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CAMPAIGNS AND ELECTIONS
WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW®
CAMPAIGNS AND
ELECTIONS
DENNIS W. JOHNSON
1
3
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Names: Johnson, Dennis W., author.
Title: Campaigns and elections : what everyone
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Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2020. |
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Subjects: LCSH: Political campaigns—United States. |
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For Pat, with all my love
CONTENTS
PREFACE: WHY YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT CAMPAIGNS

AND ELECTIONS xv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xxi
1 Voting and Participation 1
How does the United States conduct elections? 1

What’s the historical background on the right to vote in America? 2
Why was the Voting Rights Act of 1965 important? What’s the
importance of the 2013 Shelby decision? 5
Are the Voting Rights Act protections needed today? What about
voter suppression? 6
Who votes more, men or women? Why is there a gap between the
voting participation of women and men? What about Millennials? 7
What are the rates of voting for African Americans, Hispanic
Americans, and Asian Americans? And what was the racial makeup
of those who voted in recent elections? 9
Have there been efforts to diminish voting participation? 10
Do convicted felons ever get back the right to vote? 11
Why do so few voters participate in elections, especially in state and
local contests? 12
Compared to other democracies, how does the United States rank in
terms of voting participation? 14
viii Contents
What would happen if every American adult were required to vote,

as in some other countries? 14
After the 2000 presidential election exposed problems in local voting
systems, Congress passed legislation to make sweeping reforms in
the administration of voting procedures. Has that made any difference? 15
How vulnerable are state and local voting procedures to hacking and
cyber threats? 17
How accurate are voting records? 17
Can a person be kicked off the voting rolls for failing to vote in
previous elections? 18
How have mail-in ballots, absentee-ballot voting systems, and early
voting worked out? 19
Is there widespread voting fraud today? 20
Why did President Trump order an investigation into alleged voter
fraud, and what did the Voter Fraud Commission find? 21
2 Carving Out Legislative Districts 23
How do some states gain and some states lose congressional seats
following reapportionment? 23
Why has redistricting been such a problem? 24
What are the requirements for creating legislative districts? 26
Who makes the decision about redistricting legislative districts? 27
What is partisan “gerrymandering”? How far can it go before it is
unconstitutional? 27
Has there been any attempt to take redistricting and gerrymandering
out of the hands of partisan legislators? 30
Why do all states get two senators no matter how big—or small—
they are? 30
3 Political Parties and Elections 33
When did the two major political parties play an important role in
elections and campaigns? 33
Contents ix
The South was once very Democratic but now is largely Republican.
What happened? 34
What’s the difference between Republicans and Democrats? 35
Why are we so polarized today? 37
How much disagreement is there within the political parties? 39
Who has more followers, Democrats, Republicans, or independents? 40
How did we get the labels “red states” and “blue states”? 40
Where do we find the heaviest concentrations of Republicans and
Democrats? 41
Wasn’t the Tea Party a separate political party? 42
Do other political parties get involved in presidential elections? 43
Have the political parties surrendered their role in campaigning to
wealthy donors and super PACs? 44
What’s happened to the Democratic Party and the Republican Party? 45
4 Statewide, Local, and Congressional Elections 47
How many state and local elections are there? 47

What are the rules and regulations controlling campaign financing at
the state and local levels? 48
How do local candidates get out the message and let voters know
about themselves? 49
Are more women running for political office than in previous years? 49
Does it cost a lot for local candidates to run for office? 51
Do states have public financing laws and, if so, what offices do they
apply to? 54
How can an average citizen help a candidate or a cause
at the local level? 55
Electing judges has become more and more like electing regular
political candidates. Is there any danger to this? 56
Congressional incumbents hardly ever lose when they are up for
re-election. Why is that so? 57
You are kidding about elections for dogcatcher, aren’t you? 59
x Contents
5 Presidential Elections 60
Can anyone run for president, or is that just an old American myth? 60
Why do presidential elections last so long? 61
Why do we have so many primaries and caucuses? 62
What’s the difference between a caucus and a primary? 63
Why does Iowa go first? 64
How do you become a party delegate? What’s a “superdelegate”? 65
What is the electoral college and how does it work? 66
Why did the Founding Fathers decide that we needed the electoral
college to determine presidential elections? 68
Who are the electors, and how do you get to be one? 70
What if “faithless” electors refuse to vote for the winner of
the popular ballot? 71
What if the president-elect dies before the electoral
college meets? 71
What happens if no candidate receives 270 votes when
the electoral college tallies the votes? 72
What’s the “winner-take-all” system? 74
What is a “battleground” state? 74
What was the Democrats’ “Blue Wall”? 75
How close have recent presidential contests been? 75
What about third-party candidates, with no chance of winning,
acting as spoilers? 76
How much money is spent in presidential elections? Do the
candidates (and their allies) who spend the most money
always win? 77
What kinds of reforms have been suggested for our lengthy primary
and caucus season? 79
Why don’t we just have a nationwide election where whoever
gets the most votes wins, and not worry about the electoral
college vote? 80
What is the idea of a national popular-vote compact? 82
Contents xi
6 Money, Mega-Donors, and Wide-Open Spending 84
What federal rules and regulations controlled campaign financing

before 1971? 84
What did the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 do? 85
Can individual candidates spend as much as they want on their own
campaigns? 86
What’s the difference between “hard” money and “soft” money? 87
What are political action committees (PACs)? 88
What did the McCain-Feingold Act do to fix campaign-finance problems? 90
What do organizations do to get around campaign funding restrictions? 92
How did the Supreme Court undo campaign-finance reform in
Citizens United and subsequent cases? 93
What are 501(c) groups, and how do they impact campaign spending? 96
How do super PACs differ from ordinary PACs? 98
What is “dark money” and how important has it been in recent elections? 99
Who are the top individual mega-donors, how much have they
spent, and where do they stand politically? 100
What about regular people? Do they give money to political candidates? 102
How well has the FEC performed its job of enforcing campaign-
finance rules? 103
Didn’t the IRS get in trouble for trying to oversee these organizations? 104
Where does all that campaign money go? 104
What are the most expensive campaigns at the federal (but not
presidential) level? 105
Do candidates who amass the most money always win? 106
What about self-funded candidates? 107
Where are we now with federal campaign laws? 108
7 Inner Workings of Modern Campaigns 110
Why can’t candidates just run on their own, without the need for
consultants and handlers? 110
What are the key elements of any successful political campaign? 111
xii Contents
What do you mean by political consultants, and what kinds of

services do they provide? 113
What do media consultants provide? 113
What do pollsters do for a campaign? 114
How much information do political campaigns have on
the average voter? 115
Who have been some of the most important political consultants
over the years, and where are they now? 117
Hillary Clinton had the best team of consultants available; Donald
Trump’s group was best described as “junior varsity.” Did Trump
show that consultants aren’t all that necessary or smart in getting a
candidate elected? 117
8 Direct Democracy—Ballot Campaigns 121
When and why did ballot campaigns become a part

of American politics? 121
What’s the difference between initiatives, referendums, and recalls? 122
What states have direct democracy through ballot campaigns?
What about at the local level? 125
How do political consultants get involved in ballot issues? 125
What was California’s Proposition 13? 128
How many people are affected by ballot initiatives? 129
How much money is spent on ballot campaigns, and who spends
the money? 130
How successful are ballot issues? What is “choice fatigue”? 130
What are the downsides of ballot initiatives and direct democracy? 131
Is there a federal recall mechanism? Can voters recall a member of
Congress, a cabinet member, or the president? 132
What about a national referendum? Is it allowed in the Constitution?
What might the ramifications of a nationwide ballot initiative be? 133
9 How Campaigns Have Changed 135
Federal candidates now say, “I’m [name] and I approve this

message.” When did that become a part of campaigning, and why? 136
Contents xiii
How has the digital revolution changed campaigning? 136

Is regular television dead, or is there still room for national and local
television news coverage in our digital age? 138
There is more polling done today than ever before. Is it worthwhile,
and is it more accurate than past polling? 139
Has early voting changed the way campaigns are run? Has early
voting been good for voters and for democracy? 142
How have outside voices expanded their impact on campaigns? 142
In sum, how have campaigns been transformed since the twentieth
century in the first two decades of the twenty-first century? 143
10 Threats to Democracy 145
Is voter suppression real? 145

Why don’t more citizens participate in voting? Is registration the barrier? 147
What about voter apathy, especially among young voters? 149
Why not hold general elections on the weekend or make Election
Day a holiday? 150
Can our election process be trusted? 150
How confident should we be about our decentralized election system? 152
How can we combat “fake news” and social media lies? 154
Do plutocrats control our elections? 156
Many consider the current campaign-financing system to be a
mess. Is there any way to reform it? 156
How can citizens find out which groups gave money to political
candidates? For example, who received money from tobacco
companies, pro-choice organizations, from unions, or from the
National Rifle Association? 158
NOTES 161
FURTHER READING 179
INDEX 181
PREFACE: WHY YOU NEED TO KNOW
ABOUT CAMPAIGNS AND ELECTIONS
The right of all citizens to vote and participate in elections

is a bedrock principle of American democracy. It has been a
hard-won right, overcoming prejudice, stubborn resistance,
and blatant discrimination grounded in state law and practice.
In our textbook versions, citizens are given the opportunity
to choose their representatives and to vote on issues without
fear of intimidation, knowing that the elections will be fairly
conducted, and the decision of the voters will be abided by.
Citizens also are assured that elections will be held on a fre-
quent and regular basis, usually every two or four years. Our
concept of democracy also assumes that citizens will be active
in public affairs—not just voting, but also learning about is-
sues, supporting candidates for office, even donating money
and working on campaigns.
But now, as we are entering the third decade of the twenty-
first century, our campaign and election systems are not
working the way the textbooks taught us. We have seen pro-
found changes in how campaigns are conducted, how voters
get their information, who gives money to campaigns, how the
highest court has interpreted the relationship between money
and free speech, how campaign consultants have used their
xvi Preface
influence, and how outside forces have tried, and sometimes

succeeded, to impact elections.
Before we move on, let’s define two key words: elections
and campaigns. Through an election, citizens have the chance
to choose from among candidates for public office who will,
if elected, vote on policy issues. Usually, elections are held
on a fixed day, very often in early November for a general
election. Sometimes there are special elections (often to fill a
seat vacated by a death or resignation), primaries (to deter-
mine which of several candidates will represent a political
party), and, occasionally, runoff elections (when the leading
primary candidates have not reached a certain percentage of
voters during the first round). In over half the states, an elec-
tion can also include ballot issues, where there is no candi-
date, only policy issues at stake (for example, whether to have
a lottery or permit marijuana for recreational use). Elections
are conducted and monitored by state and local officials,
candidates are chosen to fill government jobs, and policy is-
sues are decided.
A campaign is the active side of an election: announcing a
candidacy, raising and debating issues, scheduling meet-and-
greet dinners and rallies, raising campaign funds, identifying
potential voters, communicating through social media and
television, and getting voters out to the polling stations. Much
of what we’ll discuss in this book deals with the changing dy-
namics and mechanisms of campaigning.
And over recent years, unfortunately we’ve seen some dis-
turbing trends.
• Thanks to federal court decisions, the federal campaign-

