Getting Good Government
by This article explores the incestuous relationship between politics and big money and points out how that relationship has contributed to the current economic crisis. It concludes with a call for campaign finance reform.
We are broken. The convergence of power politics and mega money has created a murky underground river that threatens the foundation of our public life. Locked in a death dance, politicians and their propertied patrons have waltzed us all to the brink of catastrophe as the interests of the few trumped those of the rest of us.
This is the bottom line: The greatest impediment to effective, responsive—in other words, good—government today is the method by which political campaigns are financed. Having obtained office in a system which makes them dependent upon contributions of those at the top of the economic food chain, legislators and elected executives, ever aware of the inexorable march towards the next election cycle, govern accordingly. Consider the results.
Our tax money bails out billionaires whose hubris produced the current economic wreckage; pays contractors millions for shoddy, sub par work that has endangered our troops; provides protection for auto makers who put on blinders and continued to produce outsized gas guzzlers long after demand had taken root for more fuel-efficient cars.
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Meanwhile, cash poor states cut funding for education; returning vets fail to receive basic health care and life-saving counseling; breadwinners lose jobs and families, homes.
What kind of government is this?
I began life—adult life, that is—as a political science major, and as I’ve watched this carnage, a term much discussed during my college days persistently springs to mind. That term is enlightened self-interest, a phrase used by Alexis de Tocqueville, the French historian, as he analyzed the American political system in the first half of the 19th century. Little of our recent history seems enlightened to me.
In his two-volume work, Democracy in America, de Tocqueville observed:
“The Americans . . .are fond of explaining almost all the actions of their lives by the principle of self-interest rightly understood . . . an enlightened regard for themselves constantly prompts them to assist one another and inclines them willingly to sacrifice a portion of their time and property . . . The principle of self-interest rightly understood produces no great acts of self-sacrifice, but it suggests daily small acts of self-denial.”
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