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Progressive Passion:Reviving the Fighting Spirit of Nonpartisan ReformFormer President Jimmy Carter has served as anelection observer all over the world, often in impov-erished, strife-ridden countries such as Haiti orMozambique. When he travels abroad these days,he is sometimes asked what must be an embarrass-ing question: Why are there so many problems withelection administration in the state of Florida?Carter offered a partial explanation in an op-edpublished in the Washington Post shortly before the2004 election. “Some of the basic internationalrequirements for fair elections,” he wrote, “are miss-ing in Florida.”

President Carter listed two such requirements in hisarticle: (1) a nonpartisan, national election commis-sion to ensure fairness, and (2) uniform voting pro-cedures, so all citizens, no matter where they live orwhat party they support, will have the same oppor-tunity to vote and have their votes counted. Theserequirements, by the way, are missing from electionsin the other forty-nine states as well. Thirty yearsago, when American voters were less polarized andpoliticians from the two major parties were morecivil to one another, the absence of these formalassurances of fairness didn’t seem to matter. Inrecent years, however, inconsistent voting proce-dures and partisan bias among election officials havejoined the priority list of political procedures in needof reforming, along with excessive campaign spend-ing and chronically low voter turnouts.

A pessimist might suggest that current politicaltrends—especially the increased polarization andhyper-partisanship—don’t bode well for a broad-based, nonpartisan movement of democraticchange, but history provides a hopeful, if imperfect

analogy, the wave of reform that swept this coun-try in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-turies. Progressive Era activists sought to changethe structures and processes of government andpolitics to foster a more deliberative approach torepresentative democracy. Their efforts transcend-ed traditional lines of party and geography. Wecould use more of that passion for nonpartisanshipand innovation today.

The historical analogy is imperfect because some ofthe preconditions for the Progressive Era—a devas-tating depression in 1893, a Populist rebellionagainst the two-party system, violent conflictsbetween labor and management, bitter factional dis-putes within both major parties over monetary pol-icy—don’t have modern parallels. But just imaginehow improbable a dramatic transformation of polit-ical institutions must have seemed after the presi-dential election of 1896. The stolid WilliamMcKinley had defeated the reform-minded firebrandWilliam Jennings Bryan. Populism lost steam as thecountry recovered from the depression. A business-oriented GOP emerged as the dominant nationalparty, and the party of Andrew Jackson devolvedinto a regional organization with strongholds in theSouth and pockets of support in the urban, industri-alized North and Midwest.

This historic party realignment, however, did notbring down the curtain on the Age of Reform.Progressive Republicans and anti-machineDemocrats joined with independent politicalactivists to adopt items on the Populist reform agen-da and to add some proposals of their own.Women’s suffrage, direct election of U.S. Senators,

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the popular initiative and recall, anti-trust legisla-tion, labor laws, campaign finance reform, and con-servation measures—all of these dramatic reformsthat we now take for granted occurred during aProgressive Era that barely lasted twenty years—atime, as historian Richard Hofstadter wrote, whenalmost every aspect of American life was beingreconsidered.

The tradition of nonpartisan reformism—a passion-ate belief in democracy for the sake of democracy—is alive and well in the nonprofit sector. Groups suchas Common Cause, Demos, the National CivicLeague, the League of Women Voters, the BrennanCenter for Justice, and the Center for Voting andDemocracy are working diligently and effectively topromote greater civic engagement and social equity,adopt better voting systems, and provide easieraccess to ballots and voting machines. But outsidethe world of good government groups, the ethos ofnonpartisan structural reformism has lost much of itsappeal. It certainly doesn’t help that the ProgressiveEra has been harshly scrutinized and reevaluated bygenerations of cynics, skeptics, Marxists, conserva-tive constitutionalists, and self-styled political real-ists. Among historians and political theorists askeptical view of the legacy of nonpartisanreformism is now the conventional wisdom.

