I'm going to try to post some semblance of my original post again -- what you saw in my previous attempt at a response was a glitch -- the person responsible for gluing our posts onto the Debating Room made a mistake in HTML, and so now it's apparently gone forever.What I think I said was something along the lines of:
It may be true that the dormancy of American democracy may be a result of the widespread failure of Americans to vote, but it would be undemocratic merely to blame this public apathy upon the people and leave it at that. That would be merely to say: gee, we elitists tried to promote democracy, but the philistine masses rejected us.
One can, however, point to the actions of various elitists, "capitalist" or otherwise, to show that the current climate of American political apathy has been cultivated for the sake of the elite competition for power.
1) The creation of the national security state. Since 1950, a vast apparatus has entrenched itself in Washington DC, that runs by various names (FBI, CIA, NSA, MK-Ultra, the "secret team" etc.), and which acts without democratic check or balance to execute domestic and (mostly) foreign policy, by virtue of the vast numbers of secrets this apparatus keeps from the American public under the rubric of "national security." The effort of this apparatus which calls itself the "national security state," has largely been to defend dictatorships and overthrow democracies around the world for the sake of US financial interests. Guatemala 1952, Iran 1956, Brazil 1964, the Marcos dictatorship in the Phillipines, Nicaragua for most of its existence as a nation, Chile 1974, the list goes on and on... of course, the American government has been defending dictatorship in Latin America since the Monroe Doctrine, most memorably in fighting Pancho Villa during the Mexican Revolution, but the "national security state" allows this same government to continue these activities without any need for popular approval.
2) Assassination as a means of eliminating populists. During the '60s, the height of populism in recent US history, the assassinations of several major populist figures (Jack and Bobby Kennedy, ML King Jr., Malcolm X, and we could probably even count George Wallace, for he too was a populist) culminated in a widespread disillusionment with politics in the US in the 1970s. Whether or not these assassinations occurred as a result of elite conspiracies, the result was discouraging for those wishing to involve the public in democracy.
3) Elite anti-democratic activity in the '70s and afterward. Now there have been elites running America since its inception, and the activities of these elites are well-chronicled in books such as Mathew Josephson's THE ROBBER BARONS and THE POLITICOS, C. Wright Mills' THE POWER ELITE, and G. William Domhoff's WHO RUNS AMERICA and WHO RUNS AMERICA NOW?, but the most explicit document of anti-democratic activity by America's elites was written by the elites themselves. The Trilateral Commission, formed in 1973, was an elite attempt to coordinate action amidst the economic crises of the Nixon Administration. No, the Trilats do not agree on everything, but one of their first and most important documents was a book called THE CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY, which argued that the public must be made more apathetic if democracy is to be effectively governed by elites. A summary of Trilateral publications is at http://www.jcie.or.jp/thinknet/tc/tc_contents.html . The new membership lists of the Trilateral Commission, since Carter, have revealed the identity of each new US President the April before his election, with the exception of Reagan, whose entire top-level cabinet was admitted to the Trilateral Commission. The Trilateral Commission is a smaller version of the Council on Foreign Relations, another elite social club of the same purposes, and contains a membership of the elite media, finance, and political actors of the United States, Japan, Europe, and the British Commonwealth.
4) The rise of attack advertising as an electioneering tool. In 1980, several Republicans won election to the US Senate, helped largely by attack ads, (accusing their opponents of all sorts of ethical and legal lapses) purchased largely by the NCPAC, the National Conservative Political Action Committee. Since then, the Democrats have adopted the NCPAC's electioneering strategy, and attack advertising has been the vogue in American electioneering practices, reaching its height (say the researchers) in various Senate races in 1986. What the communication research shows about attack advertising is that its main effect is to heighten public disillusionment with the whole electoral process, public disillusionment which may have begun with the revelations of the Watergate scandals and accelerated with Iran-Contra.
5) The rise of the DLC and the Democratic Party's endorsement of "neoliberalism" as an economic doctrine. Before the Democratic Party became the party of "neoliberalism," an economic doctrine which holds the government responsible for guaranteeing elite corporate financial transactions while letting the middle and lower classes fend for themselves, the Democratic Party was the champion of a mild form of populist Keynesianism, an economic policy which sought to spread the circulation of money among the people generally, so as to pump up consumer optimism and keep the economy healthy that way. To dramatize the Democratic Party's rejection of populist Keynesianism, it must be remembered that populist Keynesianism was the cause of Roosevelt's New Deal, Truman's Fair Deal, Kennedy's New Frontier, Johnson's Great Society, and some of Nixon's policies during his first Administration.
It must also be considered that the Republican Party initiated a form of Keynesian economic policy during the 1980s, but this was military Keynesianism, which worked by having the Federal government spend trillions of dollars on the military, and in the process creating dozens of millionaires, hundreds of $72,000/year jobs, and thousands of homeless people. This was Keynesianism to promote consumer optimism mostly for the rich, and it was dishonest in its application -- the Republicans were at the time promoting "supply-side economics."
So, today, we have a Democratic Party that promotes "neoliberalism" and a Republican Party that promotes "neoconservatism," being essentially the same thing. And none of the third parties have really earned the public's trust. No wonder the public is so bored with most of the election races.
Today, most major-party election strategy culminates in appeals to small, demographically-selected, "focus groups," groups of people who are likely to care enough about an election to be undecided about whether to vote for Clinton or Dole, for instance. It's cheaper and more effective to appeal to the focus groups, rather than in wasting one's time and energies as a candidate with those who aren't likely to vote.
So, in conclusion, public apathy isn't all the fault of the public.