finance laws have been almost entirely blown out of the
water. We used to require transparency; now millions of
campaign dollars can be hidden. We used to have limits
on the amount of money that can be donated or spent;
that’s almost all been taken away.
Preface xvii
• The result is that a handful of mega-donors, those willing

to give $25 million or $50 million of their own money
(often hidden from public view) to a campaign can have
a major impact on statewide and other races.
• Campaigns are no longer contests between one candi-
date and another. Organized interests (many of them
hidden behind innocent-sounding names) have flooded
campaigns with their pitches, ads, and organizational
muscle.
• In the 2016 presidential election, more adults sat at home
than voted for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. In
many big-city mayoral elections, little more than 15 per-
cent or 20 percent of the voters cast ballots.
• Many voters simply don’t know what media to trust
anymore. Fake news found on social media sites, much
of it coming from other countries, confuses voters and
distorts reality. A president barking “fake news” and dis-
paraging the mainstream press certainly doesn’t help.
• Mistrust of government and its institutions is at an all-
time high, and partisanship and the ideological divide
are as corrosive as they have ever been.
This book will try to sort out what is real, what is confusing,
and what everyone should know about campaigns and
elections. It poses 126 questions and answers that are based on
federal law and court decisions, the findings of scholars and
campaign practitioners, and analysis of historical events.
The book is divided into ten chapters, with questions and
answers focused on a common theme. Chapter 1 concerns
voting and participation. We’ll look at how our elections
work; how our participation rates compare with other coun-
tries; the long, tortured history of gaining the right to vote for
women and minorities; voting fraud; and how we protect our
electoral process. In chapter 2, the focus is on the creation of
legislative districts. We’ll look at how state legislatures create
districts, the ongoing battle over gerrymandering and creating
xviii Preface
districts favorable to one party or the other, and how states

lose or gain congressional districts following every ten-year
census. Chapter 3 is devoted to the role of political parties and
elections. How have the Democratic and Republican parties
changed over the years? Why don’t we have other parties pop-
ping up to challenge them? How many people consider them-
selves independents, and how do they vote during elections?
We’ll also ask whether political parties have surrendered their
role in campaigning to wealthy donors and super PACs.
In chapter 4, we’ll look at statewide, local, and congressional
elections. We start with a simple question: How many local
and state government offices require election by voters? We’ll
also look at how local candidates communicate with voters
when television is too expensive. Historically, women have not
run for office in the same numbers as men; has this changed
in the era of Donald Trump? In chapter 5, we look at presi-
dential elections. Several questions surround our cumbersome
and antiquated electoral college system: Why do we have this
system in the first place? How and when did it break down? Is
it a fair system? Who wants to change it and how could it be
changed? We’ll also look at questions about our lengthy pri-
mary system: How did we get to the point of having all these
primaries, and aren’t there ways to shorten the process? Why
don’t we have a straight up and down nationwide vote where
whoever gets the most votes, wins?
In chapter 6, we examine the impact of money in campaigns,
with the influence of mega donors and wide-open spending.
So much has changed in the past few years. What’s the dif-
ference between “hard” money, “soft” money, and “dark”
money? How have Supreme Court decisions profoundly
changed the way we regulate campaign financing? We’ll look
at the agencies responsible for overseeing federal campaign fi-
nancing, especially the Federal Election Commission and the
Internal Revenue Service. We’ll identify some of the wealthiest
donors and see what their impact may have been, but we’ll
also look at what average citizens can contribute.
Preface xix
In chapter 7, we look at campaign consultants. What are the

roles of campaign managers, pollsters and media specialists,
big-data consultants, get-out-the-vote specialists, and a legion
of other campaign operatives? We’ll ponder the question, If
Hillary Clinton had an all-star team of consultants, why was
she beaten by Trump’s team, which could at best be described
as the “junior varsity”? Chapter 8 is devoted to direct demo
cracy and ballot campaigns. How do ballot campaigns work,
and what kinds of issues typically appear on ballots? We’ll
also look at why ballot issues are a gold mine for political
consultants, especially in California. And we’ll explore the
dicey issue of whether there should be a system for holding
nationwide ballot elections.
In chapter 9, we’ll look at how campaigns have changed
since the beginning of the digital age. We’ll look at the revo-
lution in micro-targeting and big data, explore the impact of
social media, and look at the role of that tried and true com-
munications tool, television. Finally, c hapter 10 wraps up our
exploration of campaigns and elections by asking whether our
system and our actions pose a threat to democracy. We’ll look
at Russian hacking, “fake news,” the vulnerability of our elec-
tion system to cyber warfare, and other issues. We’ll also an-
swer the question: What can citizens do to better understand
how money is spent and how they can better participate in
these most important components of citizenship.
In all, we’ll gain a much better understanding of how
elections and campaigns work, the strengths and weaknesses
of our democratic institutions, and how we can make our
system better.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many colleagues, friends, and associates helped me develop

this volume on campaigns and elections. As with several of
my previous works, I turned to my colleagues at the George
Washington University and its Graduate School of Political
Management. I especially thank Michael Cornfield for his
insights and analysis. I also turned to several of our adjunct
faculty and friends; specialists in the art of electioneering and
politics, especially Tom Edmonds and Michael Malbin; along
with the anonymous reviewers of this project.
I also recruited friends and colleagues who have no real
background or specialized knowledge of campaigns and
elections. This book is written for them and people like them—
engaged and concerned citizens—and is designed to answer
their questions and give them a better understanding of the
inner workings of campaigns and the importance of elections.
These friends have acted in one way or another as my informal
focus group, giving me advice on the questions presented here
and posing some questions that I had not thought of earlier.
Special thanks to Jeanine Draut, Sunny Early, Lollie Goodyear,
Erik Johnson, Phyllis Kester, Christina Dykstra Mead, David
Mead, Pat Miller, Danny Poole, Mike Saunders, Trish Saunders,
Helen Shreves, Susan Wright, and Haskell Thomson and the
wise folks (especially Elliott Jemison, Mary McDermott, John
xxii Acknowledgments
Woodford) at the Chocolate Sparrow Coffee Club in Orleans,

Massachusetts.
My special thanks to Angela Chnapko, my editor at Oxford,
who encouraged me to write this volume, and who, along
with her assistant Alexcee Bechthold, made the whole pro-
cess run smoothly. Thanks, also to the fine production team
headed by Alphonsa James and the eagle-eyed copy editing of
Ginny Faber.
Most of all, my thanks to my wife Pat, who read every word
of this text, gave me some very helpful suggestions, and, more
than anything, was my best cheerleader and support through
all the burdens and joys of writing this volume.
CAMPAIGNS AND ELECTIONS
1
VOTING AND PARTICIPATION
Compared to other democracies, the United States has a medi-

ocre record of voter participation. Our interest usually peaks
during presidential elections, but even then we rarely find
65 percent of eligible voters showing up at the polls. For local
elections and ballot measures, voter participation is often much
lower. The United States has had a long history of denying
citizens the right to vote, and today there is pressure to clamp
down against alleged voter fraud. Elections are administered at
the state and local levels, but despite federal assistance, many of
the state systems are fragile and vulnerable to electronic fraud.
How does the United States conduct elections?

The most familiar method of conducting elections is called the
single-winner system—the candidate with the most votes wins.
There are two versions of the single-winner system. The first is
the plurality-voting method, which means that no matter what
percentage of the vote the top vote-getter receives, that candi-
date is declared the winner. This is how our federal elections
(for the House of Representatives and the Senate) work, as
well as many gubernatorial and other statewide contests. The
winning candidate doesn’t need a majority of votes (50 per-
cent plus one vote), just the most votes. The second version
is the majority-voting method, in which the winning candidate
must receive a majority of the votes. When there are many
2 CAMPAIGNS AND ELECTIONS: WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW®
candidates, and none receives a majority, states and other

jurisdictions with majority systems will hold a run-off between
the top two candidates.
Our presidential election system, of course, is also a single-
winner system, but the outcome depends not on popular vote
but on having the majority of electors from the electoral col-
lege. We’ll see in much more detail how the electoral college
works in c hapter 5.
We also have a multiple-winner system. This usually occurs
at the local level in cities and counties, and the chief feature
is that several candidates are declared winners. For example,
there might be four available seats in a local at-large elec-
tion and seven candidates. The top four vote-getters will be
declared the winners.
Another system, called ranked-choice voting (RCV), is used
in a number of municipalities, including San Francisco and
Minneapolis, and it is employed statewide in Maine. Instead
of just choosing one candidate, voters rank their preferences.
When there are multiple candidates, if the top vote- getter
doesn’t receive a majority, then the candidate with the lowest
number of votes will be eliminated. At that point, the voters’
second choices will be considered. Ultimately, a winner will
emerge with a majority of the votes. In 2018, a congressman
from Maine lost his bid for re-election under a newly installed
RCV system. He had the highest number of votes, but not a ma-
jority. When the votes were calculated using the RCV method,
his opponent gained more than 50 percent of the vote and was
declared the winner. The effect is very similar to a holding run-
off election, and has the benefit of assuring that an outlier can-
didate, who gains perhaps only 15 percent to 20 percent of the
vote, doesn’t come in first in a multicandidate race.
What’s the historical background on the right to vote in America?

