Dollarocracy (47 page)

Consider online privacy, which goes directly at microtargeting and the entire basis for the manner in which political campaigns are transforming. So powerful are the Internet giants that prosper by data collection, it is hard to see how the Obama administration can effectively advocate for the immensely popular “do not track” systems as mandatory on browsers. It would not only jeopardize his ties to the Internet giants, but it would also undermine the data collection tactics that empowered his own campaign.
¹⁷⁷
It seems that the power of the few over the interests of the many has never been greater, with such devastating consequences. It is this calculus that must change. And it is in this time that we must act.

Broadcast media became what they are because meaningful interventions on behalf of democracy were proposed but abandoned, first in the 1930s and then in the 1960s and early 1970s. We have been given a new opportunity to make those democratic interventions for the twenty-first century. We dare not squander it.

They who have no voice nor vote in the electing of representatives, do not enjoy liberty, but are absolutely enslaved to those who have votes.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, 1774

The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON, AUGUST 6, 1965

[American history] is not just a story of expanding the right to vote. It has expanded and contracted.

ERIC FONER, 2012

A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

JAMES MADISON, AUGUST 4, 1822

D
ollarocracy is the antithesis of democracy. Whereas democracy has as its purpose the redistribution of power from elites to the great mass of people,
Dollarocracy seeks to take the power back for the elites. Dollarocracy and democracy cannot coexist because, though he used different terminology, Louis Brandeis was right when he wrote a century ago, “We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.”
¹

This is not a complicated construct.

For Dollarocracy to prevail, democracy must not function as anything more than a spectator sport. And voting must be an exercise in futility.

There is no more important takeaway from the last election, from four decades of corporate pushback against the expansion of democracy, and indeed from almost 240 years of struggle to define the American experiment. Dollarocracy, in the final analysis, is all about reducing the effectiveness of the franchise—the capacity of the many to engage in effective self-government—and thereby increasing the power of those few with large amounts of money over those far more numerous without.

The measure of how entrenched Dollarocracy has become is demonstrated by the vast and growing distance between what significant numbers of Americans would like to see done to address the great challenges facing the nation and the feeble range of policy options countenanced in Washington and by government at all levels. What passes for policy “debate” studiously denies the will of the people, except in those cases where popular sentiment happens to coincide with the desires of powerful interests. When it comes to economics, that is rarely the case. So as America moves more and more toward Dollarocracy, America sees more and more inequality, corruption, poverty, stagnation, and decline.

That's not going to change unless the pathologies inherent in Dollarocracy are countered with a great new embrace of democracy. And we propose nothing less.

The effective response to the crisis that afflicts America in an age of $10 billion campaign seasons and news cycles that have become spin cycles ought not to be a tinkering around the edges of the problem. The response should be robust enough to end, once and for all, the whipsawing of our democratic experiment and to realize, finally, Walt Whitman's promise that we might “use the words America and democracy as convertible terms.”
²

In this concluding chapter, we make the case that what is necessary at this point in American history is not a specific reform but a great reform moment in which an array of amendments, laws, rules, and structural and social responses are initiated and implemented. Without a broad popular movement of historic dimensions, no functional reform will be possible. We outline a few proposals and agendas that follow from our critique, highlight movements that have already developed in response to the crisis, and explore ideas that have earned other nations much higher rankings on measures of democracy. We err on the side of flexibility and innovation and of a deeply American faith that this country can meet any challenge.

But in our core conclusion we are inflexible. To generate focus and momentum, this reform moment must have at its heart a deeply democratic enterprise: the clear-eyed commitment to establish for the first time in America that we the people have an explicit right to vote. This must be settled, and accepted, as a preeminent American right. It must be understood that policies governing the electoral process and campaign finance, as well as guarantees of and support for a free press, can and should be structured to assure that voting rights are nurtured and secured. The notion of one person, one vote must become sacrosanct. Not as a public relations slogan but as a reality. This is the democratic response to what Dollarocracy has wrought. Hence this is the argument that guides our conclusion.

There can be no more blurring of the margins. America must establish an affirmative right to vote, explicitly defined in its Constitution. Only by establishing an explicit right to vote after more than two hundred years of American progress toward full enfranchisement do we enshrine that progress. And only then does democracy begin to become constant. This is a worthy goal, a fundamental goal, a goal sufficient around which to build a reform moment and allow the American people to “announce their future will.”
³

America has never been a pure or perfect democracy. It began as a plutocracy where wealthy white male property holders could vote while the rest of the population was expected to pay taxes, fight wars, and hope for the best.
The franchise was extended first to the landless, then to some African Americans, to Native Americans, to women, and, eventually, to eighteen- to twenty-year-olds.
⁴
An African American man born just before the Civil War in a southern state might well have enjoyed the franchise, lost it, and regained it in a long lifetime, only to have his daughter's ability to cast her ballot undermined by restrictive voter ID laws.

