One single court decision, even a pivotal one like Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, is not the only or even the major roadblock to removing the influence of big money from our elections and governance. The biggest problem is that too many of us don’t really believe in democracy.
The best people
The alternative that we do believe in isn’t dictatorship. Rather, too many of us think it would be better if the best people ran things.
After all, the armed forces, corporations, many churches and other organizations are not democracies, and we don’t think that they should be. Instead the current leaders choose the next generation of leaders and promote those they think are the best.
Turning to the political process, the doubts about the wisdom of democracy have deep roots.
Athens to America
Our civic mythology celebrates ancient Greece as the birthplace of democracy, but many in it, and many of the writers we associate with it, did not like the idea of rule by the masses. Plato’s Republic is no democracy; it advocates for rule by philosopher kings who guide the ignorant masses in how to think.
Even in the heyday of Athens, citizens were divided into four classes from rich to poor and there were many conflicts about just how much participation the poorest should have. While all could speak at the Assembly, not all could hold office.
Many societies over time, perhaps a majority, have had some type of division between hereditary nobility and commoners, and this division has often been defended by commoners who accepted rule by “their bettors.”
The responsible people
When the United States was in formation, owning property was a common requirement to vote. This was seen as logical: Property owners had a direct stake in the health and tranquility of the nation. They were the responsible ones who had motivation to preserve and build up the wealth of the country in the same way that a business owner has more of an incentive to make things work than do employees who only collect a paycheck.
Choosing the best
All these systems of having rule by the best people come to naught because of one key problem: How do you select the best?
Historically, the answer has often been by blood: The sons and daughters of the nobility become the new nobility. As absurd as this can seem, it is true that your childhood environment does influence you. Growing up assuming you will have a leadership position in society does contribute to you learning about being a leader.
More than one democracy has multi-generation dynasties of senior leaders, such as the Kennedys or Bushes in the United States, the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty in India or the Papandreaus in Greece.
However, the children of effective dictators often turn out to be ineffective and certainly not “the best.” Gaddafi in Lybia, Assad in Syria, Kenyatta in Kenya, Duvalier in Haiti and Gnassinbe in Togo are just a few of the modern examples that prove the skills of the father are not reliably passed on to the sons.
Life lords
Great Britain has evolved a system of life peerages. Hereditary rulers have been sidelined and the House of Lords is now populated mostly by people given titles for work they themselves did. That seems like an appealing system – identify people who are heroes, who have contributed to the society, people we admire and put them in charge.
Sometimes it works. Debates in the House of Lords sometimes are more sophisticated, more adult and more progressive than those in the noisy rambunctious House of Commons.
The problem is identifying these “best people.” The process of selecting them inevitably falls prey to the political process and all its faults. Contributing money to the party in power can get you a peerage. Achievement in sports or pop culture can get you ennobled by a government trying to have the glamour of celebrities rub off on them.
Money as a sign of being the best
The assumption in the United States is often that financial success proves you to be among the best. Becoming rich is the criteria. This language has now permeated our culture. We just concluded a presidential campaign where we heard about “the 47 percent” who contributed, about the “job creators” who can’t be expected to pay taxes. People talk about the culture of entitlement and use words like “takers” and “moochers” to describe people used to be thought of as “unfortunate.”
At a local level in our clubs, churches and groups we defer to the wealthy because that is success in our culture.
While financial success does often mean accomplishment due to hard work, there are several problems.
First, wealth in our current economy is not just acquired by building new products or services that people want. Too often, wealth comes as a result of financial manipulation or just guessing which way the market will move.
While acquiring wealth can mean that you are innovative, dedicated and insightful, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you understand the larger economy or how to make it prosper. Certainly the pressure from the business community in the wake of the 2008 crash has largely been for laws that would have made the crisis worse, not prevented it. Business leaders are quite often terrible leaders for the economy.
The public interest
The biggest problem with promoting and looking to wealthy people to provide the leaders for our country is that they are not a representative sample of the interests of the nation. They don’t represent any number of professions that contain admirable people such as soldiers, scientists, clergy and social workers, to name just a few. There are more forms of success than financial.
The virtue of mob rule
But do we really want the uneducated, the financial failures and the drop-outs to have the same vote as the “best people?” Historically, this has been described as “mob rule” and it can feel to the educated and the successful like putting themselves at the mercy of philistines.
The virtue of counting the vote of the failures and the average to be equal to the best is that this creates, or should create, a tremendous incentive for the best to be committed to improving the lot of the rest of the nation.
If everyone has to vote, then all in the society should have motivation for each of us to be the best voter we can be. Each voter should hope and encourage other voters to think of the wide set of interests that form our entire society.
Money and politics
The Citizens United decision is a symptom of a larger problem. It demonstrates the extent to which we’ve come to think that the only civic virtue is making money. It causes us to reflect that the ideal of democracy may be given lip service, but we’re not fully committed to it.