Who Owns the Government?

If you see a lawyer hand a thousand bucks to the judge,

you call it a bribe.

If a pitcher in a World Series game

gave a bundle of money to the umpire,

you’d call it a bribe.

You see a lobbyist hand money to a politician, and you

call it a “campaign contribution.”

    —Ben Senturia, Working Group on Electoral Democracy

 

American politics is in chaos. The parties don’t work. People don’t vote. Politicians can’t talk straight. Government is discredited; regulation is considered a barrier to freedom, not a tool for protecting society from individual greed. Concepts of “public responsibility” and “citizenship” have disappeared.

“I don’t believe what the politicians say, and I don’t see them doing anything,” says Debbie Wooten of Charlotte, North Carolina, one of the majority of Americans who are eligible to vote but don’t. “There isn’t a candidate worth voting for most of the time,” echoes Richard McGovern of nearby Kannapolis.

It’s no accident that people have dropped out of politics. That’s exactly what the system tries to do — and has always done since it first limited the vote to property-holding white men. From the Regulators and Populists to the Suffragettes and Civil Rights Movement, the struggle for democracy — especially in the South — has meant ordinary citizens fighting well-financed elites for the right to control their own destinies.

Making “one person, one vote” a reality lies at the core of the battle for equality. But at every turn, money has worked against the leveling power of the vote.

Following the Civil War, newly enfranchised Southern blacks swelled the voting rolls and began flexing their political muscle. By the late 1870s and 1880s, when they joined white yeoman farmers in Fusion or Populist coalitions across the region, they made politics the mass enterprise it’s supposed to be. Voter turnout reached 83 percent in Virginia, 80 percent in Mississippi, 78 percent in Tennessee, and 69 percent in Alabama and Arkansas.

These reform-minded coalitions installed blacks and progressive whites in state legislatures, enacted sweeping tax changes, mandated universal public education, regulated business, and proposed laws to protect worker safety and establish a minimum wage. Their enthusiasm posed an enormous threat to the planter-merchant elites who bossed the antebellum South.

The elites struck back with a brutal campaign to restore Democratic Party control. Red Shirts and Klansmen terrorized voters, murdered reformers, and evicted elected officials from their homes and communities.

To secure their tranquility, business interests consolidated behind the new Democrats and systematically gutted the voting rights of their enemy. Literacy tests, second primaries, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and a dozen other techniques joined the rise of farm tenancy and wage slavery to repress democracy and render people voiceless. Blacks and poor whites were shut out of politics, and voter turnout plummeted. By 1904, it fell to 28 percent of adult males in Virginia, 24 percent in Florida and Georgia, and 16 percent in Mississippi.

 

“Piss Them Off”

As this special section of Southern Exposure makes clear, money has once again exerted its authority to define the limits of proper political behavior. In his interview on page 42, author and journalist William Greider notes that another consolidation of business interests followed the rush of liberal legislation spawned by the modern civil rights movement. And as Alabama activist Gwen Patton observes, the target is once again the newly enfranchised, the responsible candidate, the ordinary citizen who believes he or she owns the government.

Using money to control the political process — pushing people out rather than pulling them in — has become a bad habit. Even liberals, once they enter electoral politics, understand that the game is not about getting lots of people engaged in the system. It’s about getting 50 percent, plus one, of those who show up at the polls to vote your way. Limiting participation may serve your interests as much as a large turnout.

That’s exactly what pollster Pat Caddell told Alan Cranston in his last race for the U.S. Senate. Even though Cranston was raising millions of dollars for voter registration drives in the South and elsewhere, Caddell advised him to finance a negative advertising blitz in California. The mudslinging, Caddell predicted, would disgust young white voters who favored his Republican opponent — and drive them away from the polls.

“The voters were very alienated. The fewer who voted, the better for Cranston,” Caddell told journalist Christopher Hitchens recently. “So I told him, ‘Run the most negative campaign you can. Drive the voters away. Piss them off with politics.’ It worked. Cranston just made it by two points. The day after, I realized what I had done and got out of the business.”

Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina used an even more blatant tactic to scare off black voters in the final days before his 1990 victory over Harvey Gantt. Official-looking postcards mailed to 125,000 black voters in high-turnout precincts warned of jail terms for false answers given to poll monitors. Three months after the damage was done, the Helms campaign signed a consent decree to settle a Justice Department complaint that it had intimidated black voters.

 

Fat Cats and Paybacks

Such devious, exclusionary tactics require the backing of vast resources. Sadly, the cash is readily available from the deep pockets of the corporate rich. As a consequence, the price of election gets bid up and voters get shoved out. Many candidates simply buy their way into office — Helms has paid $30 million in his last two races — and then spend their time courting donors instead of voters. The average Senate seat now costs $4 million, which means survivors must hustle $12,000 a week during their six-year terms. Governors typically raise as much or more for their elections, and the cost of legislative races is soaring.

The payback from politicians is often blatant. Stories in this section from North Carolina, Texas, and Alabama demonstrate that state roads, federal housing, and other well-intentioned government programs have been turned into cash cows for campaign contributors.

But the simple image of bribery discounts the larger power of special-interest money to poison the entire political process. The money chase drives voters from the polls, discourages potential candidates from running, limits who has access to elected officials and government bureaucrats, restricts what gets discussed, and transforms politics from a mass-based, voluntary endeavor to high-stakes, high-tech dealmaking among professional insiders.

The bottom line: People are purposely excluded from the government they theoretically own. Millions of voters stay home on Election Day — allowing well-endowed private interests to buy candidates, define public policy, and stick taxpayers with the tab. It is easy to become so disenchanted that we lose sight of government’s potential for good and wash our hands of the whole process — which is exactly what big money wants. What’s to be done? Reformers point to a two-fold strategy: elevate the power of voters by making it easier to register and vote, and deflate the power of special-interest money with tough campaign finance laws. The goal, say elected officials and grassroots activists, is to push private money out and put ordinary people in.

It sounds simple on paper. But just as money has spun a complex web of relationships that ensnares fat cats and politicians, so a new system energized by people’s participation would necessitate an elaborate network of ties from the local precinct to Capitol Hill. It would be supported by a new ethic of reciprocity among peers, with structures of accountability that respect diversity and nurture consensus.

To get there, we need patience and flexibility and a generosity of spirit that flies in the face of economic competition and political cynicism. It is a mission that many Southerners, like their peers around the nation and the world, are undertaking in local and larger arenas: Democracy— of, for, and by the people.