By the late 1990s US participation and associational life had collapsed while parties converged

Evidence

Then, journalistic brouhaha over sex scandals and election fraud papered over the growing retreat from public life initiated by the American populace. Turnout fell to 49 percent of the voting-age population in the presidential election of 1996. Three years later, as Clinton handed a presidential medal to John Rawls, lauding him as “perhaps the greatest political philosopher of the twentieth century” and one who had “helped a whole generation of learned Americans revive their faith in democracy,” popular disengagement was reaching levels reminiscent of the early Jim Crow era and the Progressive era. Now, however, workplace and community associations were dissolving in the acid of deindustrialization and triumphant market logic. Always an instantiation of imperfect party competition, the American duopoly was becoming an effective example of non-competition; the semisovereign people, as political scientist Elmer Schattschneider had once termed them, were increasingly nonsovereign. In conditions of convergence, culture wars alone offered a simulacrum of rivalry. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 10

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives the precise empirical texture of Jäger’s ‘postpolitics’ period: 49% turnout, decaying associations, converging duopoly.
• XREF: This is the American analogue of the postpolitics conditions the whole framework rests on, and it clearly echoes Putnam’s ‘Bowling Alone’ which the reader wants to study from the Left. — connects to: Civic organizations across America faded dramatically in the late twentieth century. — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 22; Americans widely perceived community bonds weakening by the 1990s. — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 59
• SEED: The detail of Clinton honoring Rawls while mass disengagement deepened offers a compact emblem of postpolitics — prose for an essay contrasting official democratic faith with participatory decay.