THE POLITICAL MAUSOLEUM
An American TV announcer, reaching into the past for an analogy, puts it differently: “Right now I feel the nation is a stagecoach with the horses running headlong, and a guy trying to pullin the reins, and they are not responding.”
This is why so many people—including those in high office—feel so powerless. A leading American senator privately tells me of his deep frustration and the feeling that he cannot accomplish anything useful. He questions the ruin of his family life, the frantic pace of his existence, the long hours, hectic travel, endless conferences, and perpetual pressure. He asks, “Is it worth it?” A British M.P. poses the same question, adding that “the House of Commons is a museum piece—a relic!” A top White House official complains to me that even the President, supposedly the most powerful man in the world, feels impotent. “The President feels as though he is shouting into the telephone—with nobody at the other end.”
This deepening breakdown of the ability to make timely and competent decisions changes the deepest power relationships in society. Under normal, nonrevolutionary circumstances, the elites in any society use the political system to reinforce their rule and further their ends. Their power is defined by the ability to make certain things happen, or to prevent certain things from happening. This presupposes, however, their ability to predict and control events—it assumes that when they yank on the reins, the horses will stop.
Today the elites can no longer predict the outcomes of their own actions. The political systems through which they operate are so antiquated and creaky, so outraced by events, that even when closely “controlled” by the elites for their own benefit, the results often backfire.
This does not mean, one hastens to add, that the power lost by the elites has accrued to the rest of society. Power is not transferred: it is increasingly randomized, so that no one knows from moment to moment who is responsible for what, who has real (as distinct from nominal) authority, or how long that authority will last. In this seething semi-anarchy, ordinary people crow bitterly cynical not merely about their own “representatives” but—more ominously—about the very possibility of being represented at all.
As a result, the Second Wave “reassurance ritual” of voting begins to lose its power. Year by year, American voting participation decreases. In the 1976 presidential election fully 46 percent of eligible voters stayed home, meaning that a president was elected bv roughly one quarter of the electorate—in reality only about one eighth of the total population of the country. More recently, pollster Patrick Caddell found that only 12 percent of the electorate still felt that voting matters at all.
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