Faith in the People

Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

Sadly, we have not followed Jefferson’s advice. The consequence is that corporations have increasingly come to dominate our national sense of direction, so much so that the United States now leans strongly toward corporate oligarchy as a form of governance. Is “we the people” becoming “we the corporation”?

In this election year we are seeing the effects of corporate “personhood,” as it is called, particularly in the arena of campaign finance. Much of the current presidential contest revolves around money, and not just Mitt Romney’s personal fortune and where he keeps it. It has become, to the disgust of many across the political spectrum, a tenet of the current conservative contenders that votes can be bought and lies passed off as truth if enough money is thrown into the mix. In the party of the wealthy, who has the money? Corporations, of course.

Two Supreme Court cases dominate. In Buckley v. Valeo (1976) the Court held that political spending is protected by the right to free speech in the First Amendment. Then, crushing Jefferson’s hope, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) the Court held that corporations have a right to free speech under the First Amendment, just as though they were individuals. The latter decision opened the floodgates for corporate spending to promote the interests of monied elites—wealthy corporate entities—over those of individuals.

Democracy invests faith in the people to govern. The United States was founded on the democratic principle that all citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. This principle has yet to be fully achieved. But progress has been made incrementally over the past two-plus centuries, granting equal civic personhood through freedom and enfranchisement of various segments of the demos, such as African Americans and women.

In this progressive realization of our democratic principle, however, the granting of corporate personhood has been a misstep. When the powers of governance come to be held by a small number of people, an elite of any sort (the military, royalty, etc.), which is the danger of corporate personhood, then we trade democracy for oligarchy. For Aristotle, oligarchy was synonymous with the rich.

Most of us—the 99% much referred to this year—are not rich and are being disenfranchised, our individual personhood diminished, as wealthy corporations become an ascendant aristocracy. Whether the American “experiment” can survive will depend on whether we the people can revive the power of the demos in our democracy. 

Faith in the Common Good

Recently “socialism” has become a principal pejorative in political rhetoric. The label is applied to anything and everything that smacks of affecting, usually to their benefit, the majority of the population. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), so-called Obamacare, has been labeled as “socialist” in the same sense that Social Security was so labeled by its critics when it was created in 1935, during the Great Depression. One might be excused for confusing the “social” in Social Security with “socialism” were it not for the fact that such confusion, particularly now, is political rather than definitional. In the eyes of Obamacare’s critics, socialism equals bad, therefore any program that can be painted with the brush of socialism can be characterized as bad for the nation. This is patent nonsense, of course. But it sells well in some sectors.

Social Security was created at a time when more than half of all senior citizens lived in poverty. PPACA has been enacted—and upheld by the Supreme Court—at a time when more than 50 million Americans are without health insurance, which in this country amounts to being shut out from adequate health care. More than 60 percent of the uninsured live in households earning less than $50,000 a year. Children living in poverty are more likely to be uninsured than others. Indeed, the lower one’s income, the less likely one is to have health insurance or adequate health care. This situation might be excused in a developing nation but is unacceptable in one that claims to be the world’s leading democracy and is the world’s wealthiest nation.

Socialism is an economic system wherein means of production are owned by the society, the government in the case of state socialism, which is what most politicos who use “socialism” as a pejorative mean. To conflate “socialism” and the “common good,” which is a tenet of American democracy, is disingenuous at the very least. One is reminded of something Hubert Humphrey said, “Compassion is not weakness, and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism.” The idea of our nation being founded on the belief that democracy provides the best possible hope for the common good is imbedded in the first sentence of the Constitution, in the phrase “promote the general Welfare.” The common good is fundamental to our “more perfect Union.”

Faith in the common good also is a tenet of Christian belief, though the Christianists on the far right seem to disavow it. For those crying “socialism” of a religious bent, it might be piquant to quote Woodrow Wilson, himself highly religious, a Presbyterian and the son of a Presbyterian minister: “There is no higher religion than human service. To work for the common good is the greatest creed.” I also like Rev. Matthew Dutton-Gillett’s take on the notion. In a commentary dated February 19, 2010, on the blog, Below the Surface (subtitled A Conversation Between a Priest and a People about Life in Christian Community), Dutton-Gillett of Trinity Episcopal Church in Menlo Park, California, writes:

All that stuff about loving your neighbor as yourself, taking care of the poor, giving people who asked you for your coat more of your clothing than they had asked for, the suggestion that we should sell what we have and give it to the poor, the parable about the rich man and Lazarus the beggar—these are all teachings about redistributing one’s own wealth so that the more vulnerable in society would be protected and provided for. It seems clear to me that if we were to classify Jesus’ views according to today’s political definitions, he would probably fit into the category of “socialist” more easily than any other.

Faith in the common good seemed evident when Mitt Romney, as governor, signed the Massachusetts healthcare insurance reform law (referred to as Romneycare) in 2006. The law mandates that state residents obtain government-regulated minimum health insurance coverage and provides free health insurance for residents earning less than 150 percent of the federal poverty level. Now, ironically, as the Republican presidential candidate, Romney must—in order to align with the “socialism”-shouters in his party’s rightwing base—argue against the common good, against the very law he championed that is mirrored in Obamacare.

Faith in the common good—for the good of us all and for the good of American democracy writ large—ought to be unwavering. When it is smeared by epithet and battered by the hot winds of political expedience, we should be wary of those doing the smearing and blowing the hot air.