Hyperdemocracy

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This was widely viewed as shameless pandering, not to mention a cheap imitation of Republican pandering. But it wasn't viewed as surprising. Politics is pandering in a hyperdemocracy; to lead is to follow. Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution sees this as one of the great social costs of modern information technology: in a kind of Darwinian process, hyperdemocracy weeds out politicians with the sort of strong internal principles that defy public opinion. "The advantage enjoyed by people willing to trim their views to the tastes of the electorate was smaller back when you couldn't find out what the electorate thought," Aaron says. Today, "few of those with core principles survive." If you don't obey talk-radio or public-opinion polls, you're ushered offstage.

Perversely, though, politicians are also punished if they do obey. The classic complaint about President Clinton is that he stands for nothing. Which is to say, he's willing to do just about anything to satisfy voters. Since the 1960s, the number of Americans expressing trust in Washington has dropped from around 70% to near 20%. This is commonly interpreted as a judgment against the growing power of special-interest lobbyists. But it could also be a reaction against the increasingly abject spinelessness of politicians, a byproduct of the very same trend. Indeed, the one clear exception to the number's downward drift are the Reagan years. Aaron says, "Even Democrats like me, who believed Ronald Reagan was a malign force, respected him, because, damn it, there were things he really stood for."

President Clinton, being inside the Beltway, periodically gets accused of being out of touch, of not "getting it." But he has shown that he "gets" the basics: that voters are worried about crime, for example, and that they hate to pay taxes. If there's anything major he doesn't "get," it's that in a hyperdemocracy, "getting it" can be self-defeating. The voters demand slavish obedience, but the more they receive it, the less they respect it. Has this sort of disrespect reached such a level as to be actually auspicious for a politician who leads rather than follows? It is hard to say. Few politicians seem inclined to conduct the experiment.