There is constant confirmation of Eric Foner's observation that the history of the right to vote in America is one of expansion and contraction, just as there is constant confirmation of why this occurs.
⁵
As Garrett Epps noted, “Every step forward in human rights has given birth to a desire to ‘purify the electorate.' Some Northern Republicans wanted to exclude ‘disloyal' pro-southern Democrats and newly arrived immigrants from the ballot; Southern Democrats were adamant that freed slaves should not vote. As democratic devices like the referendum and initiative took hold in the 20th century, the pressure to purify grew.” Epps highlighted Foner's conclusion that “the more you enhance the power [of the people], the more [the powerful] want to make sure the right people vote.”
⁶

In earlier chapters, we examine how the evolution of the right to vote in the 1960s and the 1970s, the federal oversight of redistricting and voting practices in what were once Jim Crow states, and the development of campaign-finance and ethics laws that made elections more genuinely competitive began to pose a serious political threat to the favored position of the contemporary equivalents of the Virginia plantation owners and Boston merchants of 1787. The modern “white male landholders” mustered their resources and organized a response that utilized some of the clumsy tools of old—legal and structural voter suppression, gerrymandering, and deliberately convoluted practices. But they also embraced new tools, establishing “think tanks” to “rebrand” unpopular ideas, buying huge stakes in major media, and lobbying for rule changes that would allow them to buy even more, thereby grabbing control of debates and popular forums away from nonpartisan good-government groups such as the League of Women Voters and using legal strategies and a new understanding of campaign contributions as “corporate investments” to flood the coffers of candidates with the largesse of special interests.

This latest devolution of democracy is different from the fits and starts of the past; it goes further in replacing the authority of the vote with the authority
of the dollar. It is more sweeping and far more cynical. And it has been uncharacteristically successful, preventing a reform moment for the better part of four decades, longer than any other stretch in American history. As a result, the American experiment now teeters at a precipice between democracy and Dollarocracy.

Reformers of every stripe will tell you that something must be done. For the most part, they propose a precise fix. The place of beginning, however, ought not to be with a specific amendment, law, statute, or policy. It's not even with a focus on a specific area of concern. What's at stake is bigger than specifics. It's overarching.

But it is not unprecedented.

The United States has from its founding faced unimaginable challenges, profound divisions, and the toughest choices. And it has met them not with cautious measures but with the broad sweeps that come during what can be identified as reform moments. These are the “critical junctures” in the history of a nation where unaddressed maladies and unrealized aspirations combine to make rapid change inevitable.
⁷
Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. argued that there are cycles of history where the United States shifts from periods of private-interest dominance to periods of public-interest response. During times of private domination, government and society neglect the popular will for reform and tend to “constrain democracy,” failing to address pathologies for so long that the pressure for progress becomes “inextinguishable.”
⁸

In such a circumstance, signs and signals emerge, even for elites with a stake in the status quo, that fundamental changes must be made. This understanding ushers in a liberal or progressive period in which America will not only “increase democracy” but also utilize that increased democracy to initiate societal and economic reforms.

This is not, Schlesinger explained, a simplistic “oscillation between two fixed points.”
⁹
It is an unsteady and unstable process that reflects and responds to reforms that have been made—and to human and technological advances—rather than returning regularly to some ancient point of beginning.

America, explained former Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, has sometimes willingly, often grudgingly, accepted the concept of a “living constitution”—and with it an understanding that this country did not start
as a perfect union. Asked on the two-hundredth anniversary of the Constitution to deliver an address on the “achievements of our founders,” Marshall responded:

           
I cannot accept this invitation, for I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever “fixed” at the Philadelphia Convention. Nor do I find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the Framers particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today. When contemporary Americans cite “The Constitution,” they invoke a concept that is vastly different from what the Framers barely began to construct two centuries ago.
¹⁰

This is why reform moments invariably witness expansions upon the Constitution; these are the historical turning points where a majority of Americans embrace an opportunity to rearrange and improve upon the underpinnings of the American experiment. This is also why reform moments are as painful, as frightening, as overwhelming, as the Civil War, the labor wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the social and economic upheavals of the 1930s, and the civil rights, gender, and generational struggles of the 1960s and early 1970s. Though America was founded with a healthy rebellion against an existing order, it does not have a tradition of easy evolution. This country demands a “fierce urgency of now” to inspire a great mass of citizens to first demand immediate relief—an end to slavery, regulation of the robber barons, a real response to mass unemployment, respect for the basic humanity of people of color—and then, when they realize that it is possible, to make a more perfect union, to go deeper.

Every major reform period in American history, with the exception of the Jacksonian era, has been accompanied by numerous amendments to the Constitution, amendments that were deemed unthinkable until almost the moment they were passed. If the problems faced at this point in the American journey are going to be solved, history suggests constitutional amendments will be a significant part of the process. The measures of the moment are clear because the stakes are so high. If we are not entering into a new age of reform characterized by progress
and
the consolidation of gains, then we are accepting
the certainty of an ever-deepening degeneration toward points unknown and unwanted.