Paradoxically, the word “progressive” continues toenjoy widespread use, but most often as an indicatorof a group or individual’s position on the left-rightspectrum, less frequently as a nonpartisan (or multi-partisan) faith in the potential of social and politicalreform. Although individual reforms such as cam-paign finance restrictions often enjoy widespreadpublic support, the ethos of nonpartisan reformismlacks two key ingredients for success in contempo-rary politics: a loyal and passionate political baseand the backing of powerful interest groups.

Conservative Republicans take a dim view of theProgressive zeal for government regulation. LiberalDemocrats dislike the Progressive bias against

strong local party organizations. Civil rightsactivists have a legitimate beef with certain aspectsof the municipal reform model, especially the inno-vation of “at large” city council seats, which make itdifficult for minority candidates to win local office.Political observers of all stripes hold Progressivesresponsible for the overuse (and in some cases, themisuse) of the recall and ballot initiative in stateslike California, which some commentators havebeen known to describe as “ungovernable.”

Some critics think the Progressives were too dem-ocratic (or too directly democratic). Others thinkthey were not democratic enough. Historians havejudged Progressives both naïvely optimistic aboutthe nature of political man and cynically manipu-lative in claiming to promote the “public interest”while enacting reforms that disfranchised immi-grants and supporters of the Socialist Party. Mypurpose in this essay is not to refute any of theseanti-Progressive critiques or to enter into a purelyhistorical debate about the impacts of any givenreform. My point is to suggest that both conven-tional wisdom and political reality have swung toofar away from the nonpartisan “good govern-ment” tradition.

In this time of hyper-partisanship and “Red State,”“Blue State” polarization, when the inherent weak-nesses of our electoral system have been ignoredand in some cases intentionally exploited, theProgressive Era has important lessons to teach us,more important even than the AmericanRevolution, the Civil War, or the New Deal. For alltheir flaws, the Progressives had an approach topolitical change that was imaginative, pragmatic,optimistic, and energetic. Progressives focused theircivic energies on the structures of politics and

“Some of the basic international requirements forfair elections are missing in Florida.”

— F O R M E R P R E S I D E N T J I M M Y C A R T E R

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government in an effort to foster a more delibera-tive process that crossed the traditional dividinglines of party, region, and ideology. What was soterrible about that?

Jacksonian Democracy Versus Progressive Reform

The first great period of political innovation andreform in post-Revolutionary America was theearly to mid-nineteenth century. During the age ofAndrew Jackson the basic outlines of the modernparty system came into view with the emergence ofnational nominating conventions, the abolition ofproperty requirements for voting, and the develop-ment of popular, statewide party organizations.Jacksonian Democrats developed a “spoils system”of loyal party placeholders to discourage theentrenchment of a professional bureaucracy and topromote the party’s national agenda. Although theJacksonian Democrats sought greater political andeconomic equality (if only for white males), theirswas a traditionalist and backward-looking strug-gle, a restoration of republican virtues that hadbeen corrupted by an emerging politico-financialelite in Washington.

The Progressive Era was partly a reaction to theabuses and corruptions of an overripe Jacksoniansystem. The Progressives were distrustful of power-ful party organizations or “machines,” some ofwhich were direct descendents of JacksonianDemocratic Party clubs. Nonpartisan by inclination,the Progressives mounted “fusion” tickets to uniteanti-corruption forces across party lines and adopt-ed reform charters at the local level to insulatemunicipal government from statehouse gangs andthe political clout of trusts and utility companies.The Progressives were pragmatic, nontraditional,and future oriented. They proposed innovative

structural reforms to elevate the individual,informed voter above the party apparatus. Theywere modernists at heart, valuing scientific progress,professional expertise, and organizational efficiency.Most of all they were more interested in creating ademocratic future than in restoring a pastoral repub-lic that never really existed.

What the two traditions had in common was a will-ingness to innovate and an aversion to excessive con-centrations of wealth and political power. Whatseparated them were very different theories on how tobring about democratic change. The Jacksonianemphasis on party organization was antithetical to theProgressive’s neutral structuralism. The Progressivefaith in deliberative democracy clashed with the wardcaptain mentality of late Jacksonian democracy. On apractical level, the Jacksonian approach was proba-bly more effective in mobilizing voters, but the sideeffects—corruption and bitter partisanship—werecorrosive. The downside of the Progressive emphasison deliberative individualism was political disen-gagement, or as the scholarly critics like to say,“demobilization.”