We pride ourselves that nearly every American adult is eli-
gible to vote. Right now, the only people who cannot vote are
Voting and Participation 3
convicted felons, those with mental incapacities, and residents

who are not citizens. But as will see, many Americans fail to
register, are somehow blocked or intimidated, or simply do
not take advantage of the right to vote, particularly in state
and local elections.
The history of extending the right to vote in this country
has been long and tortuous. As historian Alexander Keyssar
reminds us, “At its birth, the United States was not a dem-
ocratic nation. The very word ‘democracy’ had pejorative
overtones, summoning up images of disorder, government
by the unfit, even mob rule.”1 And for many years to come,
very few people had the right to vote. Women, nearly all free
African Americans, slaves, Native Americans, and white adult
males who couldn’t meet the property requirements were
excluded from the vote. Later, Asian Americans and Hispanic
Americans were routinely denied the right to vote (and, in the
case of the Chinese, not even permitted to come to the United
States).
The Civil War brought an end to slavery but also the es-
tablishment of citizenship for former slaves, through the
Thirteenth Amendment. African American men obtained
the right to vote under the Fifteenth Amendment, in 1870. In
the South, under military- enforced Reconstruction, former
male slaves obtained the right to vote. By 1890, some 147,000
African American men were on the voting rolls in Mississippi.
Altogether, 1,500 African Americans were appointed or elected
to office in the South from 1870 to 1890. Ironically, several
northern states still prohibited blacks from voting. Then came
the resurgence of southern white domination and the purge
of black voting rights. Starting with Mississippi in 1890 and
spreading throughout the South, there was a massive effort
to remove blacks from the voting rolls—through intimida-
tion, so-called grandfather clauses, literacy tests, poll taxes,
and other devices. It worked: before the purge, 67 percent of
Mississippi blacks were registered to vote; by 1892, just 4 per-
cent remained on the rolls. The US Congress did nothing to
stop the wholesale elimination of voting rights—so much for

the protections of the Constitution. North Carolina governor
Charles Aycock, whose remains rest in the US Capitol crypt,
said in 1903 that he was “proud” of his state for solving the
“Negro problem”: “We have taken him out of politics and have
thereby secured good government under any party and laid
foundations for the future development of both races. . . . Let
the Negro learn once [and] for all that there is unending separa-
tion of the races, that the two peoples may develop side by side
to the fullest but that they cannot intermingle.”2 One estimate
found that in the 1940s, only 5 percent of all African Americans
living in the South were voting. Full voting protections for
African Americans—men and women—did not come until the
Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Women battled for decades to secure the right to vote.
Starting in 1848, at the Women’s Rights Convention held
in Seneca Falls, New York, women activists began to fight
throughout the states and in Congress to obtain the right to
vote. Carrie Chapman Catt, leader of the principal woman’s
suffrage organization, bitterly recounted those battles: 56 ref-
erendum campaigns, 480 campaigns to urge state legislatures
to submit suffrage amendments to voters, 47 campaigns to in-
clude woman suffrage in state constitutions, 277 fights to have
state parties include woman suffrage in their platforms, 30 plat-
form fights during presidential elections, and 19 campaigns in
each of the Congresses, spanning thirty-eight years.3 Finally, in
1920, women gained the right to vote through the Nineteenth
Amendment. There was concern, mostly among opponents,
that women would form a bloc, even a Women’s Party, to vote
their interests, but as women settled into voting, they soon oc-
cupied the whole spectrum of ideology and partisan ties.
The right to vote was extended twice more. The Twenty-
Third Amendment (1961) extended the right to vote for
president and vice president to the citizens of the District of
Columbia. Eighteen-year-olds were granted the right to vote
by the Twenty-Sixth Amendment (1971). The overwhelming
sentiment was that if we are asking eighteen-year-olds to fight

in the Vietnam War, then we should allow them to vote as well.
The saying was “old enough to fight, old enough to vote.”
Why was the Voting Rights Act of 1965 important? What’s

the importance of the 2013 Shelby decision?
The Voting Rights Act of 1965, together with the Civil Rights
Act of 1964, was one of the most important pieces of legis-
lation passed during the twentieth century. The Deep South
had continued to block or intimidate African American voters,
keeping them from exercising one of democracy’s most impor-
tant rights. After civil rights protestors were beaten and jailed
in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, an exasperated President Lyndon
Johnson ordered his attorney general: “I want you to write
me the goddamnest toughest voting rights act that you can
devise.”4
The Voting Rights Act suspended for five years all sorts of
voting registration requirements that had impeded minority
voting in six southern states (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana,
Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia) and several counties
in other states (North Carolina, Arizona, and Hawaii). To
back up the law, federal examiners (mostly southern federal
bureaucrats) were sent to those states to monitor the elections.
Any new voting requirements or restrictions these states
proposed had to be approved by the Justice Department, in a
process called preclearance. Once the voting restrictions were
removed, African American registration increased by a million
during the first four years, and the number of southern black
elected officials doubled.5 Still, white citizens and groups tried
in many ways to circumvent the requirements of the Voting
Rights Act and dilute or minimize black voting strength.
The Voting Rights Act was renewed several times. The last
time was in 2006, when its protections were extended until
2033. But in June 2013, the Supreme Court ruled, in Shelby
County v. Holder,6 that Congress had exceeded its authority in
2006 when it reauthorized the section of the Voting Rights Act

that required the preclearance of state election laws. In Shelby,
the court said, basically, that the stringent requirements in
the original law had been the right thing to do back in 1965,
but that “things have changed dramatically” since then.
Congress should have updated the law, said the conserva-
tive majority on the court. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote
the opinion. Congress had failed to make any updates, and
thus the preclearance provisions—the real heart of the law’s
enforcement— were ruled unconstitutional.7 The Supreme
Court essentially defanged the Voting Rights Act. Within
a few hours of the Shelby decision, Texas attorney general
Greg Abbott announced that the state’s voter-identification
restrictions would be implemented immediately. Those
stringent restrictions had previously been blocked by a fed-
eral court. Soon, similar action was taken in Alabama, North
Carolina, and Virginia and attempted in Florida.8
Are the Voting Rights Act protections needed today?

What about voter suppression?
The landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act opened up voting to
people who had been blatantly denied that right. Now, in the
twenty-first century, we are in an era of much tighter voting
scrutiny as conservative groups, especially, try to restrict,
even suppress, the vote. The Brennan Center for Justice at the
New York University School of Law reported that in 2010, “state
lawmakers nationwide started introducing hundreds of harsh
measures making it harder to vote.”9 The laws ranged from
voter-identification requirements to cutbacks on early voting,
registration restrictions, and measures that make it hard for
former convicts to vote. Altogether, twenty-three states have
tightened up on voting, and most of those restrictions have
been generated by Republican-controlled legislatures.
Conservative lawmakers insist that they are not trying to
keep minorities from voting but simply trying to weed out
fraud and abuse of the voting system. But some of the restric-
tive measures have been challenged in federal court. Texas’s
strict photo-ID requirements were ruled unconstitutional by
a federal court for being discriminatory against minorities.
Voter restrictions in North Carolina were struck down by a
federal court, which deemed them unconstitutional because
they “target African-Americans with almost surgical preci-
sion.” There was a bitter fight in Georgia leading up to the
2018 elections when 53,000 voter applications (mostly from
minorities) were stalled. Federal courts have also challenged
other state laws that impede minority voters. Partisan and ra-
cial gerrymandering has added to the mix of attempts to di-
lute minority voting rights and the impact of minority votes.
Minority voters, including African Americans, Hispanic
Americans, and Asian Americans, now vote overwhelmingly
for Democratic candidates.
Who votes more, men or women? Why is there a gap between the
voting participation of women and men? What about Millennials?
The Center for Women in American Politics at Rutgers
University has noted that since the 1964 presidential election,
women have outnumbered men when it comes to voting.10
Since then, women have consistently outperformed men in
terms of both numbers and percentage of voters. In the 2016
presidential election 63.3 percent of women (73.7 million)
voted, whereas 59.3 percent of men (63.8 million) voted.
Why? Political scientists are not clear on any one reason, but
several pop up. Women are more likely to access and manage
services such as healthcare, elder care, and childcare, for which
they may look for government support. Women are also more
likely to feel the effects of poverty than men, and to see the
federal government as a source of assistance. Many women
have risen up in opposition to Donald Trump’s policies and his
treatment of women, despite his boast on the campaign trail
that “nobody has more respect for women than I do. Nobody.”
The Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh and the

#MeToo movement have only added fuel to the fire, giving
many women a greater impetus to become active in elections
and politics.
Women voters have become more Democratic in recent
decades, thanks in part to the growing right-leaning social
policies of the Republican Party. The Republican Party used
to support the Equal Rights Amendment, extended childcare
services, and part-time and flexible work for men and women,
and it was not so rigid in its opposition to abortion. That has
all changed. The Democratic Party is more often seen as the
“women’s party”; and the Republican Party, as the “men’s
party.” In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the women’s vote by 12
points, but lost men by 12 points—a total spread of 24 points,
the largest gender gap ever recorded in presidential elections.
In 2012, without a woman on either party’s ticket, Barack
Obama won women by 12 points, and lost men by 8 points.
White women typically favor Republicans, but women
of color, African Americans, and Hispanics, have voted
heavily for the Democratic Party in recent elections. Women
without a college education voted heavily for Trump in
2016; whereas women with a college education voted more
for Democrats.11
Young voters may also play an important and growing role
in upcoming elections. The Pew Research Center reported
that in 2016, Generation Xers (those who were then between
the ages of thirty-six and fifty-one) and Millennials (between
the ages of eighteen and thirty- five) together accounted
for more voters in 2016 than the Silent Generation (ages
seventy-one and older) and baby boomers (ages fifty-two to
sixty-nine).12 As older voters die, the Gen X and Millennial
vote will become even more important. Millennials typi-
cally vote less often than older voters, but their participa-
tion rates are increasing. Furthermore, in 2016, Millennials
were the group that most strongly favored Democrats over
Republicans: 55 percent of Millennials were Democrats or
Democratic- leaning independents, while 33 percent were

Republicans or Republican-leaning independents. During the
2018 midterm elections, 31 percent of eighteen-to twenty-
nine-year-olds voted, ten points better participation than in
the 2014 midterm elections, but not as strong as their partici-
pation in the 2016 presidential election, at 51 percent.
What are the rates of voting for African Americans, Hispanic

Americans, and Asian Americans? And what was the racial makeup
of those who voted in recent elections?
According to the Pew Research Center, these are the average
voting rates of various groups across the past several presi-
dential elections:13
• White, 65.3%
• African American, 59.6%
• Hispanic, 47.6%
• Asian, 49.3%
Here is the racial makeup of American voters during the 2016

and 2000 presidential elections:
• White, 73.3% in 2016; 80.7% in 2000

• African American, 11.9% in 2016; 11.5% in 2000
• Hispanic, 9.2% in 2016; 5.4% in 2000
• Asian, 3.6% in 2016; 1.8% in 2000
In short, the percentage of white voters is dropping, and

Hispanic American and Asian American participation is
growing. The US Census Bureau forecasts that whites will
constitute 50 percent of the population in 2050, that Hispanics
will go from 13 percent (2000) to 24 percent (2050), that African
Americans will go from 13 percent to 15 percent, and that Asians
will go from 4 percent to 8 percent. In the 2016 election, African
Americans favored Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump by

80 percentage points; Hispanics favored Clinton over Trump
by 36 percentage points, while Trump carried white voters by
21 percent.14 The shrinking percentage of white voters means
trouble for the Republican Party if it keeps going down its cur-
rent path of appealing to and relying heavily on white voters
while losing minority supporters.
Have there been efforts to diminish voting participation?

