Reviewed by Kerry Lauerman

Sunday, November 3, 2002; Page BW04

DOWNSIZING DEMOCRACY
How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public
By Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg
John Hopkins Univ. 294 pp. $29.95

LEFT HOOKS, RIGHT CROSSES
Edited by Christopher Caldwell and Christopher Hitchens
Thunder's Mouth. 401 pp. Paperback, $16.95

LETTERS TO A YOUNG CONSERVATIVE
By Dinesh D'Souza
Basic. 229 pp. $22

The best laugh in the hit 1999 movie comedy "Election" comes when three candidates for student-body president in a Nebraska high school take to the stump before their peers. Their campaign pitches differ only in substance (and not greatly) from a modern politician's. The teacher's pet, Tracy, whose naked ambition renders her mechanical and unlikable, panders to her audience, using the specific names of classmates in a failed effort to add warmth to her speech. The jock, Paul, almost completely incoherent, tries coasting on charm, reminding his classmates of a glorious, game-winning football play.

Then the underdog, Tammy, an unpopular, miserable sophomore girl, promises to dismantle the school's student government, so that students would never have to participate in its phony civics rituals again. "Vote for me," she says. "Or don't vote for me. Who cares? Don't vote at all!" She's met with uproarious applause.

This scene would likely sadden, but not surprise, Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg. Their new book, Downsizing Democracy, charts the "declining importance of the citizen in the American political process" and the public's changed role in political deliberations. Once, Crenson and Ginsberg argue, Americans embraced civic responsibility; today they would rather the government treat them as consumers and make their decisions for them.

The most obvious sign of this malaise is the steadily dropping voter participation since the 1960s -- a trend, as early polls indicate, that looks likely to continue in next Tuesday's off-year balloting. In 1998, only about a third of all registered voters cast ballots, and in 2000 just barely half did. Pols and civic acitivists alike blame this glum condition on a bewilderingly apathetic and lazy public.

But Crenson and Ginsberg argue that the American public has chosen to become less involved in running the government, which it has come to regard as yet another service provider. We saw this process accelerate greatly during the 2000 presidential election, the final round of which "was fought outside the electoral arena and without the participation of ordinary Americans." The authors argue that our declining civic virtue originates in some unlikely (and surely, to another degree, welcome) developments: a patchwork of state militias evolving into a federal National Guard, the decline of most political patronage jobs and the growth of large public-interest groups. In gradual but steady fashion, these forces have worked to impede personal involvement in governing.

This would seem to run contrary to a rule in political science holding that elites will be forced to represent the most urgent concerns of potential voters in order to mobilize the largest possible constituency. Instead, as Downsizing Democracy documents, candidates use polling and market testing to focus on the dwindling number of voters who will actually turn out to vote. The authors chart the path of a democratic devolution, in which the elites are now swayed by other elites: either lobbyists or special-interest groups. And even groups organized around citizen concerns -- whether the NAACP, Sierra Club or Christian Coalition -- tend to highlight issues that matter most to their own elites or, in the case of environmental groups, "upper-middle-class Americans whose material and physical well-being is sufficiently secure to allow them to focus upon the welfare of gray wolves."

Another strain of downsizing, in Crenson and Ginsberg's account, comes from a nonelectoral branch of government: the courts, whose steadily growing influence has similarly diminished the role of mass public sentiment in political life. A key instance of this logic, they argue, can be seen in the fate of the 1960s civil rights movement, which abandoned its strategy of mass moblization "in favor of litigation and bureaucratic stuggle." In the process, "affirmative action for the middle class became the movement's chief preoccupation," at the expense of issues affecting an underclass that were not easily resolved through the courts.

The authors can overstate on occasion, as when they criticize modern liberals for an obsession with "a different color loop of ribbon for every noble cause," a stable of issues they go on to deride as "the causes of the comfortable." They surely don't think AIDS, breast cancer or gun violence are problems limited to the haute bourgeoisie. And Downsizing Democracy can be turgid reading ("The conjunction of elite combat and popular disengagement defies a well-established generalization of political science," they instruct at one point). Nevertheless, Crenson and Ginsberg supply a thoughtful and useful analysis of present-day democratic decline.

If there's one particularly striking omission in Downsizing Democracy, though, it's any discussion of the role the media play in a healthy democracy. And yet a thriving democracy is only as good as the thinkers leading it in debate, right?

Unfortunately, the best political minds and the most popular ones are not the same. This proposition receives much indirect testimony in Left Hooks, Right Crosses: Some of the articles in this compilation of 1990s political writing -- indeed, even some of the writers -- are not particularly well-known even to voracious political junkies. And (with the exception of a fun, mean attack on telemarketers by CNN's Tucker Carlson) these pieces are dispatches from the trenches of opinion journalism; often the contributors gathered here are fighting their own losing battles -- like Crenson and Ginsberg -- by pointing out looming problems or complicated outrages that their louder, frothier political counterparts on television ignore in favor of the easier targets.