One of the earliest (and certainly the most colorful)critics of Progressivism was a former assemblyman,alderman, police magistrate, and county supervisornamed George Washington Plunkitt, known to theturn-of-the-century readers of the New York Worldas the “Sage of Tammany Hall.” According to jour-nalist William Riordon, who recorded the sage’smusings for posterity, Plunkitt set an all-time recordamong New York politicians by managing to drawsalaries from three separate public sector jobs atonce. Standing at his “rostrum,” the bootblackstand at the New York County Courthouse, Plunkittextolled the virtues of what he called “honest graft”and denounced the dangerous heresy of civil servicereform. “How are you goin’ to interest our youngmen in their country if you have no offices to givethem when they work for their party?” he asked. “Iknow more than one young man in past years whoworked for the ticket and was just overflowin’ with

Progressives had an approach to political changethat was imaginative, pragmatic, optimistic, andenergetic.

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patriotism, but when he was knocked out by thecivil service humbug he got to hate his country andbecame an Anarchist.”

Though Plunkitt must have seemed an amusing relicof the Gilded Age to early twentieth-century readers,over time his ideas have become part of the histori-cal canon. Sociologist Michael Schudson quotes thesage in his 1998 history of American citizenship,The Good Citizen. Reformers, writes Schudson,“weakened the musculature” of American democra-cy by eliminating patronage and undercutting thepower of party organizations (p. 155). Gone werethe days when city employees paid a percentage oftheir salaries to the local party machine for the priv-ilege of a government job and when ward heelersrounded up citizens at the corner beer hall onElection Day and handed them a slate ballot printedby the party. The heyday of beer hall democracyended with the adoption of the standardized, gov-ernment-printed “Australian ballot,” which encour-aged citizens to weigh the merits of individualcandidates, as opposed to the usual practice ofblindly voting the party slate. Such reforms, arguesSchudson, “helped transform voting from a socialinto a civic act, rationalizing electoral behavior anddepriving elections of most of what made them com-pelling.” The outcome, he concludes, is a “world inmany respects more democratic, inclusive and dedi-cated to public, collective goals, and for all of that,less politically engaging” (p. 147).

The Age of Consensus

Schudson’s skeptical view of nonpartisan reformrecalls an earlier debunker of Progressivism, histori-an Richard Hofstadter, a brilliant scholar and word-smith, who coined such memorable phrases as the“paranoid style in American politics.” More thanany other historian, Hofstadter established theimage of the Progressive reformer as a Protestant,middle-class moralist whose “ethos of political par-ticipation without self-interest set impossible stan-dards.” Like the Populists before them, wroteHofstadter in The Age of Reform, the Progressive

reformers fell prey to a “form of moral absolutism”(pp. 18–19). In his 1949 book The Vital Center, his-torian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. described Progressiveliberalism as “inextricably linked with a picture ofman as perfectible, as endowed with sufficient wis-dom and selflessness to ensure power and use itinfallibly for the general good.” To Schlesinger, whohad made a name for himself in the 1940s with hisbreakthrough book The Age of Jackson, “TheSoviet experience on top of the rise of fascismreminded my generation that man was indeedimperfect” (p. ix).

Hofstadter and Schlesinger are often linked with agroup of scholars known as the “consensus histori-ans” or the “counter-Progressives.” Disillusionedby the rise of totalitarian regimes in Europe andalarmed by McCarthyism here at home, the con-sensus historians were breaking with an earlier gen-eration of “progressive” historians like CharlesBeard, Vernon Parrington, and Carl Becker. Theprogressive historians were small “d” democrats,who tended to sympathize with political reformers.(Beard was at one time an editor of the NationalMunicipal Review.) Their scholarship emphasizedthe clash of classes and interest groups, debtors andcreditors, democrats and aristocrats, a conflict thatresulted in democratic progress through agitationand reform. The counter progressives, on the otherhand, viewed American democracy as more of aconservative tradition, the product of a broad “con-sensus” in a nation that lacked the stifling classstructures and ideologies of the Old Country.

