Webb Lecture: Battling Civic Indifference

Delivered by Derek Bok
November 19, 1999
Academy Fall Meeting
Washington, D.C.

It's a great honor to be invited to come here and deliver this lecture, and very humbling to listen to such a warm introduction.

Certainly, Dick Thornberg hit most of the highlights, although he might have mentioned that I went to junior high briefly with Marilyn Monroe, which I consider my greatest accomplishment. And just so Dick understands how deep my Republican roots are, I went to the Harvard Military School, where in the ninth grade I was privileged to serve under the command of H.R. "Bob" Haldeman. He was my company commander, whose Republican credentials I think are beyond question.

I can't help reflecting on this introduction. I hope Dick won't mind me mentioning this: The last time I was privileged to see Dick he was suing me for a violation of section 2 of the Sherman Act, which was a particular embarrassment since I taught Anti-Trust at Harvard Law School. I'll never forget confronting (somewhat red faced) our attorney, who said he participated in a conference with the Assistant Attorney General for Anti-Trust. The latter was describing this rather technical violation that we were alleged guilty of, and the attorney declared, "Well you can't expect a group of college presidents to understand the arcane details of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act." To which the Assistant Attorney General replied, "Sir, I was taught Anti-Trust by one of the college presidents in question."

Well those are all happy memories, but not any happier than the chance to be here to talk to you about a subject dear to my heart. And it is a particular pleasure for me to speak to perhaps one of the few groups left in America that really honors government and really considers public service the high calling of great importance that it unquestionably is and has always been.

Two years ago I completed a study that compared the progress we had made in our society with that of other leading democracies. The progress I measured related to efforts to achieve some 70 different goals that a large majority of the American public considers important things like per capita income, access to healthcare, and equal opportunity. The really striking thing, when adding all of these things up and looking back at them, is that, in almost every case, government and public policy turned out to be very important and often truly decisive in determining the amount of progress this country had made in the last forty years toward those various goals. And I think this is a point worth remembering when presidents of both parties tell us that government is the problem but not the solution, or that the era of big government is over. I think it is important to remind ourselves how important government really is; it has to be part of the solution.

This is, I think, an especially critical moment for our government and for the whole democratic system, despite the prosperity in which we are happily immersed in this country. As you know, confidence in government in this country is very low, even after all these years of prosperity. Over 80 percent of Americans say government is controlled by special interests. Some 75 percent say elected officials don't really care what people think. Most people actually believe Washington is the greatest threat the country faces greater even than big business or big labor, or other organizations in our society.

Now, in a democracy, I was taught and I assume you were, too that when we don't like our government, we have a solution. And that is for us to mobilize and to vote out the people we don't like, thus replacing them with a better government. But, that is precisely what is not happening in government in the United States. On the contrary, people are not getting more concerned with their government - they're getting less concerned and less interested. Not only are they failing to vote which, of course, has been going on since the early '60s but if you look carefully at the evidence, it's very clear they are attending fewer political meetings, working on fewer campaigns, and signing fewer petitions than ever before.

The interesting thing is that this declining involvement is not really because all Americans are becoming less interested and less engaged in government. What is happening is that each new generation is less interested and less involved than the previous generation. So, the real source of decline is that the older generations are thinning out and replaced by newer generations that care less and are less involved than any of their predecessors. It is an interesting fact that even high school dropouts who are over 70 years old vote in presidential elections at a rate of over 60 percent far more than young people who are going to college.

Young people are the least active group of all. It is not that they are selfish or disinterested in anything but their own career, as is often alleged. Actually, they volunteer more than their parents did at a whole range of community service activities. I see that at Harvard. You see that across the country. They simply have lost faith in politics and government. They just don't see them as a useful way to address the problems of society. Less than one third of people aged 18 to 30 bothered to vote in 1996. Less than 20 percent in 1994. Very low figures.

Since the mid-'60s, they have distributed a freshman survey that looks at all the kids who attend college every year. What it asks are two questions that relate to interest in citizenship:

1. How many of you have engaged in a discussion of public affairs with your friends in the last month?
2. How many of you think that keeping up with politics and public affairs is important?

