U.S. democracy: will the last one out please turn off the lights?

• Author: Prugh, Thomas
• Position: Editorial

democracy n. l.a. Government by the people.

(Webster's Third New International Dictionary)

Ever-lower voter turnout in U.S. elections is a perennial story. Now comes study, reported in the Washington Post in February, that actually makes you wonder why voting rates are still so high. Analyzing a national survey, political scientists John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse confirmed that most Americans are not interested in the issues and don't want to get involved. Almost half thought that the country would benefit if "successful business people"--like Enron's Kenneth Lay, perhaps?-and/or "unelected experts" made the big decisions. We bate debate, especially when there's strong disagreement. We can't bear to see compromise at work and can't handle multiple issues at the same time. Democracy, basically, turns us off.

As baseball legend Casey Stengel said to one of his losing teams, "Can't anybody here play this game?"

We in the United States seem to have forgotten how, though we once knew. In 1858, for instance, thousands turned our in the hot summer sun to hear seven very long debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. But since then, human ingenuity (much of it American) has created television, shopping malls, and the Internet. Many of us in the United States long ago stopped consuming to live and began living to consume. The role of consumer has expanded with our waistlines, squeezing out the rote of citizen. And as long as the promised-land machinery keeps...