The
most corrupting force in politics, we are repeatedly told, is big money
— super PACs, corporate lobbyists, rapacious oligarchs. And there’s
plenty of evidence to support the claim.
But let’s be clear: It wasn’t
big money that drove repugican House members, before they left town
last week, to approve the first-ever Congressional lawsuit against a
sitting president, when they should have gotten serious about a pressing
border crisis. And it wasn’t big money that had gleeful Democrats doing
backflips in the streets at calls from the conservative fringe to
impeach Barack Obama.
What’s really fueling the
hyperbole and dysfunction in Washington now isn’t one privileged special
interest or another, but rather the mouse clicks of ordinary, angry
Americans whose $25 contributions add up to a mountain of influence. And
in this way, at least, American politics has finally caught up to where
the rest of society is going.
We have met the true enemy of rational debate, and, what do you know: It’s us.
There was a time, not long ago,
when it seemed to a lot of us that Internet fundraising would be its own
kind of campaign-finance reform — a way for thoughtful Americans to
wrest the political process from institutional contributors. A Democrat
funded by individual, small-dollar contributors wouldn’t be beholden to
unions or trial lawyers. A repugican relying on ordinary voters would
be able to face up to climate change, for instance, without fearing the
backlash from energy companies.
John McCain (the 2000 version)
was probably the first candidate to exploit that potential, raising
millions literally overnight — at a time when even savvy Americans were
using dial-up connections — from younger, reform-minded repugicans and
independents who responded to his outsider appeal.
Four years later, Howard Dean
stunned the establishments of both parties by relying on small-dollar
donations to easily beat the rest of the Democratic field in fundraising
right up to the eve of the primaries. And Dean’s feat seemed modest
compared to what Barack Obama did in 2008, relying on an online universe
of first-time donors to shatter fundraising records and erase Hillary
Clinton’s vast advantage among corporate cash bundlers and interest
groups.
Even then, though, niche
candidates who wouldn’t have had much impact in the analog age were
starting to figure out the fundraising potential of playing to darker,
more divisive impulses. In 2009, an unknown Republican congressman named
Joe Wilson raised something like $2 million in less than a week, and
all he had to do was interrupt the State of the Union address to call
the president a liar.
And soon you had the likes of
Michele Bachmann calling Obama un-American (which helped her raise
enough money to fuel a run for president) and Alan Grayson, an obscure
Democratic congressman, calling repugicans “knuckle-dragging
Neanderthals” and sucking up contributions like a tractor beam. And then
all of Washington started to figure out that there was real money in
catering to the extremes.
On the repugican side,
small-dollar contributions have enabled the rise of a new generation of
outside groups that are always willing to outdo the cabal apparatus by
going that extra step toward complete hysteria.
Last week, for instance, the repugican coven for House candidates went after small donors by
trumpeting the lawsuit Speaker John Boehner and his caucus had voted to
bring against Obama. That lawsuit was a pretty extreme step in itself,
but as a fundraising appeal, it was trumped by the tea party groups who
managed to up the ante yet again, calling for Obama’s impeachment. Allen West, a favorite among lunatic fringe wingnuts,
authored an online appeal for his own PAC that included a “poll” with
just one question: “Has Obama committed an impeachable offense?”
Of course, the mere mention of
impeachment elated Democrats, who already thought they had hit gold with
Boehner’s lawsuit and couldn’t believe that their run of good fortune
had only just begun. The committee in charge of raising money for
Democratic House campaigns soon announced that it had recorded its most
lucrative week ever, logging almost $5 million in mostly online
contributions; according to the party, the average gift was less than
$20, and some 52,000 people gave for the first time.
Not that any of this stopped
those same Democrats from sending out increasingly desperate and absurd
appeals as the week ended, sounding as if the entire party was about to
hand over its keys to the Koch Brothers if more checks didn’t start
rolling in immediately.
“All hope is lost,” moaned the
subject line on a Democratic email sent the very same day that the party
closed out its historic week. “News just broke that Boehner shook down
his tea party repugicans THIS MORNING for last-minute cash. … We just
ran the numbers: it’ll take another 8,947 donations before tonight’s
midnight fundraising deadline to be able to compete.”
Really? Not 8,946? Do people really believe this stuff?
The answer is, it doesn’t matter
— these solicitations are meant to appeal to emotion, not reason.
They’re aimed at the lowest common denominator of outrage. (“Hit the
button! Now, now, now!”) And you can bet they’re driving the governing
agendas in both parties, rather than the other way around.
It’s tempting to blame
politicians for all this, but really, as is generally the case, they’re
simply reflecting the culture at large. The truth is that too often in
this early stage of the Internet, the sheer volume of clicks matters
more than the substance of the issue. The institutional influence of the
last era is slowly giving way to the tyranny of a motivated audience.
We in the news media certainly
know this phenomenon. For years, we were taught that giant advertisers
represented an irresistible temptation toward corruption, and we had to
wall them off from anything having to do with news and editorial stances
in order to avoid a conflict of interest. It was a mission we took more
seriously than a lot of readers believed.
But look now at all these “most
emailed” and “most shared” lists on any given day, dominated by
drum-beating commentators that rally one side or the other. Does anyone
imagine that the new metrics don’t encourage shriller commentaries and a
shallower debate?
You can argue that advertisers
and ideological readers are fundamentally different influences — that
one force is driven by profit and the other purely by conviction. But
from a consumer’s perspective, they bring about the same result, which
is a skewing of coverage toward predetermined conclusions and away from
complex truths.
It turns out that small
concentrations of readers and small-dollar contributors can be as
corrupting to the nation’s public life as corporate advertisers and
big-money bundlers. And we haven’t yet figured out how to deal with that
corruption by mob, or whether we even want to.
Like a lot of my fellow
futurists, I once believed that the democratizing of information and
political power — the ability of individuals to weigh in collectively —
would make for a more inclusive and more enlightened political debate.
Now I’m not so sure it works that way, unless we can train ourselves to
be less easily manipulated by party committees and self-interested
partisans, and unless our leaders can resolve to actually lead, rather
than follow the loudest noise.
If that doesn’t happen, then maybe the fundraisers are right, and all hope is lost, after all.
![obamacare is awesome/ [CC image credit: Will O'Neill | Flickr.]](http://edge2.politicususa.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Screen-Shot-2014-04-01-at-3.49.49-PM-1-485x324.jpg)
Richard
G. Hendrickson called the National Weather Service on July 1, 1930, and
told them the weather conditions at his father’s farm. And he continued
to do so every day, beginning a volunteer job that continues today.
Hendrickson has been reporting conditions from Bridgehampton, New York,
for 84 years -a U.S. record. 
