The Wood between the Worlds
Wednesday, March 17, 2004
Tuesday, March 16, 2004
I forgot. Here are three Spanish blogs that should be useful to know about:
BloJJ
Iberian Notes
LibertadDigital
Flory
OK, the rate of posts is going to drop to one every few weeks between now and April 30th; it's astonishing how heavy the load is becoming. But once I clear finals week (which may mean as early as April 22-24th) I hope to make up for it.
I wasn't going to post about politics, except where events involved one or more of the three putative reasons for this blog, but I think the recent events in Spain deserve a couple of sentences, at least.
First, what an appalling disaster. If only the word "tragedy" had any weight left in it, since this is truly one. Not only is 200 (and 1,400 injured!) absolutely an awful total, relative to Spain's population, about 40m, the bombing was roughly equivalent to half the Sept. 11 total. An attack of such a magnitude has its own horror.
Second, thank God Sept. 11 was not an election year. It is not possible to predict what would have happened if an attack like that had preceded the election. Bush already failed to carry the popular vote; even worse, think what the 2000 post-election legal and media battle would have been like if the NYT were still running obituaries for victims and identification of bodies was still continuing and making news. Actually, I can't imagine it.
With luck, Americans would have reacted as they did. All but the radical left were brought back to the patriotism that, lacking as we do any ethnic bond, is the essence of American identity. Rather than being worse, the post-election problems could have been handled in the context of a temporarily re-awakened sense of civic responsibility. Such events have brought out an element of greatness in far less promising men than Gore.
On the other hand, in Spain the Socialist party won by about two million votes. There were also two million first-time voters. As in America, routine non-voters tend leftward. I think it is very wrong to accuse the Spanish of cowardice; nearly half of the voters even in record turnout voted for Aznar's PP, a very high total in a parliamentary system. And those PSOE (Socialist) voters who were committed to the party beforehand may be guilty of a great deal because of their commitment to a disastrous political philosophy, but I don't really see how they could be considered cowardly for not changing their vote. Of course they should have seen what not changing would mean, but there was little time and anyway socialists are not noted for their tight connection to reality.
(Which reminds me that there are flyers up at the university calling for "A Better World: It Can Happen" and pointing out that in this current, inferior world the rich capitalists still live off the labor of the worker. The accompanying cartoon is hilarious, of a hugely fat man in 1920s-ish fancy dress, sitting on the bowed backs of four workers, drawn in classic Soviet style, with the mighty thews and the overalls. So in case anyone was missing the subtext to post-Soviet leftist politics, the promise is still of a Better World and that doesn't just mean trying for better laws or courts or zoning regulations, but a change in the nature of reality. How would someone who thinks like that even be able to think about the likely terrorist interpretation of his vote?)
Even in the 1990s dreamtime, when most people acted and voted as if history had ended (in the Fukuyama sense), Jesse Ventura was able to win Minnesota's governorship by bringing in routine non-voters, especially the young. He turned out to be just what he looked like, a total disaster, and in the next election, the regular voters voted him out. Not only had he been a disaster but of course one of the things about routine non-voters is that they will not be likely to vote again, let alone twice in succession, once that immediate stimulus is gone. (Novelty and action-figure ads in Ventura's case.)
Scarcely 50% of the electorate in America votes, even in tight presidential elections. Every single regular voter in America could respond to terrorist attacks by voting to support the current president, whoever it was, yet not ensure his victory. The Spanish voters were subjected to several days of appalling propaganda by a press that hated the PP government intensely and that terribly misrepresented the facts. Our press might act better; would you bet on it? And of course not every single voter would switch to support Bush; a good quarter to a third of committed Democrats think Bush is a criminal and a liar, and even simply a murderer.
In other words, every responsible person with even a moderate level of knowledge, both liberal and conservative, could vote the right way, yet America could produce a "cowardly" result. That's the problem with calling Spain cowardly. It's also the problem with mass enfranchisement. People with no stake in society, and this is not a surprise, invest no effort in learning about the surrounding society and have no serious interest in its future. They know nothing, have no experience in learning what is needed, and I very much doubt could ever be counted on to come to the right conclusion about a political matter at the very moment that they would be full of the strongest civic feeling they'd ever had in their lives.
Of course I'm just assuming that the new Spanish voters were typical in being urban, young, ignorantly cynical, propertyless, unmarried, etc. If someone can find otherwise I'll be interested to see it, but what I've read suggests this is right. At any rate, this sort of thing is why I think suffrage ought to require some evidence of civic involvement. Not a lot, just a bit. One way would be to raise the age of enfranchisement to 30, or at least to the historical 25. Age is a proxy for civic involvement since most people end up married or at least significantly connected, through land or business, to the rest of society. Since the average age at first marriage is 27 for women and 29 for men, 30 would be a very simple way to skew the electorate towards people who are beginning to think responsibly. Other ways, such as requiring the voter to present at least one of a marriage license, a property deed, or a business license, would be even stronger but much more complicated to implement. It's not going to happen of course, and I don't waste much time wishing it would, but I do think people ought to think through just what it means to vote and why voting matters at all. After all, the Soviets voted, men and women, young and old, every single one.
John Flory
P.S. Don Gately asks about women's suffrage. First, I don't actually think women should be denied the vote and I never have; what I've said is, and this is true so far as I know, that no one has ever re-visited the claims made by those opposed to it before the amendment was ratified. In fact admitting women to the vote has made a huge difference; no Democrat has won a majority of the men's vote in the presidential election since 1960. More women than men (here, in Britain, and in Spain) believe in pre-emptive capitulation to terrorists, to such an extent that while men's support for various military actions often hits the 60% level, women's remains in the 40s. This is mostly, I think, a result of the far lower interest in national and especially international affairs that most, not all, women evidence. On the other hand, the same studies that have confirmed that women are primarily interested in local (city and county) politics have confirmed that men tend to know less about and to be less interested in local politics. In addition, women come later to any political interest at all. Politically aware ordinary guys (as opposed to activists) are not the majority but are still common even in their early 20s. This isn't true for women. So for me it's not a matter of sex but age, with women simply showing the effect of age more strongly.
Lastly, Don asks if women were enfranchised at any point before the 18th Amendment. The answer is, yes, because in some states before about 1830 the vote was based on property only. Laws at the time (very wrongly) made it extremely difficult for women to hold property, but when it did happen, they could end up with the vote. Again, this was only in a few states and only for a fairly brief period, and ironically women's (accidental) suffrage was snuffed out in the course of extending suffrage to all free men. I don't know whether women had ever voted in other countries; probably not, since I can't think of any other candidate than revolutionary France. They very well could have there, I don't know.