Unfortunately, the answer is yes. It is a long-standing demo-
cratic norm that people should be encouraged to participate
and that the greater the participation, the better it is for democ-
racy. But in reality, there have been efforts to curtail participa-
tion, and the burden falls heavily on minority citizens. This is
nothing new.
First, we have the long and ugly history of racial discrim-
ination and deprivation of the fundamental democratic
value, the right to vote. The South, dominated by Democrats
during much of the post–Civil War period through the 1960s,
suppressed African American voting until the federal gov-
ernment intervened by passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The Civil Rights Act, passed the year before, and the Voting
Rights Act received key support from moderate Republicans,
while southern Democrats fought vigorously against these fed-
eral protections. President Lyndon Johnson is reported to have
said, “There goes the South,” meaning that white southerners
would abandon the Democratic Party in droves. He was right.
President Richard Nixon, a Republican, exploited what he called
the “southern strategy,” wooing white voters away from their
traditional home in the Democratic Party, capturing voters who
supported Alabama governor George Wallace. Nixon courted
white southerners with his racially coded pleas for “law and
order.” African Americans stayed with the Democratic Party
and became its main source of political power in the South.
Second, the reality is that in local and state contests in

many parts of the country, whites rarely vote for minority
candidates, and minorities are suspicious of voting for white
candidates.
Third, minorities are increasingly voting for the Democratic
Party; the Republican Party is increasingly seen as the
“white party.” Gerrymandering against minorities becomes
easier when “Democrat” replaces “African American.” As
a Republican lawmaker in North Carolina boasted, “I think
electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats. So
I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the
country.”15 It would be interesting to speculate how much
alleged racial gerrymandering would go on if, say, in North
Carolina, the allegiance of African Americans was split evenly
between Republicans and Democrats.
Do convicted felons ever get back the right to vote?

About 2.5 percent of all adults are currently disenfranchised
because they have been convicted of a felony, according to
a 2016 study by the Sentencing Project, a criminal-justice re-
search and advocacy group.16 Researchers estimate that some
6.1 million adults who are or were incarcerated have lost the
right to vote; four decades ago, in 1976, that number was
1.17 million. Disenfranchisement policies are controlled by the
individual states, and they vary widely. Some states restore
voting rights after prison only (fourteen states); after prison
and parole (four states); after prison, parole, and probation
(eighteen states); or after prison, parole, probation, and post-
sentencing (twelve states). In some places, the restoration is
automatic; in other places, it must be gained by petition. Just
two states, Maine and Vermont, have no restrictions on felony
voting; even those serving time in prison can vote. In four
states, disenfranchisement is permanent unless voting rights
are granted by the governor.
Disenfranchisement has fallen most heavily on African

Americans. In four states, more than one in five African
American adults have been disenfranchised: Florida (21 per-
cent), Kentucky (26 percent), Tennessee (21 percent), and
Virginia (22 percent).
There have been some attempts to restore voting rights
to former felons. In Virginia, Democratic governor Terry
McAuliffe signed an executive order to restore the voting
rights of convicted felons who had served their sentences, a
number estimated at 206,000. Republican lawmakers cried
foul and sued the governor. The Virginia Supreme Court ruled
that McAuliffe could restore voting rights only on a case-by-
case basis, not through a sweeping executive order affecting
all former felons. McAuliffe then proceeded to restore voting
rights, one by one, and by the end of his term of office, he had
restored voting rights to some 13,000 ex-felons. His successor,
Democrat Ralph Northam continued the restoration process.
And through a November 2018 ballot measure, Florida voters
restored voting rights for some 1.5 million ex-felons, but in
March 2019 Florida Republicans in the legislature tried to limit
the number of ex-felons who could vote, claiming they needed
to pay back all court fees and fines.
Why do so few voters participate in elections, especially in state

and local contests?
There are more than 500,000 local elected officials in the United
States, and elections are usually held every two or four years.
In many of these elections, however, very few citizens bother
to vote.
A recent study at Portland State University, in Oregon,
examined 23 million voting records in fifty cities to see who
votes and who doesn’t.17 Some of results are astounding.
Voting turnout was less than 15 percent in ten of the thirty
largest cities, and the median age of those who voted was
fifty-seven. Older voters were fifteen times more likely to vote

in these mayoral elections than young people, ages eighteen to
thirty-four.
Here are the study’s results for the most recent mayoral
contests in several cities, showing the percentage of voting
participation and the median age of voters.
• Dallas, 6.1%; median age, 62

• Las Vegas, 9.4%, median age, 68
• El Paso, 11.6%, median age, 59
• Miami, 11.9%, median age, 68
• Los Angeles, 18.6%; median age, 59
• Denver, 22.6%; median age, 59
The one bright spot was the city of Portland, where nearly
60 percent of voters participated and the median age was
forty-nine. What are the consequences of such disparities
in voting? As one reporter noted, “Elected leaders will rep-
resent the interests of retirees, if they know what’s good for
them. . . . Mayors and Council members will think first to the
needs of constituents who turn out to the polls.”18
The questions still remain, why do so few people vote, and
why is the median age so high? Political scientists have studied
this issue for years and come to a number of conclusions. For
many people, voting isn’t worth the time and effort it takes;
elections are generally held on Tuesday, a workday for most.
Voter registration requirements may hold some back. Others
don’t keep up with local issues, choose not to or cannot vote
in primary elections, are just not interested in politics, or don’t
trust government or elected officials. Perhaps they feel that the
outcome of an election is a foregone conclusion—why bother
to vote? Who, then, votes most often? The elderly, the better
educated, those who have a strong sense of partisanship or
ideology, and those who believe that government can be a
force for the good in society.
Compared to other democracies, how does the United States

rank in terms of voting participation?
American voting participation is quite low when compared
to other industrial democracies. In a 2017 study by the Pew
Research Center, the United States was ranked twenty-sixth in
voting participation during its last election. Just 55.7 percent
of American adults voted in the 2016 presidential election.19
Here’s how Americans compare with voters in several other
countries:
1. Belgium, 87.2 percent of all adults voted

2. Sweden, 82.6 percent
3. Denmark, 80.3 percent
4. South Korea, 77.9 percent
5. Australia, 70.9 percent
6. United States, 55.7 percent
Interestingly, in the United States the percentage of partic-

ipation among adults who had registered to vote was much
higher (86.8 percent). So the key weakness in the United States
appears to be low registration rates. Many American adults
are not eligible to participate in elections simply because
they have not registered (or were somehow hindered) from
registering. A smaller percentage of American voters, often
between 35 percent and 40 percent, participate in midterm
elections. But in the 2018 midterm elections, voting participa-
tion reached a fifty-year high, with 47 percent of eligible voters
casting their ballots.
What would happen if every American adult were required

to vote, as in some other countries?
In some countries— such as Belgium, Brazil, Australia,
Argentina, Ecuador, and Peru— voting is required, and
penalties, usually fines, can be levied on those who fail to
participate. Some argue that voting is a duty of citizenship,

like paying taxes, showing up for jury duty, and enrolling
your children in school. But mandatory participation laws
sometimes meet voter resistance from people who simply
don’t like the government telling them what to do. Some will
submit blank or incomplete ballots, pay little attention to the
candidates and issues involved, and do the bare minimum
of thinking and preparation before casting their vote. On the
other hand, compulsory voting might force those who other-
wise wouldn’t vote to think about the candidates and issues
and register their preferences. One study in Australia found
that after compulsory voting was established, more young
voters and minority voters took part, and representation in
Parliament of the Labour Party, the more progressive party,
increased.20
What would mandatory voting be like in the United States?
Barack Obama in his last year of office thought it would be a
good idea, saying it would be “transformative” if everybody
voted: “The people who tend not to vote are young, they’re
lower income, they’re skewed more heavily towards immi-
grant groups and minority groups,” Obama said. “There’s a
reason why some folks try to keep them away from the polls.”21
It would certainly be a tall order, would probably run into con-
stitutional problems, and would meet tough challenges from
those trying to suppress voting rather than expand and en-
courage it throughout the entire population. And it would
go against the grain for many Americans, who would rebel
against having a voting requirement imposed upon them.
After the 2000 presidential election exposed problems in local

voting systems, Congress passed legislation to make sweeping
reforms in the administration of voting procedures. Has that
made any difference?
In 2002, Congress passed, and President George W. Bush
signed into law, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). The
2000 presidential contest put a spotlight on state and local

election activities, and revealed that there was no uni-
formity in how states administered voting. We learned
that in Florida, where much of the attention was focused,
counties had different voting machines—some digital, some
fully automated—and that some counties relied on hand-
prepared ballots. Ballot integrity became a major issue.
Some counties said that yes, their machines and methods
might be old-fashioned (paper ballots, for example), but
they worked, and besides, it would cost too much money to
buy newer voting machines. In addition, there was consid-
erable blowback from the private voting-machine vendors,
who balked at providing additional security against hacking
attacks.
HAVA was designed to help states improve voting ad-
ministration and voting integrity. The Election Assistance
Commission was created as an independent agency of the
federal government, and by 2005, some $3.3 billion had been
disbursed to the states to help them purchase new voting
machines. HAVA also required that for federal elections all
new voters had to provide a driver’s license or the last four
digits of their Social Security numbers. HAVA helped im-
prove voting systems, but bigger problems became evident.
As the New York Times reported, in September 2018, the real
problem was that election security depended on unregu-
lated private voting-machine vendors: “The mad history
of election security in the United States is a history of how
misguided politicians and naive election officials allowed
an unregulated industry to seize control of America’s dem-
ocratic infrastructure.”22 In 2018, Congress added $380 mil-
lion in grants under the HAVA Election Security Fund to
help with cybersecurity training and audits; still, there is
little assurance that hacking and meddling in the most basic
act of democracy— citizen voting—has been adequately
addressed. 23
How vulnerable are state and local voting procedures to hacking

and cyber threats?
As we learn more about the dangers and reality of Russia’s
(and perhaps others’) attempts to hack into voter computer
systems, state election commissions and state legislatures have
responded with a wide variety of efforts. A report by the US
Senate Intelligence Committee found that most state election
systems were outdated. It recommended three things: switch
to paper ballots or to electronic voting that leaves a paper trail;
check voting results with “risk-limiting audits” (which count
a sampling of ballots by hand and check them against the ma-
chine results); and better train election personnel about the risks
of cybersecurity. One state, Colorado, seems to be doing the
best job of protecting its election system against cyber threats,
according to the Center for Democracy and Technology, be-
cause it has incorporated the recommended safeguards.24 But
many states haven’t met the challenge because of bureaucratic
(and legislative) inertia, not recognizing the seriousness of the
problem, or a lack of funds. Chapter 10 discusses in more de-
tail the threats of Russian meddling in American presidential
and congressional races.
How accurate are voting records?