Left Hooks, Right Crosses is a gimmick book of sorts, a "best of" political opinion journalism with the conservative articles (the right crosses) chosen by Christopher Caldwell of the Weekly Standard, and their ideological counterparts (the left hooks) by Christopher Hitchens of Vanity Fair (and, until recently, the Nation, with which he very publicly broke last month). They undeniably are two of the sharpest, most agile writers in the game, but the choice of Hitchens does create one fairly glaring problem: These pieces hail from an era dominated by Bill Clinton, and Hitchens is Clinton's most ardent critic from the left. As a result, while the "right" half of the book includes, among others critical of Clinton, a vivid, acid-etched portrait by Andrew Ferguson of Democratic spinning of the 1998 impeachment vote, there's no counterpunch from the left.

Ironically, the only piece robustly critical of the impeachment proceedings -- surely the most contested event that falls under this book's aegis -- comes from another conservative, Kenneth Anderson, who, while believing that Clinton "has amply met the standard . . . for impeachment and removal," writes that "No amount of speechifying by [Rep.] Henry Hyde, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, can change the reality that the point of impeachment for Republicans is to try . . . Bill Clinton's alleged sins, not his alleged crimes."

That (along with a smart, but slight, impeachment dissent from Jonathan Schell on the left) is not enough to give this book the balance you would like such an anthology to have, so it can instead read like a somewhat idiosyncratic selection of personal favorites. But both editors' tastes are unquestionable, and most of the selections are shrewd and entertaining. On the left, Adolph Reed Jr. authoritatively debunks the The Bell Curve; Andrew Cohen has great fun with weak-thinking political groups angling to serve as outlets for Gen X outrage; Arundhati Roy and Susan Sontag offer trenchant observations on their subjects -- India's nuclear bomb and Bosnia, respectively -- punctuated with self-congratulatory asides (Sontag: "One question I'm often asked after returning from a stay in Sarajevo is why other well-known writers beside myself haven't spent time there."). And Tom Frank's essay on our cheerful acceptance of the end of the "affluent society" eerily anticipates a moment when we wouldn't be quite so cavalier about downward-shifting economic fortunes. There are also important reported essays that, in the liberal muckraking tradition, turn attention to Colombia's brutal war, the perils of workfare and the plight of prison inmates.

The selections from the right are stylistically quite different, owing, as Hitchens concedes, to the '90s, which allowed for a "renaissance of conservative writing and polemic." Conservative writers generally lack the earnest concern that marks their colleagues on the left, and as a result the pieces feel freer, less encumbered by ideology, whether the topic is the increasingly unpredictable behavior of the Republican upper class (David Brooks); the odd way we treat adolescents, including adolescents with guns, as "kids" (Jonathan Rauch); or the strange independence that John Kennedy Jr. achieved for himself (Peter Collier). There are pieces on both sides that will rattle readers, depending on their political points of view, but all of these essays are well-argued enough that no one is likely to stop reading any one of them.

That's not true of Dinesh D'Souza's cloying new Letters to a Young Conservative, which is neither engaging nor particularly illuminating. It's the latest in the Basic Books "Art of Mentoring" series (to which Hitchens contributed Letters to a Young Contrarian last year), but it's a pandering production, with trite maxims and arguments so shallow they evaporate when you turn the page. The reason D'Souza opposes gay marriage? "Children relate differently to dads than moms. I learned a lot about being a man from my dad. There is no way I could have learned those things if I had been raise by two moms." With that tart summary, he's finished and moving on to the next important problem.

Once a conservative whippersnapper himself, D'Souza is now past 40, but he spends many of his letters recounting his glory days as an enfant terrible at the Dartmouth Review. When he begins one letter to his silent interlocutor, "Chris," with "You have pressed me for further details about my Dartmouth escapades, and I am happy to oblige," you know just what kind of ride you're in for -- and that the doors are locked, with no room for escape.

He glowingly recalls the great fun he had as a college conservative, sitting with his naughty coed conspirators and listening to recordings of "Nixon speeches, and comedian Rich Little doing his Nixon imitation, and George C. Scott delivering the opening speech in 'Patton,' and some of Winston Churchill's orations, and the music from the BBC version of Evelyn Waugh's 'Brideshead Revisited.' " If conservatives want to reach out to young people, they may consider replacing D'Souza with someone more hip to the now. Like Dick Cheney. •

Kerry Lauerman is a senior editor at Salon.com.