More voters. That’s the key detail from Iowa last night. The Republican caucus electorate was 20 percent larger than in 2000 (from 86,000 to 103,000); the Democratic electorate was almost twice the size it was in 2004. Barack Obama got scads of new voters, but then, the data suggest, so did Hillary Clinton. This follows the pattern of every election since 2000. There were 105 million voters that year, and 122 million in 2004. John Kerry bested Al Gore’s vote tally by 16 percent; George W. Bush bested his own 2000 tally by 22 percent. The numbers in the midterm elections in 2002 and 200 showed a level of participation never before equaled in non-presidential years.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Television, as you have probably heard, was supposedly draining our capacity for civic participation. We were bowling alone. We don’t know when the Civil War was. We only care about Britney Spears. We don’t care about anything except our Big Macs, our SUVs, and our Venti Decaf Skim Lattes.

Evidently, we do care about a great many things. It turns out the Edward R. Murrow Era of Glorious Network Coverage With Lots of Foreign Bureaus was the period during which American voters increasingly tuned out. Meanwhile, in the Celebutard Guitar Hero Reality Television Internet Porn Era of Partisans Screaming Past Each Other Rather Than Engaging in Wonderful Civic Discourse, Americans are becoming more and more engaged with the politics of the present moment. Maybe American Idol, with its “you pick the winner” model, is actually better for civil virtue than Harvest of Shame.