Alarm bells went off when reports were published that many
of the voting records in states were outdated: the names of
dead people had not been removed; files hadn’t been updated
after people had moved out of state or changed their addresses
locally; there were typos and misspelled names, and the like. In
early 2012, the Pew Center on the States reported that the voter
registration system throughout the states desperately needed
an upgrade.25 “These systems,” Pew reported, “are plagued
with errors and inefficiencies that waste taxpayer dollars, un-
dermine voter confidence, and fuel partisan disputes over
the integrity of our elections.” Pew investigators found the
names of 1.8 million deceased persons still on the voting rolls,

2.75 million people who were registered to vote in more than
one state, 24 million (one in eight) registrations that were in-
valid or significantly inaccurate, and at least 51 million adults
(one in four) who were not registered at all.
It’s clear that the states have their work cut out for them in
cleaning up their voting rolls. But this mess is not voter fraud;
rather, it is bureaucratic inefficiency and a waste of taxpayers’
funds, and it reflects the inability of states to manage large
data systems. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 set
the guidelines for purging voters from the voting rolls. States
redoubled efforts to purge those who had died, moved, or
been double counted. Between 2014 and 2016, the names of
some 16 million voters were removed nationwide. But the
Brennan Center, in a wide-ranging report, warned that some
of those aggressive state purges violated the provisions of the
Voter Registration Act, citing the efforts in Florida, New York,
North Carolina, and Virginia, in particular. Four other states
(Alabama, Arizona, Indiana, and Maine) had written purge
policies that had violated the act.26 For example, purged voters
had not been given notice of their removal, nor were they told
of the federally required waiting period before their names
could be removed. Sometimes, voting purges occurred within
ninety days of an election, in violation of federal law. The
Brennan Center also reported that a new coterie of conserva-
tive activists has been suing state election boards for not being
aggressive enough in getting rid of suspect voters.
Can a person be kicked off the voting rolls for failing to vote
in previous elections?
In 2018, the US Supreme Court ruled that a state could kick
people off the voter rolls if they had not voted in some pre-
vious elections and had failed to respond to notices from state
election officials. The case before the court came from Ohio,
which has probably the most aggressive form of voter purging
of all the states. Ohio election officials removed voters after

they had failed to respond to a notice; the Supreme Court ruled
that Ohio’s action did not violate the Failure-to-Vote Clause
of the act.27 Twelve states, generally led by Democrats, filed
briefs against Ohio’s action; seventeen states, generally led by
Republicans filed briefs in support of Ohio.
The New York Times, in an article about the court’s decision,
cited a 2016 Reuters investigation that found that at least 144,000
persons had been removed from the voting rolls in Cleveland,
Cincinnati, and Columbus, Ohio’s three largest cities. “Voters
have been struck from the rolls in Democratic- leaning
neighborhoods at roughly twice the rate as in Republican
neighborhoods,” the study found. “Neighborhoods that have
a high proportion of poor, African-American residents are hit
the hardest.”28 In 2016, Trump defeated Clinton in Ohio by
over 446,000 votes.
How have mail-in ballots, absentee-ballot voting systems,

and early voting worked out?
In 2000, Oregon became the first state to institute mail- in
ballots for all elections. Other western states quickly followed
suit and permitted (even encouraged) mail-in ballots. Three
states—Oregon, Washington, and Colorado—now conduct all
their elections through mail-in ballots, and twenty-two states
permit some form of mail-in voting.29 Supporters argued that
it is cheaper to conduct elections through mail-in ballots and
gives voters time to study the ballot and make more informed
choices. Ballots can be long and complicated, and filled with
difficult choices. For example, on the 2018 Colorado ballot,
Denver voters had to vote on candidates for six state offices
and one congressional office, thirteen statewide ballot issues,
and nine city ballot questions. Opponents point out the loss of
the tradition of going to a polling station and interacting with
neighbors and the potential for coercion by family members to
vote a certain way.
Twenty- one states provide absentee ballots but require

voters to prove they have a valid reason for voting absentee;
twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia provide ab-
sentee ballots but don’t require voters to provide a reason.30
More and more people have taken advantage of early voting,
not waiting to vote in November. One study estimated that in
the 2016 presidential election, 50 million votes would be cast
before Election Day.31 This can cause logistical and communi-
cation difficulties for candidates who are trying to persuade
voters, only to find that many of them have already cast their
vote. But campaigns with sophisticated tracking systems can
also lock down votes and streamline their get-out-the-vote
operations by eliminating calls and pleas to those who have
already voted.
Is there widespread voting fraud today?

