Here’s the latest from the crossroads of faith, media & culture: 01/17/24
$aving democracy. That seems to be a major catchphrase for Campaign ’24 – though there is disagreement across the land on where the threat is coming from. Some say the right, some say the left, some say both – and some view money as the root of our political peril. More on that in a moment.
In
my previous post I offered some thoughts on steps I believe we need to take immediately to prevent the sort of mayhem that occurred following our last less-than-perfect attempt at a peaceful transfer of presidential power (you know, democracy). Those steps involved ballot security. Other long-term reforms are necessary to ensure that the government serves ordinary people – not just the politically privileged who may see advantages in using their power and money to create and exploit divisions among us.
One idea, I’d like to float is a legal requirement that voting districts be as close to square as possible. Politicians (and their big money donors) seem all too comfortable creating odd-shaped political precincts that seem custom-made to promote divisions rather than discussion and compromise. Meanwhile,
friend of this blog and
Save Democracy in America founder
Dan McMillan continues to push for
Voter Dollars, a concept he believes will reduce the ability of the rich and powerful (aka politically privileged) to exert undue influence on political candidates and election outcomes.
Dan McMillan: It’s apparent (that) a majority of Americans on both sides of the aisle are thoroughly disgusted with the election. People have been saying since the beginning of last year that they’re dreading it. They’re dreading the ads. They’re dreading the campaigning. They’re dreading all the anger. I mean something like 70% of Democrats don’t want the Biden-Harris ticket. On the Republican side, Donald Trump is clearly going to be the nominee but (about) half of the Republicans…wish that the party would move on. They’d like someone else.
One question this raises is why does neither party have much in the way of bench strength? Why can’t the political parties do any better than this? Both candidates are too old to be president! People keep pretending that they’re not – but they are! They’re old!
JWK: On another front, I’m not suggesting that Trump is running a positive campaign but it does seem to me that the Biden team is really implying that anyone who supports his opponent is racist. If you want to unite the country, insinuating that the roughly half of the country that seems poised to support your opponent hardly seems like a good tactic.
DM: Well, I would agree with you on that. I would say that, basically, both parties across the last three cycles…have just gotten more and more relentlessly negative – far more negative than positive with every passing cycle. I think the top-line message – the most important message – from the two major parties is pretty much identical. It was also the same message that both parties had in 2020: If the other guys win the world ends.
Joe Biden will say that if Donald Trump wins that’s the end of our democracy. We’re gonna become a dictatorship or something. You hear Republicans saying if Biden wins he’s going to impose a Marxist dictatorship on the United States. This is not a message of hope for the American people. This is not a plan to master our challenges and take advantage of our opportunities…It’s been a very long time, I think, since I’ve heard a candidate from either party talk about our country having opportunities, about what great things that our country can do. It seems like even when they do talk about substance – as opposed to just attacking their opponents – it’s mostly about fixing very bad problems, fending off disaster. Even then it’s kind of like the whole country – at least at the political level – (is) kind of like in a defensive crouch. It’s kind of un-American. We Americans through most of our history have been justly famous the world over for our optimism. We used to see ourselves as a “can-do people.” That was the phrase that my parents’ generation would use – “We Americans are a can-do people!” That was kinda how the rest of the world saw us.
I don’t think that the increasing pessimism is something that’s coming from the American people. This negativity in politics, this purely negative messaging, is not what Americans want. This is something that’s being generated at the political level because of the dysfunction of the political system. I think money in politics is one of the main drivers. So, one thing that we could explore, if you like, is I could sort of lay out how I think money is driving polarization – because no one else seems to be making this argument. So, this might be of interest. It’s kind of a new argument.
JWK: Go ahead. Lay out your argument.
DM: Here’s how I think money drives polarization. Because it’s so expensive to get a campaign off the ground – to even be taken seriously by the media – candidates self-censor, automatically really. They don’t say anything, talk about any policy idea, talk about (an) approach to fixing healthcare or infrastructure or getting a fair tax code or anything else because they don’t want to say anything that might scare away a potential donor.