The idea of a classless national consensus was reas-suring after the upheavals of the 1930s and 1940sand plausible enough in the post–World War II era,when political moderates within the two major par-ties had seemed to have achieved a rough consensuson important questions of domestic and foreign pol-icy. (The exceptions to the rule were rabble-rouserslike Joe McCarthy or the Southern segregationists,whom Hofstadter lumped together with Populistsand, to some extent, Progressives, as part of the

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paranoid strain in American politics.) With theemergence of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coali-tion, the dynamics of liberalism changed dramati-cally. Although most New Dealers, and F.D.R.himself, were deeply influenced by Progressiveideals, their approach to reform was quintessential-ly Jacksonian, a single, powerful political party witha charismatic leader at the top holding together adiverse array of sections and factions. Liberal NewDealers were changing the system from the insidewith the assistance of party organizations, govern-ment bureaucracies, and a charismatic president.

In the post-World War II era systemic, structural,and nonpartisan political reforms of the Progressivesort seemed quaintly old-fashioned and unnecessary.Sociologist Daniel Bell wrote of “the end of ideolo-gy” and political scientist Anthony Downs proposed“an economic theory of politics.” The Downs theo-ry suggested that competition in a two-party,winner-take-all system tended to encourage politicalmoderation and ideological agreement. But asSteven Hill points out in his book Fixing Elections:The Future of America’s Winner Take All Politics,Downs had noted an exception. When the voters arepolarized, politicians may move away from eachother along the ideological spectrum to appeal totheir respective constituencies at opposite poles.

Today this notion of a grand, national consensusemerging from the mediations of interest groupsand two-party competition seems laughable. Con-temporary political leaders appeal to their “bases”and try to eke out narrow victories by carving smallwedges of voters from the other side by emphasiz-ing divisive issues. With the development of newtechnologies and strategies, professional campaignmanagers have become experts at gaming the sys-

tem, engineering safe districts in which to run,exploiting the loopholes in election administrationto depress the opposition vote, and, if all else fails,appealing to the judiciary for rulings on electoraldisputes. Under conditions of excessive polarizationand super-partisanship, can we really rely on partyleaders to foster some sort of national consensus? Inthe world of perpetual campaigning, policy debatesand legislation are merely part of the arsenal of par-tisan warfare.

Nor can we expect the media to forge a consensus.In the past two decades, we have gone from a coun-try with an oligopoly of three television networksproviding news to a mass audience of viewers to a“narrow-casting,” 500-channel world of cable,satellite, and Internet technologies. Market changesand new technologies have opened up new mediafor expression, communication, and informationgathering, but they have also led to further polar-ization as more and more consumers of “news”select partisan sources such as talk radio or opin-ionated “blogs” for their information. There hasbeen—some would say—a degradation of the val-ues of fairness, and civility and professionalism(journalistic ethics being another notion popular-ized during the Progressive Era). “We have alsoseen more and more high-profile political uses ofthe media as a reflection of the owner’s opinion,”said Common Cause President Chellie Pingree in arecent interview. “A line between journalism andopinion seems to have been blurred. It seems to becheaper to have two people of different politicalviews argue with each other on television ratherthan to produce a thirty-minute in-depth broadcaston all the different perspectives.”

Increased polarization and partisanship amongpolitical leaders and media outlets have put greaterpressure on the electoral system. In other words, thesystem has to work. Qualities such as fairness andtransparency become more and more necessary for afunctional representative democracy. The self-righting mechanisms of the two-party system are

In the world of perpetual campaigning, policydebates and legislation are merely part of thearsenal of partisan warfare.

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nowhere in evidence, so the tradition of nonparti-san, good government reform, the “ethos of politicalparticipation without self-interest,” seems less naïvethan the idea of two-party competition as a vehiclefor consensus building.

