OCTOBER 14, 2020 – In yesterday’s confirmation hearing, Senator Whitehouse revealed the “dark money” campaign to get arch-conservatives appointed to the judiciary. He demonstrated effectively how a few deep pockets hold sway over how we’re governed. Immediately following Whitehouse was Senator Cruz, who countered the Rhode Islander by citing all the “dark money” from liberal sources.
Irrespective of source, there’s too much money driving our politics. Although money has always fueled American politics, it’s never played such a significant role as it does now.
Money corrupts the heart, soul, and mind of our body politic. To stage a successful house or senate campaign, huge sums need to be raised. In all too many races, relatively few donors give the really huge bucks. But none of the big funders gives for the fun of it. Donors fund with the full expectation of legislative payback—blocking or supporting legislation that helps big donor causes. Own a fossil fuel conglomerate and need to put your industries beyond regulation? Contribute gobs of cash to key members of Congress and you’ll soon “have it your way”—to hell with the impact that “having it your way” will have on the rights of everyone else to breathe without choking, drink water without croaking, and live without fear of rising seawater.
It seems so obvious: take away the need for all that campaign money and you deprive the donors of their influence. Deprive donors of their influence and you put both “representative” and “democracy” back in “representative democracy.”
All of which prompts the question, why is so much money needed?
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, in the 2020 cycle, in national aggregate, campaign funds are spent as follows: 5.28% on strategy and research, 5.43% on campaign expenses, 9.28% on “unclassified,” whatever encompasses, and 45% on “media buys.” The rest is spent on salaries, general administration and miscellaneous. What does that large segment of “media buys” buy? A bunch of one-minute made-for-TV (or internet) promotions indistinguishable from ads for pick-up trucks and commercials for . . . toilet bowl cleansers.
Yet apparently the inane, shallow, negative ads work on us. Many voters are still influenced by fluff, falsehoods, and fakery. Our susceptibility to such crude appeals reveals our national deficiency in understanding and appreciating representative democracy.
Our battered republic faces many challenges. To grapple successfully we first need to get our political house in order—we need to fix the fundamentals. Among them is integrity in governance. As long as we feed at the shallow trough of campaign advertising, the money required to stock the trough will matter more than policy merits; the deeper money goes, the greater the loss of integrity. The longer this chronic condition persists, the further our country will decline.
Barrett needs to be questioned as stridently on Citizens United as she has been on other issues. But we citizens also need to be united in becoming better informed and less susceptible to “media buys.”
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
