Dollarocracy (4 page)

How much does Dollarocracy cost? In
Chapter 2
we take a look at the 2012 election and chronicle the billionaires and very-nearly billionaires who put up the lion's share of this money and what they will get in return for their investments. This was a $10 billion election, almost double what was spent in 2008 and ten times what was spent a generation ago, even allowing for inflation. We assess how this shadowy underworld of big money is institutionalizing and operating and why notions that the dollarcrats were vanquished for all time in 2012 are untenable. At current patterns, 2012 may be remembered nostalgically a few election cycles down the road.

How is Dollarocracy made possible? In
Chapter 3
we look at the U.S. Supreme Court and the long path it took from the 1970s to the
Citizens United
case and beyond. With a judicial activism that is unwarranted and arguably unprecedented, the current Court has overturned nearly all efforts by elected officials or even public referenda to limit the ability of big money to buy elections. The chapter describes how this process was no fluke. One of the primary Supreme Court champions of unleashing corporate and billionaire campaign spending was Lewis Powell, the person responsible for the 1971 U.S. Chamber of Commerce memo that was central to igniting the campaign by large corporations and the wealthy to aggressively enter the political realm and establish Dollarocracy.

How does Dollarocracy warp our politics? In
Chapter 4
we examine the history and nature of political advertising, especially television political advertising. We describe how it shares attributes found in product advertising—including a loose connection to factual accuracy or context—but also how it
has one overriding difference: it tends increasingly to favor negative advertising, where the point of the exercise is to discredit the opponent by any means necessary. Negative advertising now dominates campaigns and is a signature contribution of Dollarocracy.

Who gets rich from Dollarocracy? In
Chapter 5
we examine the corporate media, especially the firms owning TV stations and cable channels that are raking in money hand over fist. Political advertising has been manna from the heavens for local broadcasters, now sometimes accounting for as much as 25 or 30 percent of total revenues. As these revenues have skyrocketed over the past two decades, broadcasters have all but abandoned fulfilling their legal obligation to provide campaign coverage. Moreover, we chronicle how, unlike many other democracies, the United States has no credible public broadcasting to fill the breach. This chapter also describes the grisly story of how corporate media have become to campaign finance reform what the National Rifle Association is to efforts to restrict the sale and use of assault weapons.

How do news media cover Dollarocracy? Won't they provide a check to campaign propaganda? In
Chapter 6
we take a look at the important and necessary role the news media have played in the election system in American history. In particular, we examine how professional journalism's campaign coverage became obsessed with “horse-race” issues, which allowed campaign spin and advertising to set the terms of public debate. The news media, far from being the people's sentinel, have come to fan the flames of the idiocy of election campaigns.

But wait, it gets worse. In
Chapter 7
we chronicle two of the great news media trends of recent times. First, there is an absolute and sharp decline in the resources going to journalism as commercial interests no longer find the news profitable. This means that most races get no coverage whatsoever and what little coverage exists otherwise is mostly gossipy fluff. As a result, the balance of power shifts decisively to big money to set the agenda of election campaigns. Second, the void has been filled by the rise of right-wing partisan media, like Fox News, that effectively front for Dollarocracy at every turn. We describe the decided effect this has on the political culture.

Won't the Internet solve most or all of these problems? Won't social media provide an inexpensive way for people to communicate with each other and undermine the power of Big Money? In
Chapter 8
we take a hard look at how
the Internet has evolved from its romantic origins to where it is today. We look at how political campaigns used the Internet in 2012 and how digital advertising is a very different, and far more invasive, enterprise than TV or newspaper advertising ever was. Far from overturning the money-and-media election complex, the Internet may be perfecting it.

So where does this leave matters? Should people look for the nearest ledge to jump off of? Hardly. In fact, there are workable solutions to all these problems, both in American history and in the experiences of other democratic nations. In
Chapter 9
, the conclusion, we address these options and begin to describe the political process necessary to make reform. Spoiler alert: the historical evidence demonstrates that the money-and-media election complex can be successfully dismantled only as part of a broader popular wave leading to the democratic reform of our core institutions. Likewise, no successful democratic reform movement can possibly succeed without fundamental election and media reform. Such reforms have to be in the center of
any
credible reform program to rejuvenate American democracy. But we go beyond that in
Chapter 9
to argue that it is imperative that there be a guiding vision that enlivens and empowers the entire range of campaigns for democratic renewal such that the whole will become immeasurably larger than the sum of its parts; in our view it must be a campaign for a constitutional commitment to a right to vote for all citizens, with all that entails.

With a certain amount of irony, concerned citizens will have to work through, as well as around, the existing electoral and media systems to generate the necessary reforms. Difficult? Yes. Impossible? No, at least if the history of the American experiment is to be believed—and extended.

These damned consultants come in and say, “This is how you have to run,” and it's always the same: raise money, spend it on television, don't say anything that will offend anyone.

SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS OF VERMONT, 2012

D
uring the course of 2011, the United States experienced the largest and most widespread public demonstrations in many decades. To the surprise, even shock, of politicians, pundits, and news media, countless Americans were so dissatisfied with the growing inequality in American life and with the corruption of a political system—and elections—that they were willing to take to the streets. They were standing up to protest a world dominated by the wealthy and by gigantic corporations. They were looking at a future that seemed to belong to a privileged few rather than the great mass of Americans, and they were declaring that they wanted another future—one that worked for everyone. As these often-heterogeneous crowds gathered and demanded attention, their self-referencing slogan was “This Is What Democracy Looks Like.” It was a direct challenge to the prevailing wisdom of those in power and the pundits who were so busy hailing America, circa 2011, as the greatest, freest, and most democratic nation in the world that they missed the evidence of political stagnation and democratic decline.