It may seem fanciful or overly theoretical to focus onthese historical debates about politics and reform.The average Joe isn’t sitting around the dinner tablearguing the relative merits of Jacksonian democracyversus those of Progressive reformism or quotingRichard Hofstadter to refute Charles Beard. Nor areyou likely to see any explicit references to “consen-sus historians” among journalists or politicalactivists. But it seems to me the skeptical view of thenonpartisan tradition has become the conventionalwisdom. Observers of the contemporary politicalscene are implicitly siding with the Jacksonianswhen they use arguments like “politics ain’t bean-bag” or “you can’t take the politics out of politics”to justify or simply ignore practices and proceduresthat are blatantly corrupt and unfair.

Attack of the Gerrymanders

I can’t think of any single abuse of process that bet-ter symbolizes excessive partisanship and unfairnessthan the corruption of the legislative redistrictingprocess in some states. Gerrymandering is nothingnew. It dates back to the earliest days of theRepublic, carrying the namesake of one of the non-signers of the U.S. Constitution, Elbridge Gerry.While Gerry was governor of Massachusetts, thecommonwealth assembly drew a district so mis-shapen that one journalist remarked its resemblanceto a salamander. “No,” said another observer. “It’sa Gerrymander.” Both the name and the practicestuck. Over the years Democrats and Republicanshave freely indulged in partisan gerrymandering, butmodern geographic information systems softwarehas turned an impressionistic art form into a digitalscience. Any consultant with a laptop can now pro-vide instant analysis of voting patterns within a mar-gin of error of a few percentage points. One result isfewer competitive districts.

In 2003, Texas Republicans added a new twist towhat used to be an every-ten-year affair linked tothe most recent census. Gaining a majority in thestatehouse, they threw out a court-ordered planbased on the 2000 census that had already beenaccepted and engaged in a second round of redis-tricting, egregiously gerrymandering U.S. Con-gressional districts for partisan gain. SenateDemocrats fled in protest across the state line toArdmore, Oklahoma, temporarily denying the ger-rymanderers a quorum, but ultimately the re-redistricting plan prevailed. Although Republicanstried and failed to rally public opinion against therunaway senators, the Democrats were no more suc-cessful in convincing the Texas voters that the planwas especially brazen, possibly because TexasDemocrats in past years had engineered some of theworst gerrymanders in the country. ColoradoRepublicans also passed a midnight re-redistrictingplan in 2003, but the Colorado Supreme Courttossed it out. More recently, Republicans in Georgiapassed a re-redistricting plan, and it will likely bechallenged in state courts.

Gerrymandering is a contact sport that brings outthe natural hypocrisy in politicians. Party loyalistsrarely complain if the redistricting plan benefits theirside. Turn the tables and they recover their concernfor fairness. When former victims of a gerrymanderdo manage to turn things around, they often arguethat the practice is perfectly fair if both sides areequally guilty. Apologists for gerrymandering seem-ingly forget that it is voters, not parties, who are thevictims of redistricting abuse. It is the public interest,not the party interest, they should be keeping inmind. The first casualty of redistricting wars is polit-ical accountability. In Congressional races, voters

Contemporary political leaders appeal to their“bases” and try to eke out narrow victories bycarving small wedges of voters from the other sideby emphasizing divisive issues.

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rarely cross party lines to punish their elected offi-cials for poor performance. Special interest groupsare among the prime beneficiaries of gerrymander-ing. Often the “go to” guy for some pernicious pieceof special interest legislation is the representativewho runs unopposed or in a district with a 20 to 30percent margin of victory.

The U.S. Supreme Court has had opportunities tocrack down on gerrymandering, but thus far themajority has not found any constitutional basisfor objecting to partisan gerrymandering, so thereform movement will probably have to fightredistricting abuse from state to state. One of thebest working models for a less partisan system isin Iowa, where the nonpartisan LegislativeServices Bureau draws the district lines. Althougha majority in the legislature approves the finalplan, there are strict guidelines and criteria: popu-lation equality, contiguity, unity of counties, andcompactness. Political considerations are express-ly barred from the redistricting process. If the leg-islature does not approve the first three plans bythe bureau, the Iowa Supreme Court takes respon-sibility for state districts. The governor has vetopower over both plans.

