Just an FYI here

[betsuni]

33. Here are some things that brought us to where we are now.

Going through old books, just read this in Robert Hughes' "The Culture of Complaint" (1993):

"Why do so many of the citizens of the world's oldest democracy not vote when they can ... ? Partly, it's an administrative problem -- the disappearance of the old party machine and ward system, whose last vestige was Chicago under Mayor Daley. Whatever its abuses, it got people street by street, household by household, to the ballot boxes. Its patronage system did help tie American people, especially blue-collar and lower middle class ones, to the belief that they as citizens had some role to play in the running of their country from the bottom up, ward by ward. It reinforced the sense of participatory democracy. Without it, the poor stopped voting because they believed that nobody in Washington did or could represent them. The less the poor vote, the more the party of the rich will benefit. This produced a vicious spiral, and American electoral techniques reshaped themselves to bypass the lower third of the society, except when it could be selectively stirred by threats of joblessness or veiled appeals to working-class racism.

"By the late 70s the American citizen was becoming a passive spectator at political events handed down in snippets between commercials. American network television is mostly junk designed to produce reality-shortage ... . No wonder that the act of pulling the lever every four years seemed to mean less, and that fewer people went to the booth to do it. ... In the 80s, as never before in America, we saw statecraft fuse with image-management. Too many things in this supposedly open republic got done out of sight of the citizens. Or they were presented in terms that mocked public intelligence by their brevity and cartoon-like simplicity. This was known as 'Letting Reagan be Reagan.' ... The strategy was to go for deep reflexes with trigger-words, to appeal to prejudice rather than reason or self-interest. The GOP's platform left nothing in the middle ground; it was raw anxious bigotry, aimed to separate Americans into 'us' and 'them.'"