The Real Reason Americans Don’t Vote : Behavior: As we isolate ourselves from our community, public participation of any sort becomes a nuisance.

Last Tuesday’s election produced the lowest voter turnout rate in California’s history, with only about 37% of registered voters--and thus less than 20% of the eligible population--bothering to vote. While there are promising measures on the horizon to encourage more participation, such as registering to vote as part of registering one’s car, they address the symptoms of indifference, not the underlying causes.

One frequently hears three reasons for not participating: “It doesn’t matter,” “I’m too busy” and “I can’t make a difference.”

The first reason--”It doesn’t matter”--I dismiss as simply a symptom of disenchantment. In fact it does matter, although not as much as many would have us believe; choosing between Bill Clinton and George Bush will not uproot the political landscape. Nonetheless, even if there is no drastic change after elections, there is a significant incremental change. If one cares about structuring the tax system, health-care policy, defense expenditures, the issues of abortion, gun control and the environment, then elections make some small but meaningful difference.

The second reason--”I’m too busy”--offers a crucial clue as to why individuals do not participate in politics. Consider the Greek distinction between the public and the private realms. The public world--legislatures, city-council hearings, school-board meetings, even parks and streets--is the world of politics and debate about the general good, although self-interest is hardly absent. The private world--think of the architecture of suburban homes with fences and security systems (whatever happened to the front porch?)--is the world of economic self-interest.

For centuries, many thinkers, both conservative and liberal, have warned that the new urban and commercial society would inexorably undermine public life, because the emerging acquisitive society would entice individuals more and more into their private, economic endeavors and fasten them there. Montesquieu worried that citizens “grow indifferent to public affairs (when) avarice becomes their predominant passion.” Writing like an Old Testament prophet, Tocqueville warned of the time when Americans lose all restraint at the prospect of more wealth and thus political duties appear to be a nuisance.

“The better to look after what they call their own business,” Tocqueville scoffed, “they neglect their chief business, which is to remain their own masters.”

It is difficult, Tocqueville concluded, to be simultaneously selfless citizen and self-seeking businessman. Because there is tension between commerce and citizenship, between an acquisitive ethic and democratic participation, individuals become too busy for political affairs.

The third reason for not voting--”I can’t make a difference”--is also revealing. As people sequester themselves in their private worlds, then communities and neighborhoods and associations begin to break apart and individuals become isolated from their fellow citizens. Tocqueville worried about a new urban world of strangers, each “living apart” and each glutting himself or herself with “petty and paltry pleasures,” while all were tyrannized over by a powerful centralized government.

With isolation comes powerlessness; isolated individuals are by definition powerless, because they do not meet with fellow citizens to discuss and to organize. In this new world of isolation, each person, Tocqueville maintained, “is instantly overwhelmed by his own insignificance and weakness.” Nothing renders us more powerless, Hannah Arendt noted, than modern urban loneliness, which only in the late 20th Century “has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses.” No wonder men and women believe that they cannot make a difference.

What to do? As genuine democrats are fond of saying, the cure for the problems of democracy is more democracy. More representative city governments, more democratic small towns, community organizing of all kinds, neighborhood control of schools and police--all these measures would make citizens less isolated, less powerless and more likely to put aside private economic matters, at least for a while, to attend to public concerns and the common good. But how can we travel to this new democratic world when so many centrifugal forces fling us into our private world and confine us there?