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Subject: Gore Vidal: A Corrupt System
Date: Sun, 07 Nov 1999 17:53:21 -0500
From: enrique <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Gore Vidal: A Corrupt System
The People Who Own the Country Shouldn't
Run It
Editor's Note: The following piece appears as
the Foreward to Money and Politics: Financing
Our Elections Democratically, an anthology of
essays edited by Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers
(Beacon Press, 1999).
On a recent cross-country tour of the U.S., I
chatted about politics with all sorts of
audiences-sometimes in the flesh, more rarely
from the tube where I once reigned but now,
as our rulers grow edgy, am relegated to the
cable margins (along with such fellow
nay-sayers as Noam Chomsky). In these
conversations I found again, despite ever
greater media censorship of radical ideas, that
my audiences were quite alert to the perfect
corruption of our public life. They know that
political offices are bought by those who can
pay and denied to all the rest, that politicians
are better identified with their corporate
ancestry than voting base (the late Senator
Henry Jackson, for example, being more
accurately described as the Senator from
Boeing than Washington state). But given this,
I was often asked: "Why is nothing done?"
"Why is there so little outrage" "Why is there
no party of Reform?"
Why indeed? Writing in 1758, David Hume
observed: "Nothing appears more surprising to
those who consider human affairs with a
philosophical eye than the easiness with which
the many are governed by the few, and the
implicit submission with which men resign their
own sentiments and passions to those of the
rulers. When we inquire by what means this
wonder is effected, we shall find out that, as
Force is always on the side of the governed,
the governors have nothing to support them
but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only
that government is founded, and the maxim
extends to the most despotic and most military
governments as well as the most free and
popular."
To deny inconvenient opinions a hearing is one
way the few have of controlling the many. But
as Richard Nixon used to say, "That would be
the easy way." The slyer way is to bombard
the public with misinformation. During more
than half a century of corruption by the printed
word in the form "news"-propaganda disguised
as fact-I have yet to read a story favorable to
another society's social and political
arrangements. Swedes have free health care,
better schools than ours, child day-care center
for working mothers... but the Swedes are all
drunks who commit suicide (even blonde
blue-eyed people must pay for such decadent
amenities). Lesson? No national health care, no
education, etc., because-as William Bennett
will tell you as soon as a TV red light switches
on-social democracy, much less socialism, is
just plain morally evil. Far better to achieve the
good things in life honestly, by inheriting money
or winning a lottery. The American way.
The fact that the United States was never
intended to be a democracy is so well known
that it is now completely forgotten. (Hence the
familiar, grinding incantation of our opinion
makers: "We are the greatest democracy on
earth, with the widest range of detergents,
etc.") The most candid of the Founding
Fathers, John Jay, put their opinion on the
matter in an artless but truthful way: "The
people who own the country ought to run it."
James Madison, a preacher's son, poured
unction over this when he acknowledged
demurely and approvingly the iron law of
oligarchy that invariably comes to govern
parliaments, congresses, and nations. The few
will always control the many through
manufactured opinion, which bedazzles and
confuses the many when it is not just plain
dumbing them down into the dust of what Spiro
Agnew called "The greatest nation in the
country."
Nevertheless, a truly popular opinion is
beginning to coalesce in the perpetual shadow
of manufactured opinion: our system of
electing politicians to office is rotten and
corrupted to its core, because organized
money has long since replaced organized
people as the author of our politics. And most
of it comes from rich people and corporations,
who now own our political process-lock, stock,
and pork barrel.
Some nuts and bolts. Of the billions now spent
each election cycle, most is donated in checks
of $1,000 or more. But less than one-tenth of
one percent of the general population make
individual contributions at this rate. These
happy few are prepared to pay a high and
rising price for the privilege of controlling our
government. In the 1998 election cycle, the
average winning House candidate cost the
owners about $600,000. The average winning
Senate candidate a bit over $5 million. Multiply
both figures by two if you want the cost of
dislodging an incumbent from office(in a system
where, last time around, over 97 percent were
re-elected. To finance a race in big media
markets like New York, or California, it's a bit
more expensive: as of election day 1998,
something like $36 and $21 million respectively.
And if they tire of buying others, of course, the
rich can buy political offices for themselves. In
its truly Caligulaesque Buckley v. Valeo
decision, our Supreme Court, ever eager to
extend their eccentric notion of democracy,
ruled that the rich have every right to spend
as much of their own money as they like to buy
an office. Hence, a demi-billionaire like Herb
Kohl could campaign as "Nobody's Senator but
Yours!", meaning not "yours" but "mine," and
win.
Do the many really hold the opinions of the few
who own the political process? It would seem
not since only half the eligible voters can bring
themselves to vote in a Presidential election
while only a third vote in off-year congressional
elections.
On dark days, I incline to what Henry Adams
wrote at the start of "our" century. "The whole
fabric of society will go to wrack, if we really
lay hands of reform on our rotten institutions�
From top to bottom, the whole system is a
fraud, all of us know it, laborers and Capitalists
alike and all of us are consenting parties to it."
Thus, business (Henry's Adam's "it") gets back
much more from government than it actually
invests in the process while the citizens don't
even get a national health service.
The essays collected in Money and Politics:
Financing Our Elections Democratically set out
to illuminate-even undo-the "wrack". Why
should we allow our admittedly fragile
democracy to be for sale? Without limiting
political debate, why don't we put ourselves to
the task of sharing its costs so that elections
would be more open and freely contested? On
a per capita basis, those costs would be
trivial-a few dollars a year. And by what
hypocrite's indulgence could we not do this,
and still call ourselves democratic? Reforms are
working in the state of Maine. Will they work
on a vast scale, in California, say? The US of
A? This important book presents some new
opinions and facts to challenge the current
superstitions about our estate, its owners and
alternative means of management.
To be sure, curing the evils of campaign
finance will not solve all of America's other
problems. But without such reform it is difficult
to see how those other problems can even be
addressed, much less dealt with.
This book -- full of the experience and hope of
activists now struggling to reform our campaign
finance system, and the perspective of
academic students of it -- suggests a number
of ways such reform might be achieved. It is
the most informed and accessible discussion of
the issue that I have seen to date. "Although
the heart of man is made to reconcile the most
glaring contradictions" (Hume again), now let
us use our heads and deal appropriately, as
they say in Washington, with a corporate ruling
class that has hijacked the nation, and in so
doing eliminate at least one glaring
contradiction: that ours is a government of, by
and for the many when it is so notoriously the
exclusive preserve of the few.
Editor's Note: If you would like a copy of the
book, click here to link to the publisher,
Beacon Press. To go to the Beacon Press
website, where you can read an early version
of the articles published in the book, click
here.
Respectfully,
Jay Fenello,
New Media Relations
------------------------------------
http://www.fenello.com 770-392-9480
"We are creating the most significant new jurisdiction
we've known since the Louisiana purchase, yet we are
building it just outside the constitution's review."
-- Larry Lessig, Harvard Law School, on ICANN