The figures have gone down steadily since the 1960s, and are now at their lowest ebb since the survey began.

So we have a problem, although it is not perceived very widely as one. The interesting thing is that it doesn't seem to be considered a problem by the institutions that have traditionally nurtured civic interest. I'd like to make a point about the results you saw in the newspapers today regarding the first time in the last 12 years the government has bothered to look at the level of civic understanding and awareness on the part of young people. (They do it every year for science and math.) When you look at those results you recognize that, in our schools, civic education which was for a very long time the central purpose of education and was seen as such by people like Jefferson and Washington has been totally eclipsed by a preoccupation with preparing the workforce for the next century. This is a very worthy undertaking for sure, but not one that should eclipse an understanding and ability to participate in a democratic government.

In universities, where liberal education was primarily devoted to preparing leadership for a democratic society, citizenship is simply not recognized explicitly by faculty when they are thinking about their curricula and educational programs. It is not recognized as a goal. I regret to say this was true at Harvard, even after the big curricular revisions of the 1970s, and I am sorry for it. It is something I think we see repeated at many other institutions.

I think news reporting, as we see just by turning on our television set, is given over increasingly to scandal, crime, and human-interest stories rather than issues about public policy. People who have done content analysis showed steady decline in the amount of time devoted to what is going on in Congress and politics.

Political parties don't do very much anymore to mobilize people at the grass-roots level to get them actively involved in citizenship. Their resources go increasingly to trying to change the minds of the 10 to 15 percent of swing voters people who are likely to vote, but who are not firmly committed to either the Republican or Democratic political parties thus increasingly neglecting the vast majority.

So all of that, of course, is fatal to civic participation. And as we all know, all across this country, there is an incredible competition going on for the time and attention of American citizens. Employers are trying to get more and more work, time and effort out of their employees. The entertainment industry is serving up more and more tempting diversions of various kinds. Companies are offering up more and more attractive products and trying to get people interested. In this relentless competition that is being waged by major institutions throughout society, if no one speaks up for civic participation, citizenship is bound to lose out as it has been losing out.

So the question that occurs to me is: Why is there so little concern about this decline in citizenship and civic responsibility? Well, if you look back, you'll find that Americans have always been a little ambivalent about encouraging active civic participation. There were people who put great emphasis on it to be sure, but going back to the constitutional convention, the worry was that uneducated and ignorant voters might not really appreciate the values of democracy and might not think hard enough about the choices they had to make. Therefore, they would cause the quality of government to decline.

Which reminds me of the time I was down in Orlando talking to this very large group. On the morning of the talk, I picked up the local newspaper, and in it I saw this wonderful column by a prominent Orlando columnist. I'd like to share one particularly meaningful sentence from that column: "The idea that there is some kind of benefit in ignoramuses and morons pulling levers next to a ballot is one of the evil myths of postmodern America."

I doubt very much he would write a column like that if there weren't a lot of people out there who secretly agreed with him. Now, of course, if that argument is correct, you would expect to find more confusion, intolerance, and misguided policies in states where voter participation is considerably high such as Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota than in low-turnout states like Alabama, Mississippi, and Virginia. But, of course, if you look at the states with the highest rates of poltical participation, they are also the states with the highest incomes, highest education levels, lowest levels of crime, and cleanest government. So it just simply is not true that there is a serious danger to the quality of government if more people participate. I expect the real explanation for our complacency is the widespread feeling that it would be nice to have more people participating, but, as long millions of people turn out, that is going to be good enough to get people elected and to give politicians a sense of what the public wants. I think this is really a big mistake, and if you read the literature, I think we have really spent far too little time thinking seriously about what the consequences of low political participation really are. Let me mention just a few.

In my mind, low political participation contributes to the kind of ideological conflict and polarization that many people have complained about in our government, because when voting levels decline, the zealots on either side continue voting. It's the middle-of-the-road people who stay home; therefore, the people who are elected are not really representative of the whole.