Another way of putting this is to say that heavy campaign donors, by default, choose the candidates we’re allowed to vote for and set limits for what the candidates can do while they’re in office. I say by default. It’s not a conspiracy where you get 5000 heavy donors together in an auditorium to pick candidates – but, as a practical matter, any candidate who is unappealing to the donors…doesn’t get their money. Any candidate who (says) “Maybe we should regulate prescription prices like they do in every other wealthy country so we Americans don’t have to pay twice as much for medicine as everyone pays”…knows right off the bat “I won’t get any money from Big Pharma and they’re a huge donor so I don’t want to do that.”
This problem has been with us since the eighties. Over time, it’s progressively kinda sucked the life out of our political conversation. It’s one of the reasons why I think more and more, election after election, instead of hearing substance from candidates we just hear slogans and appeals to our emotions. This problem has become drastically worse just in the last say eight years because the cost of elections has skyrocketed.
I mean the cost of the federal elections, the money spent to influence the outcome of those elections more than doubled, inflation adjusted, from 2016 to 2020 from seven-billion to 14.4-billion. The 2022 midterms shattered the record that was set in the 2018 midterms for spending – almost nine-billion dollars on congressional races. For this cycle it’s already been projected that – if you include direct mail – more than 17-billion dollars is gonna be spent on political advertising alone. Advertising, in recent years, has never been more than 60% of the total cost of the campaign because campaigns spend money on all kinds of other things as well. I mean I haven’t seen an estimate of the cost of the 2024 campaign but, if they’re gonna spend 17-billion just on advertising, I don’t see how the total cost is gonna come in below twenty (billion) or more.
I’m taking a little long to get to the point. What I mean is because candidates have to self-censor to avoid alienating donors, now that they have to raise so much money, now that their desperation for cash is just so extreme, once they get to Washington our so-called representatives are basically hogtied by this need to self-censor and by the favors they owe all the donors who have funded their campaigns.
Yeah, both parties – in theory – have a program of what they’re gonna do for us but, in practice, what can they really achieve? The country’s got a lot of different things that we need to do to make this a stronger country. It’s not like we don’t have the ability to solve our problems but the political system blocks us. Because they’re blocked by their need to raise cash, because they’re blocked from offering a real positive program, more and more the parties have defaulted to negative messaging because anger is all they’ve got left.
I would just observe that one of the things that supports my argument is that the polarization has intensified. The anger has escalated very dramatically just in the last six years and it escalated kind of in tandem, in lockstep, with the skyrocketing cost of the the campaigns. That does support my argument that the money is driving the anger (and) the polarization.
JWK: There are certainly powerful forces who seem to want people to be divided.
DM: You just put your finger on the other part of my argument. Because we’re such a diverse society, compared to other wealthy societies, divide and conquer has been a way that wealthy interests stay on top…Because both parties are now just wholly-owned subsidiaries of special interests. They can’t deliver for us in our pocketbooks where we really need more money to live on, affordable healthcare and a better standard of living. Both parties do exactly as you say. They play upon our prejudices.
JWK: I have to say though that I’m not sure I see both parties being equal in this. I mean the donor class in the Republican Party definitely doesn’t want Trump yet he’s, by far, the front-runner. Also we are living in an age – which I don’t think the power elite and the donor class are thrilled over – where there is so much access to free media that allows candidates to bypass having to spend millions of dollars on television commercials to get their messages out there. So, I think in a way technology – to the chagrin of the people in power – has kind of short-circuited their ability to totally control the narrative. I also don’t think self-censorship is a problem with either one of these leading candidates who both say the most outrageous things – which I guess, in a way, supports what you’re saying about the quality of the candidates. On the other hand, self-censorship does not seem to be their problem. Maybe the opposite.
DM: Let me respond to that, John. What you said is kind of interesting. Because there is free media, you’d think that maybe candidates would not need to spend so much but they obviously do think that they need to spend a lot and they are spending a ton and they are raising money.
