Even Tom Edsall conceded that the evidence of Americans’ political ignorance was stunning.
I was chatting with Edsall, a Washington Post reporter and perhaps the most cerebral poker-playing writer on politics, about a survey on how we think and act. The results, based on interviews with 1,514 randomly selected adults, ran for a week in his paper and, at times, were head-turning.
For sure, lots of polls are rubbish, especially many of the who’s-up, who’s-down campaign variety beloved by intellectually lazy newspapers, magazines and television.
But this effort, done by a consortium of the Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University, was at times engrossing as it found, among many matters, that Americans exhibit a prodigious stupidity about politics and government.
For example, 54 percent couldn’t name either U.S. senator from their state. Moreover, they were dead wrong about many actions of the government–for example, believing that air and water quality have worsened. Thanks to their government, that’s total balderdash.
Edsall said, “The degree to which people have strong opinions about politics but have no basic understanding, even of which party is in the majority in Congress, or who their senator is, or who the vice president is, while still holding politics in contempt, is very impressive. It’s kind of stunning.”
As sobering was the survey’s conclusion that we are becoming “a nation of suspicious strangers,” mistrusting one another and nearly all major institutions, notably the federal government. People walk around with guns even when crime is going down in their neighborhoods, reflecting an antsiness perhaps fueled by media overplay of local crime stories.
The survey’s related finding of a fracturing of community dovetailed with other research on the topic, as well as with conclusions of a recent Tribune series on the undermining of community, as seen from suburban Lemont.
Interestingly, women, more than men, are now inclined to be suspicious of government and nervous about the economy. Remember the angry white male, deemed important by the sages in the Republicans’ 1994 election wins? This survey finds a formidable body of angry females, two-thirds of whom blame the government for the economy’s decline.
The part written by Edsall involved what he discerns as the emergence of a “new political profile” in America, one whose “demographic and attitudinal characteristics are reshaping the partisan and ideological tilt of the American electorate” as people become more receptive to conservative, anti-government messages.
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“The whole structure of politics is changing,” he said during our chat. “It’s going away from traditional have and have-not coalitions, to ones involving people’s sense of what their identity is, be they a woman, a man, a non-believer.”
That changing structure, with its inherent, free-floating sets of suspicions and anxieties, gives the Republican Party what Edsall feels is a built-in advantage. Americans are now more given to buy any anti-government notion, for example inclined to the belief that hiking taxes to pay for any federal program is a waste.
That part of the survey played to a special area of Edsall expertise, namely the decline of the Democrats and dissolution of their old coalition. It’s a basic theme he and his wife, Mary, explored in a well-received 1991 book, “Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights and Taxes on American Politics” (W.W. Norton).
As the Edsalls made clear, the old Democratic coalition reflected a melding of blue-collar workers, union members, blacks and big-city political machines driven by the working class, all aligned against a business- and-corporate-driven Republican opponent.
But the latest survey underscores how those divisions are blown to smithereens, or at least into “increasingly complex units” in which partisan political allegiance is often a function of the most basic elements of one’s being, namely sex, marital status, religion conviction and race.
It presents a special headache to the Democrats in piecing together an inherently difficult coalition of different races and ethnic groups. Life is easier for the Republicans, who “reflect more white Protestant America and have less coalition building to do.”
Those new, complex units include married women, who respond differently than single women, as well as splits between males and females, and, especially in the South, between blacks and whites. Thus, while married women split evenly between the two major parties, single and divorced women lean Democratic by a 2-1 ratio. Meanwhile, every similar category of men is leaning Republican.
And while married white males with incomes below $30,000–a traditional Democratic bastion–now are evenly split between the parties, unmarried white women with incomes above $30,000 are more Democratic than Republican.
Harvard-trained Edsall, 54, is a perfect guy to try to frame all this as he tends to place even the most incremental political doings in a larger, intellectual context. He’s especially strong on the roles of race and class in politics, as demonstrated in a 1980 book he authored alone, “The New Politics of Inequality.”
He was in Iowa last week, cranking out stories with the media horde, running around with the candidates and high-profile non-candidates.
Given the survey’s results, I wondered whether he felt part of some huge disconnection between what he was doing professionally, by reporting on the candidates, and the seeming disinterest and ignorance of a larger mass.
“Well, the reality is that politics is the end of the sewage pipe of this process,” he said. “What these guys (the pols) have is a hand dealt to them. How do they get 51 percent of the vote out of this constituency out there?”
For sure, he said, it would be interesting if a politician took two steps down along the sewage pipe and figured out what to do about the issues of personal trust and community.
But the politicians are in what Edsall deems a “tertiary stage” of the process, where it’s possible to achieve their goals, and win, by simply exploiting the mistrust in what Edsall calls “a market response to what is on the surface.”
“Ideally, politics, and those seeking the presidency, would seek to go beyond that. But there are the market pressures of winning.” The survey takes one into unknown terrain. “How does a public figure cure this deep, personal trust problem?”
Indeed, he noted how Steve Forbes has tapped into the sense of “Washington being dominated by an alien culture, with interests separate, often adversarial to, regular Americans. In fact, all the candidates but Dole want to tap into this. And in 1992, Clinton, from a slightly different vantage point, tried the same thing.”
But exploiting the mistrust is the current political marketplace, admitted a somewhat rueful Edsall. And the more candidates bang away, the worse they may be making the situation.
The Lockheed Report
Lockheed Martin, the huge aerospace firm, sponsors a news chat program on a Washington radio station. It pays the journalist pundits.
Thus, one had a “special roundtable discussion” after President Clinton’s State of the Union address.
Taking Lockheed Martin’s money were former Washington Post reporter Haynes Johnson, columnist Mark Shields, former New York Times reporter Hedrick Smith, columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, and U.S. News & World Report writer Steve Roberts, the husband of. . . . oh, you know.
Lockheed Martin says the reporters on the show are beyond reproach and notes many public affairs shows are subsidized by big firms.