Another thing apathy does is to cause the media to resort more and more to scandal, negativism, and entertainment news in an attempt to grab the attention of an increasingly listless public. It certainly benefits lobbyists, because they do better the more inattentive the public. It allows politicians to avoid facing up to things that people want. As Mitch McConell said, "No politician I ever knew was voted out of office for supporting campaign finance reform." Of course, if you are apathetic, you're not going to stand up for campaign reform, even though some 90 percent of the public would say, if polled, they would like to have it. Apathy increasingly interferes with the successful implementation of programs. One of the things we are learning is that, whether you look at community policing or how you keep housing projects from deteriorating, all of these things work better if you have the active participation of citizens and community groups. As that becomes harder to achieve, it becomes harder to achieve a long list of government programs. So, if you catch my drift, apathy is not a matter of indifference. It turns out to have a lot to do with the problems that trouble people most in the United States: the behavior of government and it's perceived ineffectiveness, the partisan squabbling, the shallow tactics of the media, the power of interest groups, and the neglect of working people and the poor. Of course, apathy really has a lot to do with the last two categories because apathy is not equally distributed throughout the public. It's far more prevalent among working people and the poor. It's interesting to note that in other advanced democracies, the lower 20 percent of the public votes almost at the same rate as the rest of the population. In this country, of course, it votes about half as much as more affluent citizens.

The real tragedy in all of this is not just apathy's effect on government, but also the fact that it's occurring at a time when views about public policy are probably counting more than ever before in my memory. If you think about what has happened to the power of the people in the last half century, they now are controlling the nomination process and increasing use of refunds. Plus, their opinions count more in Washington with the increased use of polling and focus groups by politicians and grass-roots lobbyists. Millions of dollars have been spent.

That is why it so tragic that 75 percent of Americans think their opinions don't matter, when, in fact, they count more than ever before. What is fortunate is that there are plenty of practical steps we can take to rebuild a stronger sense of civic engagement and civic duty in this country.

Clearly, it starts in the schools, with much better civic education. Some don't even teach it. There are lots of ways to make it more effective. Certainly universities could do a lot more, especially now, to try to relate all of the volunteer activities into the curriculum. Instead of just going to homeless shelters, students could get a sense of why we have homeless people, how homelessness is connected to public policy and how those policies might be changed. We could spend more time thinking about how we can require some exposure to civic education for all of our students. Universities don't like to do that because everything is an option. But citizenship is not an option. There are large segments of students who don't take advantage of these opportunities and who are, therefore, graduating without a great deal of benefit to their future lives as citizens.

One option is to expand programs of voluntary national service, which I certainly would not want to make compulsory myself. We also could do a lot more to support public affairs programming and television. Unfortunately, the market system will never give you as much public affairs programming as you need, because you can never quantify the value of a more civic-minded individual. The government has to come in and supplement it through the market system in some way. The interesting thing is that in the United States we have several times less support for public affairs broadcasting than other advanced democracies have. It is not entirely an accident that most comparative surveys will tell you that Americans are much less informed about public affairs than their counterparts in other democratic countries. We certainly could find various ways to encourage participation by citizens in their communities and political parties. We could do something about campaign finance reform and, thereby, do something about what makes people most cynical. There are things we can do. Apathy is not an inevitable state in this country. But, one thing is very clear: We must have a comprehensive effort.

Allow me to conclude simply with the very old and hackneyed saying that people get the government they deserve. I would say at the moment Americans do not deserve a particularly competent or responsive government. They are really not working very hard to achieve it. But, I would still close by expressing my own optimism on that subject.
I think that in foundations, universities, and organizations like the Academy, you are beginning to see signs of a growing awareness that we have a problem. I do not for a moment think we are going to sit by and watch our democratic government deteriorate through apathy and neglect.

So, we have a clear agenda. My guess is that within the next five years you will see an increasing determination to act on that. Certainly, as chair of Common Cause, I hope that we along with other civic groups can play a very active role in trying to awaken the public that there is a real danger here. It really holds true, as DeToqueville warned about 150 years ago, that if democracy ever dies in the United States, it will not be because of invasion or insurrection within. It will be because Americans simply lost interest. It is our responsibility to make sure that never happens in this wonderful country of ours.