New York Times columnist Gail Collins pens a colourful - albeit whimsical - piece on the history of public interest in politics in the United States. She contrasts the rowdy, crowded and often bloody character of US politics a century ago to its comparatively tranquil and staid modern incarnation. While unconvincingly suggesting that video games and women are responsible for this transformation, she briefly points in a more compelling direction:
People are also less enthusiastic about politics because they no longer think of their political affiliation as being central to their identity. Once reformers arrived with the 20th century, Americans were taught to prove they were good citizens by studying the party platforms, not by getting in a fistfight at a bar. Since nobody actually did study the party platforms, folks simply slunk home and waited for the invention of radio and professional sports teams.
If we accept Collins' description as largely true for the US, how does the American example stack up against the world? Take, for example, the nature of student politics, so often the cauldron in which political identities are forged (or not forged). Twinned with violence, bristling senses of political affiliation remain common around the world. One need only look so far as an Indian college campus, for instance, to feel the uncomfortable heat of party political identity. Elsewhere, fierce party identities may induce less violence but are no less prevalent. In British student unions, aspiring student politicians are affiliated with political parties. In their American equivalents, on the other hand, such naked and presumptuous politicking would be totally out of place. Why does party identity persist in many parts of the world and not in the US?
Collins doesn't ask what it means in a democracy for party identity to be out of vogue. But even without the bluster of party tribalism, American politics cannot substitute "modern" indifference for cool, reasoned engagement.