We have heard a lot of charges of voter fraud, most of which
came from conservatives and the Trump campaign (charges
of a “rigged election”), alleging that minorities are voting il-
legally. But according to research conducted by disinterested,
nonpartisan organizations, voter fraud is a myth. The Brennan
Center for Justice has taken the lead in examining alleged
voter fraud, and concluded that perhaps 0.0003 to 0.0025 of the
votes might—might—be fraudulent. The Washington Post in
2014 investigated voter fraud allegations, and found thirty-one
credible (but not yet proven) cases of voter impersonation out
of one billion votes studied. Similar findings have come from
social scientists at Columbia University and Arizona State. The
Brennan Center concluded that an American is more likely to
be “struck by lightning than he . . . [is to] impersonate another
voter at the polls.”32
But a contentious congressional election in 2018 put the
spotlight on another kind of possible voter fraud. The North
Carolina state board of elections refused to certify the election
of Republican Mark Harris over Democrat Dan McCready in
Another random document with
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XI
Briefly, then, there are two ways of regarding the Classical—the
materialistic and the ideological. By the former, it is asserted that the
sinking of one scale-pan has its cause in the rising of the other, and
it is shown that this occurs invariably (truly a striking theorem); and in
this juxtaposing of cause and effect we naturally find the social and
sexual, at all events the purely political, facts classed as causes and
the religious, intellectual and (so far as the materialist tolerates them
as facts at all) the artistic as effects. On the other hand, the
ideologues show that the rising of one scale-pan follows from the
sinking of the other, which they are able to prove of course with
equal exactitude; this done, they lose themselves in cults, mysteries,
customs, in the secrets of the strophe and the line, throwing scarcely
a side-glance at the commonplace daily life—for them an unpleasant
consequence of earthly imperfection. Each side, with its gaze fixed
on causality, demonstrates that the other side either cannot or will
not understand the true linkages of things and each ends by calling
the other blind, superficial, stupid, absurd or frivolous, oddities or
Philistines. It shocks the ideologue if anyone deals with Hellenic
finance-problems and instead of, for example, telling us the deep
meanings of the Delphic oracle, describes the far-reaching money
operations which the Oracle priests undertook with their
accumulated treasures. The politician, on the other hand, has a
superior smile for those who waste their enthusiasm on ritual
formulæ and the dress of Attic youths, instead of writing a book
adorned with up-to-date catchwords about antique class-struggles.
The one type is foreshadowed from the very outset in Petrarch; it
created Florence and Weimar and the Western classicism. The other
type appears in the middle of the 18th Century, along with the rise of
civilized,[21] economic-megalopolitan[22] politics, and England is
therefore its birthplace (Grote). At bottom, the opposition is between
the conceptions of culture-man and those of civilization-man, and it
is too deep, too essentially human, to allow the weaknesses of both
standpoints alike to be seen or overcome.
The materialist himself is on this point an idealist. He too, without
wishing or desiring it, has made his views dependent upon his
wishes. In fact all our finest minds without exception have bowed
down reverently before the picture of the Classical, abdicating in this
one instance alone their function of unrestricted criticism. The
freedom and power of Classical research are always hindered, and
its data obscured, by a certain almost religious awe. In all history
there is no analogous case of one Culture making a passionate cult
of the memory of another. Our devotion is evidenced yet again in the
fact that since the Renaissance, a thousand years of history have
been undervalued so that an ideal “Middle” Age may serve as a link
between ourselves and antiquity. We Westerners have sacrificed on
the Classical altar the purity and independence of our art, for we
have not dared to create without a side-glance at the “sublime
exemplar.” We have projected our own deepest spiritual needs and
feelings on to the Classical picture. Some day a gifted psychologist
will deal with this most fateful illusion and tell us the story of the
“Classical” that we have so consistently reverenced since the days of
Gothic. Few theses would be more helpful for the understanding of
the Western soul from Otto III, the first victim of the South, to
Nietzsche, the last.
Goethe on his Italian tour speaks with enthusiasm of the buildings
of Palladio, whose frigid and academic work we to-day regard very
sceptically: but when he goes on to Pompeii he does not conceal his
dissatisfaction in experiencing “a strange, half-unpleasant
impression,” and what he has to say on the temples of Pæstum and
Segesta—masterpieces of Hellenic art—is embarrassed and trivial.
Palpably, when Classical antiquity in its full force met him face to
face, he did not recognize it. It is the same with all others. Much that
was Classical they chose not to see, and so they saved their inward
image of the Classical—which was in reality the background of a life-
ideal that they themselves had created and nourished with their
heart’s blood, a vessel filled with their own world-feeling, a phantom,
an idol. The audacious descriptions of Aristophanes, Juvenal or
Petronius of life in the Classical cities—the southern dirt and riff-raff,
terrors and brutalities, pleasure-boys and Phrynes, phallus worship
and imperial orgies—excite the enthusiasm of the student and the
dilettante, who find the same realities in the world-cities of to-day too
lamentable and repulsive to face. “In the cities life is bad; there are
too many of the lustful.”—also sprach Zarathustra. They commend
the state-sense of the Romans, but despise the man of to-day who
permits himself any contact with public affairs. There is a type of
scholar whose clarity of vision comes under some irresistible spell
when it turns from a frock-coat to a toga, from a British football-
ground to a Byzantine circus, from a transcontinental railway to a
Roman road in the Alps, from a thirty-knot destroyer to a trireme,
from Prussian bayonets to Roman spears—nowadays, even, from a
modern engineer’s Suez Canal to that of a Pharaoh. He would admit
a steam-engine as a symbol of human passion and an expression of
intellectual force if it were Hero of Alexandria who invented it, not
otherwise. To such it seems blasphemous to talk of Roman central-
heating or book-keeping in preference to the worship of the Great
Mother of the Gods.
But the other school sees nothing but these things. It thinks it
exhausts the essence of this Culture, alien as it is to ours, by treating
the Greeks as simply equivalent, and it obtains its conclusions by
means of simple factual substitutions, ignoring altogether the
Classical soul. That there is not the slightest inward correlation
between the things meant by “Republic,” “freedom,” “property” and
the like then and there and the things meant by such words here and
now, it has no notion whatever. It makes fun of the historians of the
age of Goethe, who honestly expressed their own political ideals in
classical history forms and revealed their own personal enthusiasms
in vindications or condemnations of lay-figures named Lycurgus,
Brutus, Cato, Cicero, Augustus—but it cannot itself write a chapter
without reflecting the party opinion of its morning paper.
It is, however, much the same whether the past is treated in the
spirit of Don Quixote or in that of Sancho Panza. Neither way leads
to the end. In sum, each school permits itself to bring into high relief
that part of the Classical which best expresses its own views—
Nietzsche the pre-Socratic Athens, the economists the Hellenistic
period, the politicians Republican Rome, poets the Imperial Age.
Not that religious and artistic phenomena are more primitive than
social and economic, any more than the reverse. For the man who in
these things has won his unconditional freedom of outlook, beyond
all personal interests whatsoever, there is no dependence, no
priority, no relation of cause and effect, no differentiation of value or
importance. That which assigns relative ranks amongst the individual
detail-facts is simply the greater or less purity and force of their form-
language, their symbolism, beyond all questions of good and evil,
high and low, useful and ideal.
XII
Looked at in this way, the “Decline of the West” comprises nothing
less than the problem of Civilization. We have before us one of the
fundamental questions of all higher history. What is Civilization,
understood as the organic-logical sequel, fulfilment and finale of a
culture?
For every Culture has its own Civilization. In this work, for the first
time the two words, hitherto used to express an indefinite, more or
less ethical, distinction, are used in a periodic sense, to express a
strict and necessary organic succession. The Civilization is the
inevitable destiny of the Culture, and in this principle we obtain the
viewpoint from which the deepest and gravest problems of historical
morphology become capable of solution. Civilizations are the most
external and artificial states of which a species of developed
humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become
succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following
expansion, intellectual age and the stone-built, petrifying world-city
following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood of Doric and
Gothic. They are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity
reached again and again.
So, for the first time, we are enabled to understand the Romans as
the successors of the Greeks, and light is projected into the deepest
secrets of the late-Classical period. What, but this, can be the
meaning of the fact—which can only be disputed by vain phrases—
that the Romans were barbarians who did not precede but closed a
great development? Unspiritual, unphilosophical, devoid of art,
clannish to the point of brutality, aiming relentlessly at tangible
successes, they stand between the Hellenic Culture and
nothingness. An imagination directed purely to practical objects—
they had religious laws governing godward relations as they had
other laws governing human relations, but there was no specifically
Roman saga of gods—was something which is not found at all in
Athens. In a word, Greek soul—Roman intellect; and this antithesis
is the differentia between Culture and Civilization. Nor is it only to the
Classical that it applies. Again and again there appears this type of
strong-minded, completely non-metaphysical man, and in the hands
of this type lies the intellectual and material destiny of each and
every “late” period. Such are the men who carried through the
Babylonian, the Egyptian, the Indian, the Chinese, the Roman
Civilizations, and in such periods do Buddhism, Stoicism, Socialism
ripen into definitive world-conceptions which enable a moribund
humanity to be attacked and re-formed in its intimate structure. Pure
Civilization, as a historical process, consists in a progressive taking-
down of forms that have become inorganic or dead.
The transition from Culture to Civilization was accomplished for
the Classical world in the 4th, for the Western in the 19th Century.
From these periods onward the great intellectual decisions take
place, not as in the days of the Orpheus-movement or the
Reformation in the “whole world” where not a hamlet is too small to
be unimportant, but in three or four world-cities that have absorbed
into themselves the whole content of History, while the old wide
landscape of the Culture, become merely provincial, serves only to
feed the cities with what remains of its higher mankind.
World-city and province[23]—the two basic ideas of every
civilization—bring up a wholly new form-problem of History, the very
problem that we are living through to-day with hardly the remotest
conception of its immensity. In place of a world, there is a city, a
point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the
rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on
the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid
masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-
fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the
countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the
country gentleman. This is a very great stride towards the inorganic,
towards the end—what does it signify? France and England have
already taken the step and Germany is beginning to do so. After
Syracuse, Athens, and Alexandria comes Rome. After Madrid, Paris,
London come Berlin and New York. It is the destiny of whole regions
that lie outside the radiation-circle of one of these cities—of old Crete
and Macedon and to-day the Scandinavian North[24]—to become
“provinces.”
Of old, the field on which the opposed conception of an epoch
came to battle was some world-problem of a metaphysical, religious
or dogmatic kind, and the battle was between the soil-genius of the
countryman (noble, priest) and the “worldly” patrician genius of the
famous old small towns of Doric or Gothic springtime. Of such a
character were the conflicts over the Dionysus religion—as in the
tyranny of Kleisthenes of Sikyon[25]—and those of the Reformation in
the German free cities and the Huguenot wars. But just as these
cities overcame the country-side (already it is a purely civic world-
outlook that appears in even Parmenides and Descartes), so in turn
the world-city overcame them. It is the common intellectual process
of later periods such as the Ionic and the Baroque, and to-day—as in
the Hellenistic age which at its outset saw the foundation of artificial,
land-alien Alexandria—Culture-cities like Florence, Nürnberg,
Salamanca, Bruges and Prag, have become provincial towns and
fight inwardly a lost battle against the world-cities. The world-city
means cosmopolitanism in place of “home,”[26] cold matter-of-fact in
place of reverence for tradition and age, scientific irreligion as a
fossil representative of the older religion of the heart, “society” in
place of the state, natural instead of hard-earned rights. It was in the
conception of money as an inorganic and abstract magnitude,
entirely disconnected from the notion of the fruitful earth and the
primitive values, that the Romans had the advantage of the Greeks.
Thenceforward any high ideal of life becomes largely a question of
money. Unlike the Greek stoicism of Chrysippus, the Roman
stoicism of Cato and Seneca presupposes a private income;[27] and,
unlike that of the 18th Century, the social-ethical sentiment of the
20th, if it is to be realized at a higher level than that of professional
(and lucrative) agitation, is a matter for millionaires. To the world-city
belongs not a folk but a mass. Its uncomprehending hostility to all
the traditions representative of the Culture (nobility, church,
privileges, dynasties, convention in art and limits of knowledge in
science), the keen and cold intelligence that confounds the wisdom
of the peasant, the new-fashioned naturalism that in relation to all
matters of sex and society goes back far beyond Rousseau and
Socrates to quite primitive instincts and conditions, the reappearance
of the panem et circenses in the form of wage-disputes and football-
grounds—all these things betoken the definite closing-down of the
Culture and the opening of a quite new phase of human existence—
anti-provincial, late, futureless, but quite inevitable.
This is what has to be viewed, and viewed not with the eyes of the
partisan, the ideologue, the up-to-date novelist, not from this or that
“standpoint,” but in a high, time-free perspective embracing whole
millenniums of historical world-forms, if we are really to comprehend
the great crisis of the present.
To me it is a symbol of the first importance that in the Rome of
Crassus—triumvir and all-powerful building-site speculator—the
Roman people with its proud inscriptions, the people before whom
Gauls, Greeks, Parthians, Syrians afar trembled, lived in appalling
misery in the many-storied lodging-houses of dark suburbs,[28]
accepting with indifference or even with a sort of sporting interest the
consequences of the military expansion: that many famous old-noble
families, descendants of the men who defeated the Celts and the
Samnites, lost their ancestral homes through standing apart from the
wild rush of speculation and were reduced to renting wretched
apartments; that, while along the Appian Way there arose the
splendid and still wonderful tombs of the financial magnates, the
corpses of the people were thrown along with animal carcases and
town refuse into a monstrous common grave—till in Augustus’s time
it was banked over for the avoidance of pestilence and so became
the site of Mæcenas’s renowned park; that in depopulated Athens,
which lived on visitors and on the bounty of rich foreigners, the mob
of parvenu tourists from Rome gaped at the works of the Periclean
age with as little understanding as the American globe-trotter in the
Sistine Chapel at those of Michelangelo, every removable art-piece
having ere this been taken away or bought at fancy prices to be
replaced by the Roman buildings which grew up, colossal and
arrogant, by the side of the low and modest structures of the old
time. In such things—which it is the historian’s business not to praise
or to blame but to consider morphologically—there lies, plain and
immediate enough for one who has learnt to see, an idea.
For it will become manifest that, from this moment on, all great
conflicts of world-outlook, of politics, of art, of science, of feeling will
be under the influence of this one opposition. What is the hall-mark
of a politic of Civilization to-day, in contrast to a politic of Culture
yesterday? It is, for the Classical rhetoric, and for the Western
journalism, both serving that abstract which represents the power of
Civilization—money.[29] It is the money-spirit which penetrates
unremarked the historical forms of the people’s existence, often
without destroying or even in the least disturbing these forms—the
form of the Roman state, for instance, underwent very much less
alteration between the elder Scipio and Augustus than is usually
imagined. Though forms subsist, the great political parties
nevertheless cease to be more than reputed centres of decision. The
decisions in fact lie elsewhere. A small number of superior heads,
whose names are very likely not the best-known, settle everything,
while below them are the great mass of second-rate politicians—
rhetors, tribunes, deputies, journalists—selected through a
provincially-conceived franchise to keep alive the illusion of popular
self-determination. And art? Philosophy? The ideals of a Platonic or
those of a Kantian age had for the higher mankind concerned a
general validity. But those of a Hellenistic age, or those of our own,
are valid exclusively for the brain of the Megalopolitan. For the
villager’s or, generally, the nature-man’s world-feeling our Socialism
—like its near relation Darwinism (how utterly un-Goethian are the
formulæ of “struggle for existence” and “natural selection”!), like its
other relative the woman-and-marriage problem of Ibsen, Strindberg,
and Shaw, like the impressionistic tendencies of anarchic
sensuousness and the whole bundle of modern longings,
temptations and pains expressed in Baudelaire’s verse and
Wagner’s music—are simply non-existent. The smaller the town, the
more unmeaning it becomes to busy oneself with painting or with
music of these kinds. To the Culture belong gymnastics, the
tournament, the agon, and to the Civilization belongs Sport. This is
the true distinction between the Hellenic palæstra and the Roman
circus.[30] Art itself becomes a sport (hence the phrase “art for art’s
sake”) to be played before a highly-intelligent audience of
connoisseurs and buyers, whether the feat consist in mastering
absurd instrumental tone-masses and taking harmonic fences, or in
some tour de force of colouring. Then a new fact-philosophy
appears, which can only spare a smile for metaphysical speculation,
and a new literature that is a necessity of life for the megalopolitan
palate and nerves and both unintelligible and ugly to the provincials.
Neither Alexandrine poetry nor plein-air painting is anything to the
“people.” And, then as now, the phase of transition is marked by a
series of scandals only to be found at such moments. The anger
evoked in the Athenian populace by Euripides and by the
“Revolutionary” painting of Apollodorus, for example, is repeated in
the opposition to Wagner, Manet, Ibsen, and Nietzsche.
It is possible to understand the Greeks without mentioning their
economic relations; the Romans, on the other hand, can only be
understood through these. Chæronea and Leipzig were the last
battles fought about an idea. In the First Punic War and in 1870
economic motives are no longer to be overlooked. Not till the
Romans came with their practical energy was slave-holding given
that big collective character which many students regard as the die-
stamp of Classical economics, legislation and way of life, and which