As I write this, advocates of nonpartisan redistrict-ing are following with interest developments inCalifornia, where Governor Arnold Schwarze-negger has proposed a ballot initiative known as theVoter Empowerment Act. If successful, the initiativewould overturn the “pay-to-play” incumbency pro-tection plan that Democratic consultants mappedout in 2001 and turn over the process to a panel ofretired judges. Not all reformers view this move aswholly positive, noting that it would be yet anothermid-decade redistricting effort and would amountto a partisan policy wrapped in a good governmentpackage. Democrats in the California Senate areproposing an alternative amendment to create aseven-member independent redistricting commis-sion and negotiating with the governor on a possi-ble compromise.

Nonpartisanship, Professionalism, and Fair ElectionAdministration

On Election Day in 2004, Common Cause, the FelsInstitute for Government at the University ofPennsylvania, the Hispanic Voter Project at JohnsHopkins and the National University, and theNational Constitution Center operated a telephonehotline to take calls from voters who experiencedproblems at the polls. The hotline received more than200,000 calls. Almost everything that could gowrong did go wrong. In some precincts, the machinestallied more votes than voters. At other pollingplaces, the machines gave votes for the wrong candi-date. Ten-hour lines greeted would-be voters in onecollege town, while other voters breezed throughpolling places in half an hour or less. Misinformationand inconsistent rulings issued forth from officialsand election workers across the land, sowing publicconfusion about everything from registration formsto the use of provisional ballots.

In 2002, Congress passed the Help America VoteAct (HAVA) to deal with some of the problems thathad been raised by the 2000 election. The law allo-cated $3.9 million to states to be disbursed over athree-year period to pay for improvements in votingequipment and election administration. But HAVAimplementation was flawed by lack of adequatefunding and inconsistent application. One of themost significant features of HAVA was the introduc-tion of “provisional ballots” for those voters whoshowed up at their polling places to find that theirnames did not appear on the voter roles.Unfortunately, Congress did not create a uniformprocedure for determining the circumstance underwhich those ballots would be counted. In Ohio and

Many Americans support the idea of politicalchange and fair process in theory but lack the zealfor nonpartisan reform and the capacity for out-rage when confronted with evidence of systemiccorruption or bias.

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Florida election officials did not count provisionalballots unless they were cast in the proper pollingplace. Other states only allowed provisional votes tobe cast in federal races.

In spite of these weaknesses, Miles Rapoport, presi-dent of the reform group Demos, says there are rea-sons for optimism. Billions of dollars have beenappropriated by states to improve election equip-ment and administration, and HAVA is a tentativestep in the direction of a national election commis-sion. “We have the potential mechanism for it in theElection Assistance Commission that was set upunder HAVA,” he said in a recent interview, “but itwas set up to be weak, to have no teeth, and it was-n’t funded or even appointed. The commissionought to be allowed to work, but I think thereshould be a real debate about how much of thisprocess should be nationalized, which could meanany one of three things—voluntary guidelines,national standards locally administered, or nationalstandards with a federal election agency.”

Strong national standards go against the Americangrain of state and county control of election proce-dures, but the recent problems with voting equip-ment, ballot design, unequal resources, andarbitrary enforcement argue for a uniform set ofminimum standards. Equally critical is the issue ofpartisan bias in election administration. For electionofficers to be on the boards of campaign committeesis clearly a conflict of interest. The League ofWomen Voters, among other groups, has called forprofessionalism in election offices. In the modernworld of computerized voting, election administra-tion should be a job for which technical expertiseand professionalism are important qualifications.

As author Steven Hill, cofounder of the Center forVoting and Democracy, said in a recent interview.“It doesn’t matter what sort of mechanism you have,whether it is paper ballots or touch screen voting. Ifyou can’t trust the election administrators, you’vegot problems.”

A New Age of Reform

“One thing you can say,” noted Common CausePresident Chellie Pingree when asked about therecent failings of our American election administra-tion, “is that reform itself has come back as an issue.People see the danger of having a broken system.Honestly, we can’t answer all the questions we getabout electoral reform. Do the machines work? Dotheir votes count? It is a huge topic of conversationamong activists and citizens.”

