Democracy's future
Carlin, David R. Jr.
OF SEVERAL HINDS David R. Carlin, Jr. DEMOCRACY'S FUTURE PARTIES THAT NOBODY GOES TO Politics in America today is more paradoxical than any politics ought to be. On the one hand, the two major...
...But if politicians are to get elected, it is not enough to cater to special interests...
...Since there will be no one uplifting the potential apadietics and taming the potential fanatics, apathy and fanaticism will abound...
...2. The potential apathetic is a lot of trouble...
...Come to think of it, it is already in real danger.ready in real danger...
...for only sensationalism can get the attention of the apathetic...
...3. Potential fanatics are the most trouble of all, far more trouble than the apathetic, who will go away when you ignore them...
...How can these apparently contradictory phenomena be reconciled...
...So what will happen as the Democratic and Republican parties continue to fade away like the Cheshire Cat...
...And that is precisely what has been happening in recent years...
...1. The average religious person is no problem...
...Back to Washington politics...
...and they attempted to tame potential fanatics...
...You do something sensational to catch their limited attention...
...But how do you appeal to people whose party loyalty is close to zero and whose political knowledge and interest are not much higher...
...Their passion for religion is so great that they find it difficult to tolerate average Catholicism or the average Catholics who practice it, much as the Bach fanatic finds it difficult to abide the lover of sentimental music...
...Potential fanatics, by contrast, refuse to go away...
...On election day, they must appeal to "independent" (that is, apathetic) voters...
...American political parties have been similar to the Catholic church, in that they have aimed at fostering a moderate degree of intensity, in this case political intensity...
...During the age of persecution, a tempting alternative was to burn them at the stake...
...If we are prochoice in everything else, why shouldn't we be pro-choice in politics...
...This political independence, it may be noted in passing, is part and parcel of a broader cultural trend toward individual autonomy...
...Much hard pulling on the part of others is required to keep this kind inside the Catholic fold...
...Party loyalty is tenuous, party organization weak, party bosses nonexistent...
...The church has an ancient history of putting these people in rigorous and challenging institutional settings (convents and monasteries), hoping this will tame them while converting their vast energies to useful purposes...
...The answer is easy...
...How can we have near-anarchy plus organized warfare at the same time...
...they tried to raise the potentially apathetic to the level of minimal political participation...
...While you're doing this you put an amazingly unflattering picture of your foe on the TV screen, an image presenting him or her as either a villain or an imbecile or (better still) both...
...Like the potential apathetic, this type also tends to dislike priests, though here the complaint is not about the badness of priests but about their goodness: a goodness that is too tame, too banal, too mediocre, lacking the bite and savor of real sanctity...
...Over the last thirty years or so, Americans have become progressively more independent, less committed to either party...
...A clue to the answer may be found in the history of the Catholic church...
...But special interest groups-whether these are of the ideological type (for example, the National Rifle Association, the National Organization for Women, the National Right to Life Committee) or of the economic type (for example, the National Education Association, the National Federation of Independent Businesses, the American Medical Association)-are made to order for the single-issue mentality...
...In fact, most clergy themselves belong to this category...
...If the experiment continues, if fanaticism and apathy continue to be given free rein, American democracy will be in real danger...
...They sustained mild political commitment and interest among average Americans...
...There is no reason to believe this experiment will succeed, since strong political parties seem to be essential ingredients in a democracy...
...In its policy toward these three types lies one of the great secrets of the church's longevity...
...At the same time, old Washington hands assure us they have never seen the fever of partisanship running quite so high a temperature as it has in the past few years, a temp soaring even higher in the era of Speaker Gingrich...
...He or she avoids most gross immoralities, attends Sunday Mass regularly, marries in the church, has the kids baptized and confirmed, shows respect for the clergy, contributes money, is proud to be Catholic, etc...
...Very understandably, the clergy find it easy to work with this type, and they wish all Catholics could be like this...
...Our "do-your-own-thing" ethic has produced high rates of fornication, divorce, abortion, violence, yuppie shopping sprees, and entrepreneurial initiative, plus political independence...
...As political parties wane, fanatics and apathet-ics fill the void...
...You could not easily be a fanatic inside the Democratic or Republican parties of the old days...
...On the one hand, the two major parties are as feeble as they have ever been...
...We Americans are embarked on a great and dangerous experiment to see if we can operate a modern democracy without strong political parties...
...This category includes Catholics who are criminals, who are unreformed drunks, who married outside the church, who don't work at raising their kids Catholic, who rarely or never attend Mass, who dislike priests in general because of some unpleasant experience with a particular priest, etc...
...You run TV ads attacking your opponent as a person of bad character: liar, hypocrite, thief, womanizer, racist, anti-Semite, hater of widows and orphans, etc...
...But the parties are in decline...
...As the parties have grown weaker, as they have lost their once-vast bases of loyal voters, their men and women in Washington have come increasingly under the sway of single-issue groups and the fanatics and semi-fanatics who populate them...
...The most the church realistically hopes for with these people is to maintain them at some minimal level of religion, well below the level of the average Catholic...
...Religions that try to raise everyone to the level of fanaticism burn out within a few generations, while religions that tolerate apathy wither away...
...Fanatics are single-issue people, while political parties are multi-issue organizations...
...The church has always had to worry about three kinds of constituents: (1) the average religious person, (2) the potential apathetic, and (3) the potential fanatic...
Vol. 122 • April 1995 • No. 7
