Long May Public Opinion Survive

Long May Public Opinion Survive
by Josh London

I can't help but feel that the national political scene in this country is growing increasingly tiresome and dull. Yes, McCain looks like he could potentially knock out Bush, and, yes, the Reform Party has publicly fallen to bits, and, yes, Hillary has officially declared her candidacy. But who cares? It is far too early to make predictions about Bush, the Reform Party has never been significant and everyone knew Hillary was running for office months ago. Besides, none of the political horse-race-type news has any real relevance to the lives of any worthwhile citizen. Sure horse-race politics can be of dramatic relevance to the lives of politicos and journalists, but not to any real people.

So I thought it might be worthwhile to place the 2000 presidential election in a broader international perspective. After all, the United States is not the only nation with a 2000 presidential election that ought to be important to Americans. Two that are perhaps worth discussing are in Russia, which has nearly as many nuclear weapons as the United States, and in Mexico, with whom we share a 2,000-mile border.

To the paid observer, or the political junkie, who has been watching all three elections at varying distances, there are some notable similarities. The citizenry in all three countries are showing some degree of satisfaction, or, at any rate, moderately blissful apathy. And why not? Our economy is growing firmly and steadily, and the economies of Mexico and Russia are -- all things considered -- growing... ah, perceptibly. Both Russia and Mexico have had some very rocky recent economic history, but both are having a swell time of it of late.

And yet, with all three countries, their respective electoral systems are forcing their respective blissfully apathetic citizenry to face new issues and make different choices. Term limits bar incumbent presidents here and in Mexico from seeking re-election, while Russians know little about Vladimir Putin, who was virtually unknown when Boris Yeltsin named him prime minister in August 1999 and whose intentions have been murky since Yeltsin resigned December 31 and made him acting president.

Here in America, due to our long-established two parties and our baroquely encrusted system of caucuses and primaries, our politics is roughly responsive to current opinions and diverse constituencies. This is not the case in Russia or Mexico, both of which started the 1990s with one-party systems. Both Russia and Mexico are developing, however haphazardly, multiparty political systems. The immediate result of the political changes is that the voters are being forced -- one hates to use such language for either country as it has significantly more meaning for them than us -- to contemplate change and their politicians have, presumably, no choice but to respond.

Mexico's PRI party has held the presidency since it was founded in 1929. Fortunately President Ernesto Zedillo has reduced PRI's election-rigging and has abandoned the tradition of naming his own successor. Indeed, PRI held its first primary last November -- announcing to the world that it was leaving the choice to voters for a change. The winner, Francisco Labastida, widely seen as Zedillo's pick, has accepted the North American Free Trade Agreement and other free-market reforms. Of course, so has his closest rival, former Guanajuato Gov. Vicente Fox of the conservative PAN party, and, trailing behind, former Mexico City Mayor Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas of the leftist PRD party. So the three clowns are distinguishing themselves by competing with rival proposals to improve education and clean up corruption.

According to those in the know, the ruling party is favored in the vote, and cynics -- I mean realists -- say the system won't change. But the emergence of real, palpable, electoral competition (including reasonably clean vote counts), and the premium voters afford politicians for good performance in office, give Mexican politicos more or less benign incentives that have never really been available before.

Russia is far more screwed up. Putin seems terribly unlikely to have serious competition in the March 26 election, which leads many to rightfully conclude that Russia's electoral democracy is a fraud. But Yeltsin put Putin on the way to winning only after the Putin-backed "Unity" slate wiped out the "Fatherland" slate led by Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov and former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov in the December 19 Duma elections. It is true, of course, that "Unity" was helped by scurrilous negative campaigning on media oligarch Boris Berezovsky's ORT television. But voters had a variety of other sources of information and a hardy and healthy skepticism well developed over the years.

In his brilliant 1922 book, Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann argued that electoral democracy could not produce responsible government. Voters could not understand complex issues and would be swayed by stereotypes and slogans. He understandably recommended "an independent, expert organization for making the unseen facts intelligible to those who have to make the decisions" -- Platonic guardians. Unfortunately, Lippmann was being naive: the institutional arrangements of all such organizations are such that a whole host and variety of internal pressures and interests, and counter interests, and competing interests, helps insure that no such "guardian" class, group or organization could ever really exist. (This has been the supreme lesson of the "public choice" school of economics.)

No, much better to leave it to public opinion. Of course, one who has spoken with voters in the United States, Mexico, and Russia cannot help but be struck by how often their responses, even if not at first forthcoming and uttered in shorthand phrases, show a weak grasp of a limited variety of inchoate humbug, nonsensical "knowledge" of issues and candidates and a firmly irrational and poorly developed basis for evaluating choices?and these are the ones who plan on voting. But this is still preferable to the visions of the anointed "guardian" class.

Still, for all its faults, electoral politics 2000, by forcing choices on the voters in all three countries, is an expression of the sentiments of a relatively free and prosperous people. We should all give thanks to those who sacrificed themselves to secure this freedom. Long may public opinion survive.