Strategically Communicating

Gore Vidal once said, “Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.”

While I could list the many ways in which the two major-party candidates for President are “interchangeable,” I’m more concerned with the “great cost” of American elections—particularly how the great costs have grown exponentially since the Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizens United and the implications of that decision.

In the “The Lie Factory,” New Yorker writer Jill Lepore digs into the history of political consulting, focusing on the genesis and evolution of Campaings, Inc., the firm that laid the foundation for the practices that still dominate modern political campaigns. What is most troubling about Lepore’s report is how it illustrates the consistent theme in American politics: The overwhelming power and dominant influence of money.

Noam Chomsky writes that the father of capitalism himself warned against this trend: “Adam Smith said: ‘the principal architects of policy consolidate state power and use it for their interests’ … It’s basically court decisions and lawyers’ decisions, which created a form of private tyranny which is now more massive in many ways than even state tyranny was.”

So since we can see that the current trend is nothing new in our history, what can we do to change it? Cenk Uygur, main host and co-founder of the Internet and talk radio show, The Young Turks, offers this solution. What do you think about his proposal?