







Some political scientists argue that mere length of participation in the political process confers immunity. But Burnham points out that Germany experienced nearly two generations of adult male suffrage before 1930. "When crisis comes," he concludes, "the crucial differentiation lies not in the length of exposure before the crisis, but in the relative intensity of political commitment to traditional parties."

Turning to the U.S., Burnham asks, "What level of political immunization should be expected to exist in such a partially demobilized, non-confessional voting universe?" Normally the answer is, "both weak and stable." Weak because our middle class parties are hardly "political churches" (though today's GOP comes close). Stable because, given that it lacks confessional parties, "as a rule, American electoral politics is not a transcendental struggle for state power." Whew!...

But wait—not so fast. The American political universe has a hole in it—the party of nonvoters of whom Burnham notes: "The lower the class, the lower the turnout." He sees the American "working classes" as "the most vulnerable of all to capture under pressure by a reflexive and authoritarian mass movement." As evidence, he points to the Wallace movement of 1968, the closest American analogue to extremist contagion. Only 8% of "Business and Professionals" voted for Wallace, compared with 23% of "Service Workers" and 19% of "Unskilled Workers." Wallace garnered 13.5% of the national vote, but more than a third of the Southern vote. The Alabama Governor drew his strength in the South from manual workers, farmers, young voters, weak partisans, and independents, many of whom were pulled into the electorate from the party of nonvoters. This surge of new voters propelled Wallace to a twenty-point victory in Louisiana. In Catholic areas, turnout swelled from 63% in 1964 to 75% in 1968; in Protestant areas, it rose from 70% to 85%. Among whites, only strong "party identifiers" in metropolitan areas fought off the contagion.

Wallace appealed to "white backlash" and white supremacist voters angry over the civil-rights movement and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. 1968 saw backlash, war, assassinations, and urban riots—but no economic crisis.

The American electoral universe is shaped by a near-majority party of nonvoters, a near-plurality of independent voters, and a deliquescing core of intense partisans. Goo-goos have long vaunted the un-churched independent voter and deplored "party ideologues"—New Deal/sixties liberal Democrats, and Goldwater/"movement" Republicans. But such praise can't survive focus group exposure to "undecided" voters deciding. The groups I saw deliberating on C-Span in 2004 were at sea. They had nothing to work with—they knew little about politics, and less about political history. They had no ear for the contending principles of politics: freedom and order, equality and liberty. Such voters are political dust. In 1992 they blew toward Ross Perot—an authoritarian impatient with congressional "shop talk." And they remain available to the winds of crisis.

If independent voters seem innocent of the facts of power, America's nonvoters know the score. They know that the rich and powerful rule. That may be the main reason they don't vote. What's in it for them? Inert and alienated, they await the crisis. They are a classic constituency for the politics of resentiment, for the kind of political pitch Richard Hofstadter labelled the "paranoid style." The longer they stay out in the political cold, the more dangerous they become. Yet if they enter politics, how will they vote? For what? Against what? Those questions haunt American democracy.