As far as self-censorship, while it’s true that neither candidate hesitates to say very disparaging things about their opponent – and, even worse, about the people who vote for their opponent which I think is just unforgivable – but where they do censor themselves is that neither President Trump or President Biden has a plan for us to cut the excessively high cost of healthcare so that every American can have insurance. For our healthcare system we spend twice as much per capita as they do in many other wealthy societies and yet we’re getting lousy results with one American in ten having no insurance (and) life expectancy lagging three or four years behind most other wealthy countries. To me, that’s like Job One. One of the most important things we need to do is tackle this ridiculous healthcare system. No one in either party is often talking about solutions. The reason they’re not is because any solution would gore the financial ox of Big Pharma, of health insurance companies, of these private equity groups that are buying hospitals and creating monopolies. That’s what I mean by self-censorship. The self-censorship keeps you from offering the people real solutions to our problems. Instead, all they’ve got left is the anger (and) attacking each other. That’s how my argument works.
JWK: I agree with you to the extent that both parties exploit anger toward the other party but I feel that the current power structure certainly does not favor Trump.
DM: You’re right that the Big Business wing of the Republican Party definitely would rather have someone other than Trump. It’s interesting.
JWK: And yet he is the top candidate. So, if money is the only deciding factor, why is he ahead?
DM: He’s not the preferred candidate for the Big Business wing but he still has a lot of deep-pocketed heavy donors. Nonetheless, I think a lot of the people who support him see him as a disruptor, as someone who is running against the system (and) against the Establishment. I think the main reason people support him is they see him as offering at least some hope of change. Of course, he doesn’t really doesn’t have a plan that he has presented to us for bringing change, for draining the swamp, for doing the things that need to (create) change…One of the things I hear very often from his supporters when I talk with them is they say “Well, you know, I’m not crazy about him but maybe he’ll shake things up.”
JWK: But he does have a record. You can compare the Biden record to the Trump record. Personally, here’s how I feel. I’m not a fan of his tweets or his personality but I do think when you compare the two records Trump had a better handle on inflation, on the border and, despite what the media would tell you, the world wasn’t on the brink of World War III. Again, he’s not my top choice but it’s not like there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between them. I mean they each have their records and, in my humble opinion, Biden’s record doesn’t pass muster.
DM: I’ve got to sort of keep away from from evaluating one or the other. What I would say – and I say this to people on both sides of the aisle – is you can make a case with real data for your party being better but I defy you to make a case that either party is acceptable.
JWK: What do you think of the No Labels movement to offer a third party alternative to Trump or Biden?
DM: It’s kind of grotesque really. They present themselves as an alternative to the two major parties but they’re a dark money group. They won’t disclose who funds them. To me the biggest problem in the system is that our government is for sale to campaign donors and here’s this group presenting themselves as this alternative, as this breath of fresh air. In a way, they exemplify what’s worst about our politics because it’s bad enough when candidates depend on donors giving huge amounts of money but the worst of all is the dark money when we don’t even know who the donors are and there’s even less accountability. So, I think the people at No Labels are hypocrites of the worst kind. I really do.
JWK: If you could write a law to get big money out of politics, what would that look like?
DM: The idea has been out there for a while. The best term for it is Voter Dollars. It simply will make the voters the donors. I mean given that the only people who still have any say in our government are heavy campaign donors, we make ourselves – the people – the donors, make voters the donors. The way this would work completely is that for every two-year cycle – I’m talking about the federal elections – the federal government would give every registered voter an online account of campaign cash – $100 per voter for the presidential years, $50 for the midterms which are cheaper. You can’t take the money out and spend but you login with your PIN online and then you can direct this money to the candidates that you want to support. If we fund the system at that level – which is pretty robust – then candidates who want to serve us will be able to get enough money from us – campaign cash controlled by the voters – to run the kind of expensive campaign that you need to be competitive and their opponent is not going to have much excuse for taking money from Big Oil, Big Pharma or any billionaire.
JWK: Would they be allowed to?
