Read Online Dollarocracy by John Nichols - Free Book Online Page B

of the excessive influx of money.” 5
    Imagine if the internationally renowned, Nobel Peace Prize–winning former president of any other country were to say that his homeland suffered under “the worst election processes in the world.” We would, as Americans, be justifiably skeptical of claims that the country in question met the basic standards of democratic governance. We might even threaten to cut off foreign aid until fundamental reforms were initiated. Yet like the frog in the pot that is slowly coming to a boil, we do not always respond with the same urgency to indications of a crisis at home.
    This book argues for a conclusion that is obvious and unavoidable to anyone paying attention to the likes of Gore, Huntsman, and Carter: that with democracy itself so threatened, citizens must, as they have before, respond with the boldness appropriate to maintain the American experiment. In a country where, as Huntsman noted, millions of Americans decide not to vote because they think the political process is “rigged” to produce the results desired by contemporary robber barons, the time for debating whether a crisis exists is long past. It is no longer rational, let alone permissible, to neglect the crisis of our political process, which goes far beyond the challenges posed by corporate cash and the renewal of the Money Power that the last century’s Progressives took on in a battle for the soul of the nation.
    This is a radical book in the best sense of that term. It reminds the American people, who, polling suggests, are well aware of the crisis and are searching for solutions, that the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. said in his wisdom, “When you are right you cannot be too radical.” 6 It is not just right but also necessary to reach a radical recognition of the scope of the crisis, to understand that a discussion of a “broken system” must identify the points of rupture: special-interest influence on our politics, to be sure; but also the collapse of a journalism sufficient to name and shame the influence peddlers; the abandonment of basic premises of democracy by partisans who are willing to winat any cost; and the rise of a consulting class that makes “win at any cost” politics possible by shaping a money-and-media election complex every bit as dismissive of the popular will as the military-industrial complex is.
    The high-stakes partisanship of the moment causes even the best of those who are in power to be cautious in their responses to the crisis. A perfect example came when President Barack Obama delivered his fourth State of the Union address in February 2013. He delivered a stirring defense of the right to vote—a right that this book argues must be explicitly protected by our Constitution. But then, against all the evidence of a need for a bold response to explicit disenfranchisement and to the broader dysfunction of the system, President Obama proposed merely to appoint a commission to reflect on the challenge. Worse yet, the commission the president named for the purpose of improving “the voting experience in America” was to be chaired by the most rigid of partisans: the top election lawyer for the Democrats and the top election lawyer for the Republicans. 7
    The president likes to say that with regard to the challenges posed for voters, “We have to fix that.” We agree, but it has to be the right fix, not just in the details but also in the character and the scope of its ambition.
    We do not mean to be cynical, but we are certain that any improvement of “the voting experience in America” that is proposed and implemented by partisans of the current process, any insider “fix,” will be insufficient to address the pathologies inherent in “one of the worst election processes in the world.”
    The change must come, as it always has, from the people. It must go beyond partisanship and ideology, beyond the