in any event vastly lowered both the value and the inner worthiness
of such free labour as continued to exist side by side with gang-
labour. And it was not the Latin, but the Germanic peoples of the
West and America who developed out of the steam-engine a big
industry that transformed the face of the land. The relation of these
phenomena to Stoicism and to Socialism is unmistakable. Not till the
Roman Cæsarism—foreshadowed by C. Flaminius, shaped first by
Marius, handled by strong-minded, large-scale men of fact—did the
Classical World learn the pre-eminence of money. Without this fact
neither Cæsar, nor “Rome” generally, is understandable. In every
Greek is a Don Quixote, in every Roman a Sancho Panza factor, and
these factors are dominants.
XIII
Considered in itself, the Roman world-dominion was a negative
phenomenon, being the result not of a surplus of energy on the one
side—that the Romans had never had since Zama—but of a
deficiency of resistance on the other. That the Romans did not
conquer the world is certain;[31] they merely took possession of a
booty that lay open to everyone. The Imperium Romanum came into
existence not as the result of such an extremity of military and
financial effort as had characterized the Punic Wars, but because the
old East forwent all external self-determinations. We must not be
deluded by the appearance of brilliant military successes. With a few
ill-trained, ill-led, and sullen legions, Lucullus and Pompey
conquered whole realms—a phenomenon that in the period of the
battle of Ipsus would have been unthinkable. The Mithradatic danger,
serious enough for a system of material force which had never been
put to any real test, would have been nothing to the conquerors of
Hannibal. After Zama, the Romans never again either waged or were
capable of waging a war against a great military Power.[32] Their
classic wars were those against the Samnites, Pyrrhus and
Carthage. Their grand hour was Cannæ. To maintain the heroic
posture for centuries on end is beyond the power of any people. The
Prussian-German people have had three great moments (1813,
1870 and 1914), and that is more than others have had.
Here, then, I lay it down that Imperialism, of which petrifacts such
as the Egyptian empire, the Roman, the Chinese, the Indian may
continue to exist for hundreds or thousands of years—dead bodies,
amorphous and dispirited masses of men, scrap-material from a
great history—is to be taken as the typical symbol of the passing
away. Imperialism is Civilization unadulterated. In this phenomenal
form the destiny of the West is now irrevocably set. The energy of
culture-man is directed inwards, that of civilization-man outwards.
And thus I see in Cecil Rhodes the first man of a new age. He stands
for the political style of a far-ranging, Western, Teutonic and
especially German future, and his phrase “expansion is everything”
is the Napoleonic reassertion of the indwelling tendency of every
Civilization that has fully ripened—Roman, Arab or Chinese. It is not
a matter of choice—it is not the conscious will of individuals, or even
that of whole classes or peoples that decides. The expansive
tendency is a doom, something daemonic and immense, which
grips, forces into service, and uses up the late mankind of the world-
city stage, willy-nilly, aware or unaware.[33] Life is the process of
effecting possibilities, and for the brain-man there are only extensive
possibilities.[34] Hard as the half-developed Socialism of to-day is
fighting against expansion, one day it will become arch-expansionist
with all the vehemence of destiny. Here the form-language of politics,
as the direct intellectual expression of a certain type of humanity,
touches on a deep metaphysical problem—on the fact, affirmed in
the grant of unconditional validity to the causality-principle, that the
soul is the complement of its extension.
When, between 480 and 230,[35] the Chinese group of states was
tending towards imperialism, it was entirely futile to combat the
principle of Imperialism (Lien-heng), practised in particular by the
“Roman” state of Tsin[36] and theoretically represented by the
philosopher Dschang Yi, by ideas of a League of Nations (Hoh-
tsung) largely derived from Wang Hü, a profound sceptic who had no
illusions as to the men or the political possibilities of this “late”
period. Both sides opposed the anti-political idealism of Lao-tse, but
as between themselves it was Lien-heng and not Hoh-tsung which
swam with the natural current of expansive Civilization.[37]
Rhodes is to be regarded as the first precursor of a Western type
of Cæsars, whose day is to come though yet distant. He stands
midway between Napoleon and the force-men of the next centuries,
just as Flaminius, who from 232 B.C. onward pressed the Romans to
undertake the subjugation of Cisalpine Gaul and so initiated the
policy of colonial expansion, stands between Alexander and Cæsar.
Strictly speaking, Flaminius was a private person—for his real power
was of a kind not embodied in any constitutional office—who
exercised a dominant influence in the state at a time when the state-
idea was giving way to the pressure of economic factors. So far as
Rome is concerned, he was the archetype of opposition Cæsarism;
with him there came to an end the idea of state-service and there
began the “will to power” which ignored traditions and reckoned only
with forces. Alexander and Napoleon were romantics; though they
stood on the threshold of Civilization and in its cold clear air, the one
fancied himself an Achilles and the other read Werther. Cæsar, on
the contrary, was a pure man of fact gifted with immense
understanding.
But even for Rhodes political success means territorial and
financial success, and only that. Of this Roman-ness within himself
he was fully aware. But Western Civilization has not yet taken shape
in such strength and purity as this. It was only before his maps that
he could fall into a sort of poetic trance, this son of the parsonage
who, sent out to South Africa without means, made a gigantic fortune
and employed it as the engine of political aims. His idea of a trans-
African railway from the Cape to Cairo, his project of a South African
empire, his intellectual hold on the hard metal souls of the mining
magnates whose wealth he forced into the service of his schemes,
his capital Bulawayo, royally planned as a future Residence by a
statesman who was all-powerful yet stood in no definite relation to
the State, his wars, his diplomatic deals, his road-systems, his
syndicates, his armies, his conception of the “great duty to
civilization” of the man of brain—all this, broad and imposing, is the
prelude of a future which is still in store for us and with which the
history of West-European mankind will be definitely closed.
He who does not understand that this outcome is obligatory and
insusceptible of modification, that our choice is between willing this
and willing nothing at all, between cleaving to this destiny or
despairing of the future and of life itself; he who cannot feel that
there is grandeur also in the realizations of powerful intelligences, in
the energy and discipline of metal-hard natures, in battles fought with
the coldest and most abstract means; he who is obsessed with the
idealism of a provincial and would pursue the ways of life of past
ages—must forgo all desire to comprehend history, to live through
history or to make history.
Thus regarded, the Imperium Romanum appears no longer as an
isolated phenomenon, but as the normal product of a strict and
energetic, megalopolitan, predominantly practical spirituality, as
typical of a final and irreversible condition which has occurred often
enough though it has only been identified as such in this instance.
Let it be realized, then:
That the secret of historical form does not lie on the surface, that it
cannot be grasped by means of similarities of costume and setting,
and that in the history of men as in that of animals and plants there
occur phenomena showing deceptive similarity but inwardly without
any connexion—e.g., Charlemagne and Haroun-al-Raschid,
Alexander and Cæsar, the German wars upon Rome and the Mongol
onslaughts upon West Europe—and other phenomena of extreme
outward dissimilarity but of identical import—e.g., Trajan and
Rameses II, the Bourbons and the Attic Demos, Mohammed and
Pythagoras.
That the 19th and 20th centuries, hitherto looked on as the highest
point of an ascending straight line of world-history, are in reality a
stage of life which may be observed in every Culture that has
ripened to its limit—a stage of life characterized not by Socialists,
Impressionists, electric railways, torpedoes and differential equations
(for these are only body-constituents of the time), but by a civilized
spirituality which possesses not only these but also quite other
creative possibilities.
That, as our own time represents a transitional phase which
occurs with certainty under particular conditions, there are perfectly
well-defined states (such as have occurred more than once in the
history of the past) later than the present-day state of West Europe,
and therefore that
The future of the West is not a limitless tending upwards and
onwards for all time towards our present ideals, but a single
phenomenon of history, strictly limited and defined as to form and
duration, which covers a few centuries and can be viewed and, in
essentials, calculated from available precedents.
XIV
This high plane of contemplation once attained, the rest is easy. To
this single idea one can refer, and by it one can solve, without
straining or forcing, all those separate problems of religion, art-
history, epistemology, ethics, politics, economics with which the
modern intellect has so passionately—and so vainly—busied itself
for decades.
This idea is one of those truths that have only to be expressed
with full clarity to become indisputable. It is one of the inward
necessities of the Western Culture and of its world-feeling. It is
capable of entirely transforming the world-outlook of one who fully
understands it, i.e., makes it intimately his own. It immensely
deepens the world-picture natural and necessary to us in that,
already trained to regard world-historical evolution as an organic unit
seen backwards from our standpoint in the present, we are enabled
by its aid to follow the broad lines into the future—a privilege of
dream-calculation till now permitted only to the physicist. It is, I
repeat, in effect the substitution of a Copernican for a Ptolemaic
aspect of history, that is, an immeasurable widening of horizon.
Up to now everyone has been at liberty to hope what he pleased
about the future. Where there are no facts, sentiment rules. But
henceforward it will be every man’s business to inform himself of
what can happen and therefore of what with the unalterable
necessity of destiny and irrespective of personal ideals, hopes or
desires, will happen. When we use the risky word “freedom” we shall
mean freedom to do, not this or that, but the necessary or nothing.
The feeling that this is “just as it should be” is the hall-mark of the
man of fact. To lament it and blame it is not to alter it. To birth
belongs death, to youth age, to life generally its form and its allotted
span. The present is a civilized, emphatically not a cultured time, and
ipso facto a great number of life-capacities fall out as impossible.
This may be deplorable, and may be and will be deplored in
pessimist philosophy and poetry, but it is not in our power to make
otherwise. It will not be—already it is not—permissible to defy clear
historical experience and to expect, merely because we hope, that
this will spring or that will flourish.
It will no doubt be objected that such a world-outlook, which in
giving this certainty as to the outlines and tendency of the future cuts
off all far-reaching hopes, would be unhealthy for all and fatal for
many, once it ceased to be a mere theory and was adopted as a
practical scheme of life by the group of personalities effectively
moulding the future.
Such is not my opinion. We are civilized, not Gothic or Rococo,
people; we have to reckon with the hard cold facts of a late life, to
which the parallel is to be found not in Pericles’s Athens but in
Cæsar’s Rome. Of great painting or great music there can no longer
be, for Western people, any question. Their architectural possibilities
have been exhausted these hundred years. Only extensive
possibilities are left to them. Yet, for a sound and vigorous
generation that is filled with unlimited hopes, I fail to see that it is any
disadvantage to discover betimes that some of these hopes must
come to nothing. And if the hopes thus doomed should be those
most dear, well, a man who is worth anything will not be dismayed. It
is true that the issue may be a tragic one for some individuals who in
their decisive years are overpowered by the conviction that in the
spheres of architecture, drama, painting, there is nothing left for
them to conquer. What matter if they do go under! It has been the
convention hitherto to admit no limits of any sort in these matters,
and to believe that each period had its own task to do in each
sphere. Tasks therefore were found by hook or by crook, leaving it to
be settled posthumously whether or not the artist’s faith was justified
and his life-work necessary. Now, nobody but a pure romantic would
take this way out. Such a pride is not the pride of a Roman. What are
we to think of the individual who, standing before an exhausted
quarry, would rather be told that a new vein will be struck to-morrow
—the bait offered by the radically false and mannerized art of the
moment—than be shown a rich and virgin clay-bed near by? The
lesson, I think, would be of benefit to the coming generations, as
showing them what is possible—and therefore necessary—and what
is excluded from the inward potentialities of their time. Hitherto an
incredible total of intellect and power has been squandered in false
directions. The West-European, however historically he may think
and feel, is at a certain stage of life invariably uncertain of his own
direction; he gropes and feels his way and, if unlucky in environment,
he loses it. But now at last the work of centuries enables him to view
the disposition of his own life in relation to the general culture-
scheme and to test his own powers and purposes. And I can only
hope that men of the new generation may be moved by this book to
devote themselves to technics instead of lyrics, the sea instead of
the paint-brush, and politics instead of epistemology. Better they
could not do.
XV
It still remains to consider the relation of a morphology of world-
history to Philosophy. All genuine historical work is philosophy,
unless it is mere ant-industry. But the operations of the systematic
philosopher are subject to constant and serious error through his
assuming the permanence of his results. He overlooks the fact that
every thought lives in a historical world and is therefore involved in
the common destiny of mortality. He supposes that higher thought
possesses an everlasting and unalterable objectiveness
(Gegenstand), that the great questions of all epochs are identical,
and that therefore they are capable in the last analysis of unique
answers.
But question and answer are here one, and the great questions
are made great by the very fact that unequivocal answers to them
are so passionately demanded, so that it is as life-symbols only that
they possess significance. There are no eternal truths. Every
philosophy is the expression of its own and only its own time, and—if
by philosophy we mean effective philosophy and not academic
triflings about judgment-forms, sense-categories and the like—no
two ages possess the same philosophic intentions. The difference is
not between perishable and imperishable doctrines but between
doctrines which live their day and doctrines which never live at all.
The immortality of thoughts-become is an illusion—the essential is,
what kind of man comes to expression in them. The greater the man,
the truer the philosophy, with the inward truth that in a great work of
art transcends all proof of its several elements or even of their
compatibility with one another. At highest, the philosophy may
absorb the entire content of an epoch, realize it within itself and then,
embodying it in some grand form or personality, pass it on to be
developed further and further. The scientific dress or the mark of
learning adopted by a philosophy is here unimportant. Nothing is
simpler than to make good poverty of ideas by founding a system,
and even a good idea has little value when enunciated by a solemn
ass. Only its necessity to life decides the eminence of a doctrine.
For me, therefore, the test of value to be applied to a thinker is his
eye for the great facts of his own time. Only this can settle whether
he is merely a clever architect of systems and principles, versed in
definitions and analyses, or whether it is the very soul of his time that
speaks in his works and his intuitions. A philosopher who cannot
grasp and command actuality as well will never be of the first rank.
The Pre-Socratics were merchants and politicians en grand. The
desire to put his political ideas into practice in Syracuse nearly cost
Plato his life, and it was the same Plato who discovered the set of
geometrical theorems that enabled Euclid to build up the Classical
system of mathematics. Pascal—whom Nietzsche knows only as the
“broken Christian”—Descartes, Leibniz were the first mathematicians
and technicians of their time.
The great “Pre-Socratics” of China from Kwan-tsi (about 670) to
Confucius (550-478) were statesmen, regents, lawgivers like
Pythagoras and Parmenides, like Hobbes and Leibniz. With Lao-tsze
—the opponent of all state authority and high politics and the
enthusiast of small peaceful communities—unworldliness and deed-
shyness first appear, heralds of lecture-room and study philosophy.
But Lao-tsze was in his time, the ancien régime of China, an
exception in the midst of sturdy philosophers for whom epistemology
meant the knowledge of the important relations of actual life.
And herein, I think, all the philosophers of the newest age are
open to a serious criticism. What they do not possess is real
standing in actual life. Not one of them has intervened effectively,
either in higher politics, in the development of modern technics, in
matters of communication, in economics, or in any other big
actuality, with a single act or a single compelling idea. Not one of
them counts in mathematics, in physics, in the science of
government, even to the extent that Kant counted. Let us glance at
other times. Confucius was several times a minister. Pythagoras was
the organizer of an important political movement[38] akin to the
Cromwellian, the significance of which is even now far
underestimated by Classical researchers. Goethe, besides being a
model executive minister—though lacking, alas! the operative sphere
of a great state—was interested in the Suez and Panama canals (the
dates of which he foresaw with accuracy) and their effects on the
economy of the world, and he busied himself again and again with
the question of American economic life and its reactions on the Old
World, and with that of the dawning era of machine-industry. Hobbes
was one of the originators of the great plan of winning South
America for England, and although in execution the plan went no
further than the occupation of Jamaica, he has the glory of being one
of the founders of the British Colonial Empire. Leibniz, without doubt
the greatest intellect in Western philosophy, the founder of the
differential calculus and the analysis situs, conceived or co-operated
in a number of major political schemes, one of which was to relieve
Germany by drawing the attention of Louis XIV to the importance of
Egypt as a factor in French world-policy. The ideas of the
memorandum on this subject that he drew up for the Grand Monarch
were so far in advance of their time (1672) that it has been thought
that Napoleon made use of them for his Eastern venture. Even thus
early, Leibniz laid down the principle that Napoleon grasped more
and more clearly after Wagram, viz., that acquisitions on the Rhine
and in Belgium would not permanently better the position of France
and that the neck of Suez would one day be the key of world-
dominance. Doubtless the King was not equal to these deep political
and strategic conceptions of the Philosopher.
Turning from men of this mould to the “philosophers” of to-day, one
is dismayed and shamed. How poor their personalities, how
commonplace their political and practical outlook! Why is it that the
mere idea of calling upon one of them to prove his intellectual
eminence in government, diplomacy, large-scale organization, or
direction of any big colonial, commercial or transport concern is
enough to evoke our pity? And this insufficiency indicates, not that
they possess inwardness, but simply that they lack weight. I look
round in vain for an instance in which a modern “philosopher” has
made a name by even one deep or far-seeing pronouncement on an
important question of the day. I see nothing but provincial opinions of
the same kind as anyone else’s. Whenever I take up a work by a
modern thinker, I find myself asking: has he any idea whatever of the
actualities of world-politics, world-city problems, capitalism, the

