You Get What You Pay For

I've thought for some time that this country had been living off our civic republican legacy without doing much to restore it. There are a lot of good books (check out Theda Skocpol) about how the old civic associations were replaced by "professional" activists more interested in getting people to write a check than really volunteer. Robert Putnam wrote a famous but very controversial book about how modern America isolates us from one another. Of course, when he wrote his book, there were no such thing as blogs!

Now there is yet more evidence that the Putnam-Skocpol is essentially correct:

1) Increasingly, those who don't finish high school are participating less and less in public life

2) The Left is struggling with "outsourced" activists who are much less effective than the home-grown variety cultivated by Republicans.

I'm hoping that the developing momentum supporting "clean elections" laws (like the excellent initiative in California) will somewhat dilute the overpowering influence of money in politics. And I like the "Netroots" movement. But until people are willing to get off their duffs and get involved, and until political leaders ask them to do so, we're going to continue to have a political system insensitive to the public interest. Even when we win, we're going to get crap like this.