DM: We can’t stop the billionaires from offering the money. We can’t stop special interests from giving money. The Supreme Court won’t let us do that. Back in the seventies the Court decided that money spent in donations or to buy political advertisement – money spent to influence elections – is itself free speech protected by the First Amendment which I think is the most powerful example I know of the triumph of book learning over common sense. I mean I think this idea is so stupid it’s unbelievable but the Court ain’t going nowhere. This is the hand we’re dealt so the only path to changing the game and putting the American people back in the driver’s seat is a public financing mechanism like this one. Just make us the donors, let the candidates get their campaign cash from us and when they get to Washington they’ll keep on taking care of their donors – only now we’re the donors so they take care of us and then we have government by the people again which, right now, we really don’t have.
JWK: I’m not sure about Voter Dollars but I do think that corporations and unions – both – should not be allowed to donate to political campaigns. I know the Supreme Court says they’re people but I don’t think they’re people. I think they’re entities that have interests that are sometimes at odds with the people. I can see how you can’t stop individual people from donating. The Supreme Court would have to overrule their own decision, I guess – which they’ve recently done with abortion – but I think you need to get the corporate money and the big organization money out of politics. I mean people are investing in companies or giving dues to their unions and they have no say over how their money is used politically. I don’t think it should be allowed to be used politically.
DM:There is a law still on the book that says that unions and corporations can’t give directly to candidates out of their treasure but what they can do – and this is what the
Citizens United decision established when they decided that corporations are people with with free speech rights just like you and I – is that they can give to super PACS. They can give to these so-called independent committees. A super PAC can take contributions of unlimited size and they can spend unlimited amounts of money as long as what they do isn’t too tightly coordinated with the candidate – but the coordination rules are so loose that they totally coordinate. You may have followed some of the
back and forth between the super PAC supporting Ron DeSantis and the DeSantis campaign. Basically, every candidate’s got a super PAC that is doing a get-out-the-vote effort, doing polling, running ads favoring the candidate or attacking the candidate’s opponents. Sometimes – very often, in fact – the person who runs the super PAC is someone who worked on that candidate’s campaign in the last cycle. So, there’s total coordination even though they pretend there isn’t.
JWK: Where’s the logic there? If the organizations are people – with the free-speech rights of people – then they should be able to donate directly to the campaign if they want to. That doesn’t seem to hold up logically. Either they can donate or they can’t, I would think. I just think they should not be allowed to.
DM: I don’t think any of this massive private donation should be allowed at all. The only way we’re gonna be able to pass laws to limit the cost of campaigns and the amount that is donated and spent by different groups is we would need a constitutional amendment because only a constitutional amendment can overrule a decision by the Supreme Court.
JWK: They could overrule themselves, right?
DM: Yes, in theory they can but this precedent is very long established and in all the more recent decisions of the Supreme Court they have only taken that argument about money equaling speech further and further and further. I mean the current majority on the Court, there’s no indication at all that they’re the least bit interested in overturning that precedent. I think, basically, that’s what we’re stuck with. So, the only path we can take is the public-financing route. That’s why I put all my chips on this one.
JWK: So, how can people support you in this drive?
DM: What I would like people to do is to go to our website,
SaveDemocracyinAmerica.org, and share with their friends…On the website there are links to some of my TV and radio interviews. There are also a couple of videos. We used to have a donate button but I removed it because what I really want from our fellow Americans is something a lot more important than money. It’s validation. You know, John, I go on radio and television and I speak in person and I make my best case but the people in my audience don’t know me from
Adam. I would say to every American who hears about what we’re doing, the people that you know who know you and trust you, our message about money in politics and (the case for) Voter Dollars is always gonna be a hundred times more powerful coming from you than it will ever be coming from me. So, if you like what we’re doing or if you just even think that this idea is interesting and worth thinking about and discussing, help us spread the word. Share our website, our videos, this interview with people you know who trust you.
JWK: Anything else you’d like to say as we wrap up?
DM: One thing I would just finally say is that I talked about how the money creates these incentives for candidates and parties to divide us. I think probably the most important thing I want all of us to understand is that our fellow Americans are not the enemy. The money is the enemy. It’s the enemy of us all – and, because it’s the enemy of us all, there’s no reason why we can’t come together and defeat it.
John W. Kennedy is a writer, producer and media development consultant specializing in television and movie projects that uphold positive timeless values, including trust in God.
Encourage one another and build each other up – 1 Thessalonians 5:11
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