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Campaigns and Elections: What

Everyone Needs to Know(r) Dennis W

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PREFACE: WHY YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT CAMPAIGNS

1 Voting and Participation 1

How does the United States conduct elections? 1

What would happen if every American adult were required to vote,

2 Carving Out Legislative Districts 23

3 Political Parties and Elections 33

4 Statewide, Local, and Congressional Elections 47

How many state and local elections are there? 47

6 Money, Mega-​Donors, and Wide-​Open Spending 84

What federal rules and regulations controlled campaign financing

7 Inner Workings of Modern Campaigns 110

What do you mean by political consultants, and what kinds of

8 Direct Democracy—​Ballot Campaigns 121

When and why did ballot campaigns become a part

9 How Campaigns Have Changed 135

Federal candidates now say, “I’m [name] and I approve this

How has the digital revolution changed campaigning? 136

10 Threats to Democracy 145

Is voter suppression real? 145

The right of all citizens to vote and participate in elections

influence, and how outside forces have tried, and sometimes

• Thanks to federal court decisions, the federal campaign-​

• The result is that a handful of mega-​donors, those willing

districts favorable to one party or the other, and how states

In ­chapter 7, we look at campaign consultants. What are the

Many colleagues, friends, and associates helped me develop

Woodford) at the Chocolate Sparrow Coffee Club in Orleans,

Compared to other democracies, the United States has a medi-

How does the United States conduct elections?

candidates, and none receives a majority, states and other

What’s the historical background on the right to vote in America?

convicted felons, those with mental incapacities, and residents

stop the wholesale elimination of voting rights—​so much for

sentiment was that if we are asking eighteen-​year-​olds to fight

Why was the Voting Rights Act of 1965 important? What’s

2006 when it reauthorized the section of the Voting Rights Act

Are the Voting Rights Act protections needed today?

The Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh and the

Democratic-​ leaning independents, while 33 percent were

What are the rates of voting for African Americans, Hispanic

Here is the racial makeup of American voters during the 2016

• White, 73.3% in 2016; 80.7% in 2000

In short, the percentage of white voters is dropping, and

Americans favored Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump by

Have there been efforts to diminish voting participation?

Second, the reality is that in local and state contests in

Do convicted felons ever get back the right to vote?

Disenfranchisement has fallen most heavily on African

Why do so few voters participate in elections, especially in state

fifty-​seven. Older voters were fifteen times more likely to vote

• Dallas, 6.1%; median age, 62

Compared to other democracies, how does the United States

1. Belgium, 87.2 percent of all adults voted

Interestingly, in the United States the percentage of partic-

6 Money, Mega-Donors, and Wide-Open Spending 84

8 Direct Democracy—Ballot Campaigns 121

• Thanks to federal court decisions, the federal campaign-

• The result is that a handful of mega-donors, those willing

In chapter 7, we look at campaign consultants. What are the

stop the wholesale elimination of voting rights—so much for

sentiment was that if we are asking eighteen-year-olds to fight

Democratic- leaning independents, while 33 percent were

fifty-seven. Older voters were fifteen times more likely to vote

How have mail-in ballots, absentee-ballot voting systems,

Twenty- one states provide absentee ballots but require