Dollarocracy (7 page)

If there is one thing we have learned from our study of money in politics, it is this: those who fail to initiate reforms when they are first proposed always come to regret their inaction. Money makes things worse. Fast. Lyndon Johnson recognized this after the 1966 election, which saw a dramatic increase in television advertising in congressional and state races.

In 1967, LBJ sought to establish a public-financing system for elections, with the goal of assuring that “radio and television, newspaper and periodical advertising” by the parties and their presidential candidates would be paid for with federal funds rather the private donations that, in an era of “skyrocketing” campaign costs, “were creating a potential for danger—the possibility that men of great wealth could achieve undue influence through large contributions.”
⁵³
The
Wall Street Journal
sympathized with LBJ's concerns, as did many Republicans. Even though it did not embrace the whole of the president's proposal, the
Journal
editorialized that it “would not be averse to a law requiring broadcasters to ‘pay' for use of the free public airwaves by donating free time to major political candidates.”
⁵⁴

Although LBJ was unable to get his public-financing plan approved, Congress did create Medicare, launch a “war on poverty,” and pass a civil rights act. It also approved a voting rights act. In the mid-1960s, democracy was on the march in America, voting rolls were expanding, and electoral politics was reforming. On the heels of the civil rights movement, the vote for eighteen-year-olds, the peace movement, and the women's movement,
signs suggested the United States might continue moving in a more social democratic direction in the 1970s.

Emboldened by the times, the labor movement (in a manner that has been underappreciated) was also being rejuvenated by a new generation of activists.
⁵⁵
By the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, Richard Nixon and his fellow Republicans were busy enacting numerous measures—such as creating the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), passing sweeping Clean Air and Clean Water acts, expanding public housing—that were well to the left of anything Bill Clinton would advocate in the 1990s or Barack Obama would pursue in the 2010s.

A more concrete sense of the change in the political culture is found in the career of consumer advocate Ralph Nader. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Nader and his activist gaggle of “Nader's Raiders”—whom he would eventually organize into the Public Citizen infrastructure that remains to this day—were able to win a stunning series of legislative and regulatory victories for consumer rights, open governance, and environmental regulation.
⁵⁶
The accomplishments of this revitalized consumer movement are still recognized today in scores of groundbreaking laws, such as the Freedom of Information Act and the seminal 1966 National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, and in enforcement agencies such as the EPA and OSHA. Not for nothing is it said that Ralph Nader has saved more lives than any American except Dr. Jonas Salk. Nader was arguably the most popular living American during the era of his greatest agitation. He stood for honest and effective government and against monopolistic and corrupt crony capitalism. He encouraged a generation of young people to take an optimistic view that organized political activity was capable of positive outcomes and that public service was an honorable life's work. To this day, his acolytes are among the republic's greatest legislators, regulators, journalists, and activists.

In making this argument, we do not mean to romanticize U.S. politics of the 1960s or 1970s. This was an extraordinarily turbulent period, and a remarkably large portion of Americans thought social inequality, militarism, racism, and poverty, even political corruption, were so severe at the time that they required radical solutions. The 1972 Democratic presidential candidate, George McGovern, argued passionately that “at no time have we
witnessed official corruption as wide or as deep as the mess in Washington right now.”
⁵⁷

While some of the economic and social problems of those days seem almost quaint by comparison with today's Dollarocracy, the important point is simply that the political culture at the time was better equipped to deal with popular dissent; it even allowed a progressive like McGovern to gain the nomination of a major political party. Not since McGovern has a Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, who was not in bed with the moneyed interests been able to take the lead of one of the two dominant parties. It was still very much an uphill battle, as McGovern's eventual defeat in his 1972 race with Nixon illustrated. There were deep frustrations, to which the demonstrations and riots of the period attest. But organized people were more serious players in U.S. politics than they have been subsequently, and radical reformers, such as Congressman Ron Dellums of California and Congresswoman Bella Abzug of New York, actually walked the corridors of power. Detroit even elected a Marxist judge, Justin Ravitz, and Alaska elected the nation's first Libertarian legislator, Dick Randolph.
⁵⁸
It was a freer and more fluid time politically.

As those election results illustrate, the social movements of the 1960s were quick to put the election system in their sights. But the reformers of that era did not merely compete for power; they also exposed power, with a fury not seen since the days of the muckrakers in the early years of the century. By the time Lyndon Johnson's career wound down, a new generation of muckrakers was exposing the commoditization of American politics with books such as Joe McGinniss's
The Selling of the President 1968
and Mark Green and Michael Waldman's
Who Runs Congress?

