HOBBITS AND HOOLIGANS

American revolutionary and president John Adams said, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." Adams was a political animal if ever there was one, but he hoped future generations would evolve into a higher form of life.

This book explains why we should try to realize that hope.

DOES POLITICAL PARTICIPATION ENNOBLE OR CORRUPT? MILL VERSUS SCHUMPETER

The great nineteenth-century economist and moral philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that we should institute whatever form of government produces the best results. Mill advised us to examine all the consequences. That is, when asking whether it's best to have monarchy, oligarchy, aristocracy, representative legislatures, or other forms of government, we should focus not just on the obvious things, like how well different forms of government respect liberal rights or promote economic growth. We should also examine how different forms of government affect citizens' intellectual and moral virtue. Some forms of government might leave us dumb and passive, while others might make us sharp and active.

Mill hoped that getting people involved in politics would make them smarter, more concerned about the common good, better educated, and nobler. He hoped getting a factory worker to think about politics would be like getting a fish to discover there's a world outside the ocean. Mill hoped political involvement would harden our minds yet soften our hearts. He hoped that political engagement would cause us to look beyond our immediate interests and instead to adopt a long-term, broad perspective.

Mill was a scientific thinker. When he wrote, few countries had representative government. These few countries restricted suffrage, permitting only a nonrepresentative and elite minority to vote. In Mill's time, political participation was mostly an educated gentleman's pursuit. Mill did not quite have the evidence needed to back up his claims. At most, he had a reasonable but untested hypothesis.

That was just over 150 years ago. The test results are now in. They are, I will hold, largely negative. I think Mill would agree. Most common forms of political engagement not only fail to educate or ennoble us but also tend to stultify and corrupt us. The truth is closer to the economist Joseph Schumpeter's complaint: "The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again."

If Mill's hypothesis is wrong and Schumpeter is right, we must ask some hard questions: How much do we really want people to participate in politics? How much should people even be allowed to participate?

THE UPSIDE OF DEMOCRATIC DECLINE

Many books about democracy and civic engagement complain that participation rates are falling. They note that in the late 1800s, 70 to 80 percent of eligible Americans voted in major elections. They then complain that we now muster at most 60 percent for a presidential election, or 40 percent for midterm, state, and local elections. After citing these numbers, they gnash their teeth. US democracy is more inclusive than ever, with more and more people invited to take a seat at the political bargaining table. And yet fewer people RSVP. Citizens are not taking the responsibility of self-government seriously, they say.

My response is different: this decline in political engagement is a good start, but we still have a long way to go. We should hope for even less participation, not more. Ideally, politics would occupy only a small portion of the average person's attention. Ideally, most people would fill their days with painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain, or perhaps football, NASCAR, tractor pulls, celebrity gossip, and trips to Applebee's. Most people, ideally, would not worry about politics at all.

In contrast, some political theorists want politics to pervade more aspects of life. They want more political deliberation. They think politics ennobles us, and see democracy as a way of empowering the little person to take control of their circumstances. Some "civic humanists" regard democracy itself as the good life, or at least a higher calling.

Which side is closer to the truth depends in part on what human beings are like, what democratic participation does to us, and what problems mass political participation is likely to solve — or create.

THREE SPECIES OF DEMOCRATIC CITIZENS

We no longer have to speculate, as Mill did, about what politics does to us. Psychologists, sociologists, economists, and political scientists have spent more than sixty years studying how people think about, react to, and make decisions in politics. They've investigated what people know, what they don't know, what they believe, how strongly they believe it, and what makes them change their minds. They've looked into how opinionated people are, how and why they form coalitions, and what gets them to act or participate. I'll review much of this research in greater detail in the coming chapters. Here, I summarize the results.

People differ in how strongly they hold political opinions. Some people cling to their opinions with religious fervor, while others have only weakly held views. Some people maintain the same ideology for years at a time, whereas others change their minds in a heartbeat.

People differ in how consistent their views are. Some people have a unified, coherent set of opinions. Others have inconsistent, contradictory beliefs.

People differ in how many opinions they have. Some people have an opinion on everything, and some people have hardly any at all.

Then too, people differ in how much information or evidence they have to support their beliefs. Some people have a strong background in the relevant social sciences. Some just watch the news. Others know hardly anything about politics. They have opinions, but little or no evidence backing them up.

People differ in how they regard and respond to those with whom they disagree. Some see their political opponents as satanic, while others think they are merely mistaken. Some believe that at least some of their opponents are reasonable, while others think all of them are fools.

People also differ in how much and in what ways they participate. Some people obsess over politics the way others obsess over celebrity love affairs. Some people vote, volunteer, campaign, and donate. Others never have and never will...