Founded in 1970 by former National Civic LeagueChairman John Gardner, Common Cause is bestknown for its tireless advocacy of campaignfinance reform and ethics in government, but likeother reform groups, the organization has broad-ened its focus in response to contemporary events.“Obviously campaign finance reform will continueto be a big concern for us,” says Pingree, “but weare also very interested in these questions of elec-toral reform, and we’ve become increasingly con-cerned about the role of the media in terms ofproviding information in a democracy and howpeople access that information.”

Looking ahead, Demos President Rapoport identifiesthree priorities for a twenty-first-century reform agen-da. The first is better election administration. “Weneed to continue to move forward on changing theelection machines themselves,” he says. “In additionto machines, we need more poll workers and a betterratio of machines to voters. A big issue will be nation-al standards for many issues that are now decided ona state to state or even a county to county basis—pro-visional ballots, what forms of I.D. are acceptable,what are the standards for computerized voting lists.”

The second priority is making the electoral systemmore accessible to groups that have been discour-aged from voting or frozen out of the process.Among those reforms are the full implementation ofthe National Voter Registration Act, specifically,ensuring that social service agencies offer opportu-nities for clients to register as mandated by law;

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Election Day registration or automatic registration;early voting; mail-in voting and creating an ElectionDay holiday; easing voting restrictions on formerfelons; and opening up opportunities for immigrantsto vote.

The third area of concern, says Rapoport, is makingroom in the system for “more voices and choices,” acategory that includes campaign finance reform,redistricting reform, easier ballot access for inde-pendent or third party candidates, and “fusion”tickets that allow the endorsement of a candidate bymore than one party. Other reforms include chang-ing the Electoral College and instant run-off voting.

Such an ambitious reform agenda rivals that of theProgressive Era itself. There is certainly no lack ofwill or imagination among contemporary reformadvocates. The question is whether voters and thepolitical leaders they elect will pay more than lip ser-vice to the need to reform the system. ManyAmericans support the idea of political change andfair process in theory but lack the zeal for nonparti-san reform—democracy for the sake of democracy—and the capacity for outrage when confronted withevidence of systemic corruption or bias. During theAge of Reform, intellectuals and best-selling muck-rakers had a well-developed sense of outrage.Reformers routinely challenged the status quo, buttheir views were well within the mainstream of earlytwentieth-century political thought. Popular heroesof the reform movement had pugilistic nicknameslike Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette. Progres-sivism, in other words, had a fighting spirit. It wasn’ta bloodless exercise in moral perfectionism.

It may be, as Michael Schudson and others haveargued, that nonpartisan reforms of the Progressive

Era dampened public enthusiasm for electoral poli-tics, but enthusiasm is not the only requirement for ahealthy democracy. As Jimmy Carter argued persua-sively in his opinion piece in the Washington Post,transparency, fairness, and consistency are alsoimportant. “It is unconscionable to perpetuate fraud-ulent or biased electoral practices in any nation,”said the former president, channeling the spirit offorgotten reformers. “It is especially objectionableamong us Americans, who have prided ourselves onsetting a global example for pure democracy.”

N O T E S

Bell, D. The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of PoliticalIdeas in the Fifties. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960.

Carter, J. Washington Post, September 27, 2004, p. A19.

Downs, A. An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York:Harper, 1957.

Hill, S. Fixing Elections: The Failure of America’s WinnerTake All Politics. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Hofstadter, R. The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R.New York: Knopf, 1955.

Morton, M. J. The Terrors of Ideological Politics: LiberalHistorians in a Conservative Mood. Cleveland: Press of CaseWestern Reserve, 1972.

Riordon, W. Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of VeryPlain Talks on Very Practical Politics. New York: McClure,1905.

Schlesinger, A. Jr. The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom.Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949.

Schudson, M. The Good Citizen: A History of AmericanCivic Life. New York: Free Press, 1998.

Michael McGrath is editor of the National Civic Review.

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