Good piece of reporting, but leaves some questions unanswered. For example, why does the US have a larger share of the Pruses than, say, Denmark or Germany?
Weingarten explain his protagonist's behavior as follows: "Here is what crossed my mind:
Like all people who don't vote, Ted has distanced himself to some degree from the society in which he lives. It's symptomatic, I think, of a larger choice he has made. He has willed himself into a certain protective ignorance about the way life works. This intellectual callus might make some things easier to bear, but I'll bet it comes at a cost. The world must be a more terrifying place when you don't know all you can about why things happen the way they do, and why people do what they do, and whether there's anything out there that can leap out at you from the dark."
This explanation, I believe, points in the right direction. People (and animals) who experience the world mainly as a series of aversive stimuli withdraw into passivity and indifference to what's happening around them. Psychologists call it "learned helplessness."
But that explanation leaves an important part unanswered. If Ted's behavior is an individual choice or in Weingarten's words, Ted he willed himself into protective ignorance, why does that choice fall into a pattern followed by 50 or so percent of the population. One can expect that pattern to persist in, say, the old rural South where Blacks were conditioned into "learned helplessness" by slavery and discrimination. But in Michigan? Ted is white, probably of Polish origins (judging by his last name), so his behavior cannot be attributed to systemic features delivering a steady barrage of "aversive stimuli." In fact, Ted seems quite resourceful and pro-active in most every day life situations.
I think that this unanswered part can be explained by observations of two early 20th century sociologists, William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki in their book _The Polish peasant in Europe and America_ first published in 1927. They observed that many Eastern European immigrants had been socialized into a value system that emphasized collectivism and extended family over individualism (which was the norm in Eastern Europe for centuries). After their immigration to Europe or the US they faced a society that was individualistic rather than collectivistic. Thomas and Znaniecki observe that those who were economically successful quickly adopted to a new value system, while those who were not - retrenched to their ethnic ghettoes and their defeatist value systems. A similar argument was proposed some 50 years ago by Oscar Lewis as a "culture of poverty" theory.
Following this line of reasoning, one possible explanation of the behavior described in the Weingarten's piece is that is a form of adaptation of immigrants coming from collectivistic cultures (such as Eastern Europeans, southern Italians, or for that matter the Amish) to American individualism. Many of these immigrants lived in small communities, such as mining towns of central and western PA, that were not fully integrated into the mainstream American society in the same they would have been had they stayed in Europe. They simply live on the fringes of the mainstream society and developed social norms that suit their social position.
If that is the case, no political mobilization in a conventional "left" sense - i.e. by running populist candidates - would change the indifference of these people. Politics is simply not a part of their lives, and the only way to change that is to integrate these folks into an altogether different culture of which politics is a part. I am lees certain, however, how to do that. In fact, there are many "traditional" social groups "left behind" the modern society.
Wojtek