20
PARTISAN REVIEW
their functions.
Is there anything left for the party to do? I mentioned James Bryce's
book,
The American Commonwealth:
I like the way Bryce formulated the
problem. He wrote, "In a country so full of change and movement as
America, new questions are always coming up, and must be answered.
New troubles surround a government, and a way must be found to es–
cape from them; new diseases attack the nation and have to be cured.
The duty of a great party is to find answers and remedies." We often
wonder what politics are about. People sometimes think politics is a
contest for power. Certainly it is that. In modern times, it is said to be a
struggle over image, and I suppose that plays a role too. But in the end,
politics can justify itself only in the pursuit of remedy, that is, finding
answers to questions. This is the one way in which a president can
revitalize
il
party.
Although I am certainly in favor of voter registration efforts, better
voter turnout alone will not revitalize the parties. Voter turnout
declines as the voter pool enlarges. The first decline in voter turnout
came with the Nineteenth Amendment, with women's suffrage, in 1920.
Women were not used to voting, and so turnout fell. The passage in
1965 of the Voting Rights Act, enfranchising for all practical purposes
the black vote in the South, caused another decline in the percentage of
turnout, because blacks, like women before them, were not "socialized,"
as the sociologists say, into the habit of voting. The passage of the
Twenty-sixth Amendment enfranchising eighteen-year-olds caused a
further decline in voter turnout. Even today, though women and blacks
are beginning to vote, the eighteen-year-olds are not. Every enlargement
of the pool of eligible voters has reduced the percentage of voters
turning out for elections.
I do not think that changing registration practices is going to affect
these deeper problems. What might affect these deeper problems, though,
would be to have presidents come up with serious answers to the
problems that assail the country. Politics is in the end less about power
and image than it is about remedy. It seems that one reason for voter
alienation is that voters do not think politicians are addressing issues that
concern them. In the most recent debate, when President Bush tried to
bring up the so-called character issue, the audience of average voters
wouldn't have anything to do with it. They didn't want to hear Bush
making dark hints about Clinton going to Moscow when he was a
student at Oxford. They wanted to know what the candidates were
going to do about the problems we have today.
I am rather hopeful that these things will change. I inherit from my
father a cyclical view of American politics. There has been a clear pattern
