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, Race, and Religion

The term faith has many meanings, and one purpose of this blog is to explore them. One expression of faith is a belief that the principles of our nation’s founding are still sound. For more than two hundred years we, as a nation, have put our faith in democracy as it was articulated by our eighteenth-century founders—people such as Washington, Franklin, Madison, and Jefferson. Their vision of democracy has had staying power but only, it might be argued, because we have enlarged upon the realization of their vision.

For example, when the founders wrote the first words of the Constitution, “We the People…,” the de facto definition of “the People” was white male property owners. They were the demos of our democracy; they could vote. But they comprised only ten to sixteen percent of the population of our fledgling union.

As our “experiment” in democracy, as Jefferson called it, has evolved, it has been understood that through the office of time “the People” would come to encompass the entire citizenry of the nation. We are still working toward that realization in many areas of civic life—all rights are still not equal—but we have largely succeeded at minimun in enfranchising all citizens. The property-ownership requirement was eliminated by 1850, the 15th Amendment extended the vote to nonwhites in 1870, and the 19th Amendment in 1920 finally enfranchised women. These were major advances.

Other inclusive actions, often overlooked, include the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, which granted Native Americans citizenship, including the right to vote in federal elections; and the 23rd Amendment, which granted District of Columbia citizens the right to participate in presidential elections.

The evolving nature of enfranchisement also is illustrated by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was passed to protect minority rights that had been compromised by some states’ erection of barriers to voting, such as literacy tests.

Remnants of old prejudices, however, linger in today’s politics, often intersecting with religion. A strident—and at the moment, increasingly visible—racist faction is rattling on the radical right. This has meant that some candidates, such as Rick Santorum, have played pander and deny, first aligning themselves with the radicals and then backpedaling to assure the moderates. Santorum, for example, was widely reported talking about “black people” and welfare this winter, something he later tried to deny, despite video evidence.

The most egregious example of racism at work in the current presidential election campaign is “Don’t Renig in 2012.” Despite fancy linguistic footwork by some defenders, the phrase is short for “Don’t Reelect a Nigger in 2012,” and when that slogan is paired with an echo of the Obama logo, the meaning is clear.

Faith in our democratic experiment remains thin among a significant portion of the population, not a majority but a substantial, often strident, sometimes influential minority. This minority fears and opposes anyone who is not them: not white, not their brand of “Christian,” and so forth. In this respect, the remarks of Dennis Terry, a pastor whose introduction of Rick Santorum recently went viral on the Internet, are illustrative:

“There is only one God, and his name is Jesus,” Terry said. “I'm tired of people telling me that I can't say those words. I’m tired of people telling us as Christians that we can’t voice our beliefs or that we can no longer pray in public. Listen to me: if you don’t love America, if you don’t like the way we do things I got one thing to say—GET OUT. We don’t worship Buddha. We don't worship Mohammad. We don't worship Allah. We worship God. We worship God’s son Jesus Christ.”

In a nation as diverse as ours, this is a narrowly defined demos indeed.