KEY POINTS:
Travelling in the eastern states of America I passed places with names like Valley Forge and Appomattox and realised how little I knew of the country's formative wars. I bought a book entitled A People's History of the American Revolution, so-called because it tried to discover how it was for ordinary folk.
I hadn't known, for example, that the War of Independence was as much a civil war as the later conflict between the states. Many Americans were not comfortable when agitators like George Washington issued their Declaration of Independence, and quite a number fought on the British side.
But one passage struck me as particularly interesting. The author, Ray Raphael, had come by figures for Queens County on Long Island where only 12 per cent of the residents had publicly aligned themselves with the rebels while 27 per cent had made clear their continuing loyalty to the Crown. "The remainder," he notes in passing, "had not declared themselves one way or the other in their public actions."
He goes on to describe how the county became alienated when it was occupied by British soldiers who treated all Americans as enemy, but I am intrigued by that "remainder" - a majority - who as late as 1774 had no apparent point of view.
This was a society on the brink of a momentous political convulsion. By that time the North American settlements were nearly as old as New Zealand is today and the issues that gave rise to the independence movement had been matters of contention for years before someone took that poll in Queens.
The great liberal tracts of Thomas Paine and others who inspired the American and French Revolutions had been written. The colonies, according to conventional historical accounts, were in ferment. Yet there in one community, 60 per cent of people had shown no inclination to take part.
Today's opinion polls would call them the "uncommitted" or "undecided", implying everyone considered the question important enough to at least ruminate on it. Pollsters do not mention the large number of those they call who are simply not interested.
Modern democracy, which can be dated from those late 18th-century revolutions, operates on a myth of mass participation. Extraordinary efforts are made to urge every eligible adult to vote in elections and the vast majority of people (though not in the United States) dutifully cast a vote.
But once the duty is done, discreetly and strictly confidentially, politics has no reality for them. If they find themselves caught in a discussion of public figures or issues, they offer opinions borrowed from the media. An air of absurdity descends on the conversation and sensible participants quickly move it on to people and pleasures they know and love.
I observe this with total admiration. There are many more important things in the experience of a healthy, active, outgoing human being than politics. Whenever I write on the subject I know I need to get a life.
Politicians and their professional advisers understand the limits of the public appetite for their work very well. They have to understand it. Elections are not won with finely honed programmes of economic and social reform.
This is not as readily acknowledged by commentators, critics, academics and activists promoting or opposing a political programme, and fair enough; political detail is their bread and butter. But they do not stand for election and they should cut a little slack for those who do.
I have been reading the book that history will credit, simplistically, with the downfall of Don Brash. Poor artless Don was the architect of his own demise. His attitude to Maori and the Treaty made him unsuited to be Prime Minister in my view, but obviously he resigned to protect personal material in emails that he could not keep private without also suppressing an unbalanced book that otherwise wouldn't have destroyed him.
The book is as disingenuous as anything Don Brash ever did. It is built on the premise that societies make progress by presenting the voters with full, clear and candid programmes of far-sighted change for their prior endorsement.
Hager looks and sounds like the sort of political innocent who might believe this but I don't think he is. This is a man who almost single-handedly engineered New Zealand's expulsion from Anzus. That was not a step endorsed before it happened. The Government had gone to the previous election with a policy to declare the country off limits to nuclear armed and powered ships but to keep it within the Anzus alliance. The electorate knew this would be difficult but that was the deal.
That Government, and those since, took equally far-reaching decisions on Maori Treaty rights without prior electoral approval, as Brash exposed. Hager doesn't raise democratic objections to that policy either. It was Brash's appeal to democratic sentiment that Hager says prompted his hatchet book.
It plays to the popular sentiment that politics is dishonest. People who have better things to talk about are content to believe that. They dislike change. They would not vote for it, but they have the power to endorse it, or not, when it is done. That is how democratic politics has usually worked, even in the convulsions at its birth.
