Do Consumers Make Bad Voters?

Before long we shall be past Christmas and it will be politics all the time: First Iowa, then New Hampshire, Michigan, Nevada, and South Carolina (or does South Carolina come before Nevada? Whatever). But before the Christmas lights are taken down and the metal trees are put away until next year, it is worthwhile pausing to consider what the season tells us about our politics.

Contrast for a moment the lines that form outside Wal-Mart on the day of a big sale with the short lines we are accustomed to seeing at polling stations in presidential election years. One would think that it would be the other way around. There are sales all year long, but only one presidential election every four years. What conclusion shall we draw?

The obvious conclusion is that we take shopping more seriously than we do politics. But I think this is too simple. As economists like to point out, the benefits of voting are less clear than the benefits of shopping. One person's vote is unlikely to change the outcome of any election, meaning it's quite rational for a voter to decide to stay home. Why spend a few hours trudging to the polls if one's vote is unlikely to matter? Meanwhile, a shopper who buys at a discount can measure in dollars and cents the advantages of purchasing an item on sale.

Nonetheless, it is not a stretch to surmise that our identity as shoppers may be stronger than our identity as citizens. Daily experience suggests as much. The average American today spends far more time thinking about what they shall buy than how they should vote. Most of us clip coupons. Few of us clip the papers for news stories that might be worth remembering later when we have to cast a ballot. While we know the price of a gallon of milk, most of us don't know that we have three branches of government or that there are 100 members in the United States Senate.

All this may be obvious. What is less obvious is the connection between our identities as consumers and voters. Could it be that the more we identify as consumers the less we identify as voters? In other words, is there a tension between these identities?

History suggests that this is precisely the case. Studies show that the more developed our consumer culture has become the less attention we have paid to politics. Surveys show that Americans in the 1950s, who grew up in an era when consumerism was just beginning to take hold, had a firmer grasp of political details than we do now in some respects. For instance, they understood the differences between the two political parties better than Americans today, according to Harvard's Vanishing Voter Project. And they voted in higher numbers.

One reason among many for our general indifference to the duties of citizenship nowadays is that in a world of abundant consumer goods there are many more pleasant ways to spend one's leisure time than boning up on politics, as John Dewey presciently observed in 1927 in The Public and Its Problems. Dewey, though an optimist, wasn't sure in 1927 whether voters would be able to overcome the natural propensity in a consumer's republic (to borrow Liz Cohen's apt phrase) to become educated voters. Today, sadly, we have our answer and it's not reassuring.

It is worthwhile recalling Dewey's warning:

Political concerns have, of course, always had strong rivals. Persons have always been, for the most part, taken up with their more immediate work and play. The power of "bread and the circus" to divert attention from public matters is an old story. But now the industrial conditions which have enlarged, complicated and multiplied public interests have also multiplied and intensified formidable rivals to them. In countries where political life has been most successfully conducted in the past, there was a class specially set aside, as it were, who made political affairs their special business. Aristotle could not conceive a body of citizens competent to carry on politics consisting of others than those who had leisure, that is, of those who were relieved from all other preoccupations, especially that of making a livelihood. Political life, till recent times, bore out his belief. Those who took an active part in politics were "gentlemen," persons who had had property and money long enough, and enough of it, so that its further pursuit was vulgar and beneath their station. To-day, so great and powerful is the sweep of the industrial current, the person of leisure is usually an idle person. Persons have their own business to attend to, and "business" has its own precise and specialized meaning. Politics thus tends to become just another "business": the especial concern of bosses and the managers of the machine.

The increase in the number, variety and cheapness of amusements represents a powerful diversion from political concern. The members of an inchoate public have too many ways of enjoyment, as well as of work, to give much thought to organization into an effective public. Man is a consuming and sportive animal as well as a political one. What is significant is that access to means of amusement has been rendered easy and cheap beyond anything known in the past. The present era of "prosperity" may not be enduring. But the movie, radio, cheap reading matter and motor car with all they stand for have come to stay. That they did not originate in deliberate desire to divert attention from political interests does not lessen their effectiveness in that direction. The political elements in the constitution of the human being, those having to do with citizenship, are crowded to one side. In most circles it is hard work to sustain conversation on a political theme; and once initiated, it is quickly dismissed with a yawn. Let there be introduced the topic of the mechanism and accomplishment of various makes of motor cars or the respective merits of actresses, and the dialogue goes on at a lively pace. The thing to be remembered is that this cheapened and multiplied access to amusement is the product of the machine age, intensified by the business tradition which causes provision of means for an enjoyable passing of time to be one of the most profitable of occupations.

In 1929 Dewey, joined by the economist Paul Douglas, tried to form a new third party to play to the voters' natural identification as consumers. Their League for Independent Political Action attracted little support, however. Perhaps someone should try again--or, more realistically, the Democrats should simply adopt consumerism as a platform. A party that represented the interests of voters as consumers might just succeed this time. We may not think of ourselves as citizens any longer. But we certainly do conceive of ourselves as consumers. Dewey may simply have been ahead of his time (as he usually was).

Say what you will about the notion of a" consumer's party," voters would know what their party stood for--an improvement on our two main parties, which often seem confused about the interests they are supposed to represent.

KMART shoppers! Hear this! On aisle four there's a bargain on health insurance. Get those policies while they last!