For too many decades, Americans have been chronically distracted by less important things, not bothering to engage in serious self-examination. Material progress has become our false god.
While private morality might have thrived among individuals, issues of public morality began to wither. Economic values have taken precedence over ethical values, and now we’re having to face the consequences of this moral corrosion. An amoral economic system, in which a corporate bottom line is given precedence by our government over considerations of who or what gets hurt, has corroded our nation’s politics. And the symptoms are everywhere. Wealth inequality, racial and criminal injustice, the undue influence of money on our government, the desecration of our environment, the destruction of nonindustrial farming, compromised food and water supplies, opioid addiction, lack of educational and economic opportunity for the many while a tiny few are made richer every day—all were wounds given a chance to fester while too many of us weren’t looking, weren’t even complaining about the problem if it didn’t apply to us.
Politicians who tried to warn us of what was happening were typically viewed as “too negative,” and journalists whose job is to inform us about what’s happening were too often owned by the very forces that drove this systematic selling-off of our collective good. Once a few corporate conglomerates were allowed to own the majority of our news outlets (i.e., the term corporate media), stories that once might have earned someone a Pulitzer for good investigative journalism began just as likely to get the journalist fired.
The main organizing principle of American society today is not democracy; it is short-term profit maximization of multinational corporations. Our government does not now function to protect its citizens from overreach by corporations, so much as it works to protect corporations from all those pesky citizens who keep demanding that their rights be respected.
Democracy is not the enemy of an amoral economic system; it’s simply inconvenient to an amoral economic system. The thieves who stole the treasures of our democracy—a thriving middle class, accessible health care, a robust educational system, and proper environmental stewardship—didn’t use brute force to knock down the door. No, they used the soft, insidious power of political propaganda that no seriously thinking person should have fallen for. Yet too many of us were not serious. Too many of us were not thinking. The American people have been played for fools.
As early as the 1980s, the causes of many of our deepest problems were sold as good economic policy. Plans were laid for an economic reversion to what is basically an aristocratic system; “trickle-down economics” hailed as our economic salvation when in fact it created all manner of entitlement for the few and all manner of misery for the many. It did not uplift our middle class; quite to the contrary, it destroyed our middle class: from workers losing their jobs when corporations got tax breaks for moving their factories overseas to farmers being pushed off their land so agribusiness could take over to mental health care facilities being closed all over the country to attacks on unions, stealing from the middle class in order to give more to the rich was actually sold as good economic policy. Over and over we’ve elected those whose policies exalt the profits of corporations over the well-being of our citizens. Just enough of the serfs were allowed to get rich themselves, you see. What a clever sleight of hand prevailed.
The wealth inequality in America today has led to what is essentially a new class of aristocrats and a new class of serfs. In the richest nation on earth, roughly 40 percent of our citizens now have a hard time covering their basic costs, from food and health care to transportation and rent. Sixty-two percent of Americans cannot be deemed members of the middle class. Millions of Americans have to work at two or three low-wage jobs just to make ends meet. And in issues ranging from justice to education to health care to environmental protection, the underlying cancer of unbridled corporate influence on political campaigns is poisoning the very roots of our democracy.
In the words of the late Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”
The “few” in this context are made up mainly of large corporate interests, for whom government now, for all intents and purposes, primarily functions. Their flood of undue financial influence—especially since the Supreme Court Citizens United decision removed restrictions on their donations to campaign coffers—is now so great as to chronically and systematically override the will of the American people. Author Jane Mayer refers to this nefarious phenomenon as “dark money.”
Like addicts coming out of denial, no longer thinking that they can control their drinking or drugging, Americans need to get out of our denial regarding the depth of corruption that prevails within our political establishment. Such a moment of clarity can be frightening at first, but it’s also a moment when breakthroughs occur. It opens the mind to the possibility that there might be another way. And there is another way. That way is not to disparage our democracy, but to reclaim it, rebuild it, and return it to its deepest principles. It is ultimately our emotional connection to democracy, and our devotion to the possibilities it creates for the human race, that will empower us to save it.
Democracy is important because it is a conduit for the will and the wisdom of the people ourselves. If we lose sight of that internal value, then we lose the light that guides us. And that light is not mere symbol; it is the power of enlightened thought. “Through the night with the light from above” from the song “God Bless America” is not just a lyrical phrase. America is experiencing a dark night of the soul now, and we need our light—our wisdom, and our love—to guide us. For in the words of Abraham Lincoln, “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”