Suddenly, the politicians weren't writing the script. The people were, or, at the very least, they were trying. This surprised the elites that imagined an “end to history” had occurred with the fall of the Berlin Wall more than two decades earlier. Even more surprising to the punditocracy was how it seemed that a significant percentage of Americans were sympathetic to the protestors and thought they were making accurate and important points.
¹
When the demonstrations subsided, the politicians, pundits, and journalists went back to sleep. They returned to regurgitating their bromides, but the sleeping giant of American democracy had let its presence be known. And it is this unruly mass, which wants democracy in reality not just in clichés, that most petrifies the proponents of Dollarocracy.

Nowhere is this lack of effective political democracy more apparent than in the election system. The United States, unlike most democracies, does not make an explicit guarantee of the right to vote in its Constitution. And the disregard for voting rights, as well as implicit and explicit efforts by the political class to suppress participation, has risen to crisis levels in many states. Americans see that crisis. Fifty-nine percent of those surveyed in 2012 polling by the Rasmussen Reports group believe our elections are rigged to produce results that are invariably beyond the control of mere voters. Rasmussen polling in 2011 found that 45 percent, a solid plurality, believe the U.S. Congress would be better chosen through random selection of members from the pages of a phone book than via the current election process. More than 70 percent are certain that the system has degenerated to such an extent that members of Congress trade votes for cash or campaign contributions. And the old trust that citizens once placed in their own representatives, the elected officials whom they knew and respected, has disappeared: 56 percent of those surveyed say their representatives and senators would sell them out for a campaign-contribution check.
²
Two-thirds of Americans say their “trust in the political system has been weakened by the recent developments in political financing,” said Vidar Helgesen, head of the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.
³

Americans have lost faith in the process. Voter turnout among eligible adults has plummeted since the second half of the nineteenth century, when a 75 percent turnout on Election Day was routine, and when the numbers pushed past the 80 percent level several times. Today, anything approaching
a 60 percent turnout for a presidential election—a level not achieved since the 1960s—gets the pundits shouting for joy.
⁴
The 2012 turnout fell to around 52 percent of American adults. This was down from a 58 percent turnout in 2008.
⁵
(By comparison, in ten of the other twelve largest democratic nations in the world in terms of GDP, the voter turnout rate in the most recent national elections ranged from 61 to 81 percent; the laggards are Canada at 54 percent and India at 56 percent.)
⁶
For America's congressional “off-year” elections—the actual equivalent to many countries' national elections, which do not have direct elections of the chief executive—turnout is a lot closer to 35 percent of all adults.

In the elections for the local school boards, county commissions, and city councils that frequently have a more definitional role in our lives than the federal government does, turnout goes from disappointing to dismal, as many communities report participation rates below 20 percent. It's so bad that the U.S. State Department assures the world that “2011 U.S. State, Local Elections Important Despite Low Turnout.”
⁷
If there were broad rejection of the franchise equally across all classes, races, and regions, that would be a subject of profound concern. But it should be even more profoundly concerning that disengagement from the process tends to be concentrated in particular populations—those frequently targeted by voter suppression initiatives of the politically and economically powerful.
⁸
And voting is defined by class: people in the wealthiest one-sixth of the population vote at nearly double the rate of people in the poorest one-sixth.
⁹
Not surprisingly, Pew Research polled nonvoters before the election in 2012 and found that by a 5–2 margin those at the lower end favored Obama over Romney.
¹⁰

These figures reveal the extent to which popular support for current government policies in the United States is overrated. Even in 2008, with the highest voting turnout percentage since 1972, the median voter was in the sixtieth percentile for annual household income—meaning, 59 percent of Americans had
lower
incomes than the average voter—while the median nonvoter was in the fortieth percentile for annual household income.
¹¹
As far back as the 1970s, research by scholars such as Walter Dean Burnham lent credence to the notion that if Americans voted across income levels at the same rate as most Europeans did, the nation would be electing governments with far greater sympathy toward social democratic policies.
¹²
Research also demonstrates—despite
the repeated claims of conservative pundits and mainstream media commentators about the United States becoming a “center-right nation”—that Americans have not moved to the right on a battery of core political issues since the 1970s. Indeed, they may have become more progressive.
¹³

Dollarocracy reigns in practice, as is well outlined in a series of recent trailblazing research projects by leading political scientists. These independent studies and analyses reach a stunning consensus that the interests and opinions of the great bulk of Americans unequivocally have no influence over the decisions made by Congress or executive agencies today, at least when they run up against the interests of either a powerful corporate lobby or wealthy people as a class. When the opinions of the poor, working class, and middle class diverge from those of the very well off, the opinions of the poor, working class, and middle class cease to have any influence. While there is a high likelihood that politicians will adopt the positions of their very wealthiest constituents, research confirms with eerie consistency that politicians will generally take the
opposite
position of those favored by the poorest third of their constituents.
¹⁴
Dollarocracy, indeed.