionately political, whether left or right, is not a happy one. For them, as Dwight Macdonald wrote recently in this journal,2 “Armageddon is a quadrennial festival.” But most of the citizens in such a polity are the apathetic ones. “They don’t vote,” Mr. Macdonald explained, “because they don’t want to vote, of their own free will, and they don’t want to because they feel it won’t make any difference and that none of the candidates represents them and their interests. (It’s also discouraging, in a country this size, to think that one’s vote is only about 1/70,000,000 of the total.)”
Apathy, a learned zoologist has written, is a characteristic response of any living organism to stimuli which are too intense or too complicated for it to cope with. What is the cure for apathy? Prayer, was the answer in the Middle Ages; education, we are more likely to say today. But education may actually have an alienating effect upon the voter. Rightly understood, education has its own objective: the cultivation of intellectual excellence, even humane skepticism. We have no more business demanding that education carry the burden of responsibility for political participation than for life adjustment. But whatever one may think about the functional relation between education and politics, there is, and always will be, a great gap between the issues we are increasingly challenged by and the capacity of even the most educated mind to cope with them.
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In the brilliant final chapter of Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee’s Voting, that wisest of living judges, Learned Hand, is quoted: “I do not know how it is with you, but for myself I generally give up at the outset. The simplest problems which come up from day to day seem to me quite unanswerable as soon as I try to get below the surface. . . . My vote is one of the most unimportant acts of my life; if I were to acquaint myself with the matters on which it ought really to depend, if I were to get a judgment on which I was willing to risk affairs of even the smallest moment, I should be doing nothing else, and that seems a fatuous conclusion to a fatuous undertaking.”
This seems to me to say it exactly. Learned Hand’s statement contains indeed, as the authors of Voting point out, the very paradox of democracy. Despite the dream of the Enlightenment, the individual is, and will always be, unable to meet the requirements of democracy. Yet democracy has worked reasonably well in the United States and a few other countries. Why? Not because—and again despite the dream of the Enlightenment—there is something infallible or sanctified in the politics of democracy, but because of the institutional system that has gone with democracy where it has been successful. It is not to the Enlightenment’s cherished faith in the individual and the General Will that we look for a resolution of the paradox but to the religious heritage of Judeo-Christianity, the basic social and economic institutions of the West, the cultural pluralism and the social consensus, all of which are at once distinguishable from and inextricably related to political democracy. These are the crucial elements of a free society, as minds as far apart as Proudhon and Tocqueville saw before national democracy was well under way. Given these social and moral conditions it does not really matter that only 50 per cent of the electorate turns out for the vote, so far as the preservation of a reasonably free society is concerned. Without these conditions, 100 per cent would not help us—as Soviet Russia should make plain to all.
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1 The American Voter, by Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes (John Wiley, 573 pp., $8.50); The Costs of Democracy, by Alexander Heard (University of North Carolina Press, 493 pp., $6.00); Politics in Boston, by Murray B. Levin (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 84 pp. $1.25).
2 In “The Candidates and I” (April).