The pressure for meaningful campaign finance reform was such that Democrats and Republicans attached their names to reform measures. No less a partisan than President Nixon signed the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, with its unprecedented campaign donation and spending disclosure requirements, its spending limits calculated with a ten-cents-per-voter multiplier, and its fines for violating candidates and contributors. The
New York Times
imagined the ushering in of “a revolution in American political financing.”
⁵⁹

Barely six months after Nixon signed the new law, with high praise and a promise of full Republican compliance, however, Nixon's lawyers were
contending in court that a key provision of the measure—public disclosure of the identity of campaign contributors—was an unconstitutional invasion of privacy. Campaign donors, the lawyers for Nixon's reelection campaign claimed, had a “fundamental right” to remain anonymous in their political associations. Remarkably, the lawyers for Nixon were asking the courts to allow the campaign to keep secret the names of contributors to a $10-million slush fund that had been reported in federal filings only as “cash on hand,” and that the Federal Bureau of Investigation eventually determined had been used by the head of Nixon's campaign, Attorney General John Mitchell, for an ambitious campaign of political spying and sabotage that was organized to harm the president's political foes and ensure his reelection.
⁶⁰

Within months of Nixon's landslide reelection in 1972, investigative journalists had brought the Watergate scandal into full view, shocking the American people and Congress into action. By the summer of 1973, the
New York Times
announced that, with a Senate vote to impose a $3,000 limit on donations to federal campaigns, prospects were good for the establishing of “the first effective curbs in American political history on the influence of the rich in government.” A year later, Congress seemed to realize the promise by voting overwhelmingly to amend the Federal Election Campaign Act to

       
•
  
limit contributions to candidates for federal office;

       
•
  
require the disclosure of political contributions;

       
•
  
provide for the public financing of presidential elections;

       
•
  
limit expenditures by candidates and associated committees;

       
•
  
limit independent expenditures to $1,000;

       
•
  
limit candidate expenditures from personal funds; and

       
•
  
create a federal election commission (FEC) as an independent regulatory agency charged with disclosing campaign finance information, enforcing provisions of the law such as limits and prohibitions on contributions, and overseeing the public funding of presidential elections.
⁶¹

The political pendulum had swung, or so it seemed. The enthusiasm for a cleaner politics was widespread. In the final vote for FECA, 75 percent of House Republicans and 41 percent of Senate Republicans supported the law.
The major resistance on the Hill came from Representative Wayne Hays, a powerful old-school pol and Ohio Democrat, who “loathed campaign finance reform” as an impediment to his modus operandi.
⁶²
The mood was sufficiently optimistic that former secretary of health, education, and welfare John Gardner—a Republican—could speak, as he did in launching Common Cause, of the American people not merely “revitaliz[ing] politics and government” but also “rebuilding the nation.”
⁶³

America did not continue for long on the progressive path of revitalizing politics and government. Beginning in the mid-1970s, the campaign trail began bending back toward privilege and the gains of the previous era began to be wiped away. Those rules, regulations, and enforcement agencies that could not be shuttered came under sustained attack. And a new generation of politicians, trained to recognize and respect the Money Power, swept away the old reformers.

In a single election, that of 1980, McGovern and Church were ushered out of the Senate, as were Gaylord Nelson, a great environmentalist; Birch Bayh, who had championed the Voting Rights Act and organized congressional approval of the amendment that lowered the voting age to eighteen; and Mike Gravel, who partnered with Nader and others in fights for freedom of information and open government. The modern age of reform, such as it was, had ended. Under the leadership of newly elected President Ronald Reagan and the Republican senators who replaced McGovern, Church, Nelson, Bayh, and Gravel, government returned to the old calculus of doing no more than was absolutely necessary for citizens and absolutely everything that could be done for the wealthy and big business.

This did not just “happen.” Corporations and wealthy individuals organized politically as never before. They responded to a situation where, as political scientist David Vogel put it, “from 1969 to 1972, virtually the entire American business community experienced a series of political setbacks without parallel during the postwar period. . . . For the first time since the 1930s, business found its political influence seriously challenged by a new set of interest groups.”
⁶⁴
By the early 1970s, corporations were also arguably at or near their low ebb to date in public esteem, regarded as rather unsavory actors.
⁶⁵

This elite response was not simply a “right-wing” countermovement. It drew from both parties and had congressional supporters who identified themselves as liberal “reformers.” What unified the players was a strong commitment to having corporations and the wealthy return to playing a preeminent and unquestioned role in the governance of the United States. Consider
The Crisis of Democracy
, a report prepared in 1975 by Harvard's Samuel Huntington and two other prominent academics for the Trilateral Commission, a group of establishment—some even self-described “liberal”—political, academic, and corporate leaders founded by David Rockefeller in 1973.

The report imagined the contemporary crisis of democracy in 1975 America precisely in Tom Paine's or La Follette's terms, except that the Trilateral Commission was on the other side. “The essence of the democratic surge of the 1960s was a general challenge to existing systems of authority, public and private. . . . People no longer felt the same compulsion to obey those whom they had previously considered superior to themselves in age, rank, status, expertise, character, or talents.”

The report noted that the percentage of people who regarded the government as being “run for the few big interests” rather than for “the benefit of all” increased from 17 percent in 1958 to 53 percent in 1972. The percentage of Americans expressing confidence in large corporations fell by half between 1966 and 1973, to 29 percent, a larger drop than that experienced by any other institution. In the view of the report, the problem stemmed from an “excess of democracy”—with people having unrealistic expectations that the system could never satisfy.
⁶⁶

The “logic” of the report was plain to see: it was time for corporations and their supporters to organize politically and do their best to undermine the effectiveness of the organizations that opposed them or made “unrealistic” demands upon them. Citizens had to learn their place and be happy with it. The “crisis” of democracy was that there was too much democracy. The report concluded that “the effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups.”
⁶⁷
It was time for suddenly involved minorities, poor people, students, militant workers, and women to return to the lower decks of their galleys and let the traditional rulers again steer the ship of state.