Wendell Potter and Nick Penniman, Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts our Democracy and What We Can Do about It (2016) — a Book Review

04 April 2016

An excellent overview of how American democracy was lost to Big Money

Wendell Potter and Nick Penniman’s Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts our Democracy and What We Can Do about It (Bloomsbury Press, 2016) is primarily best read by people who have not been paying attention to our pseudo-democracy’s death spiral.

For the informed, however, it may be worth a miss. There is nothing thematically new in the book, although it does provide good examples of how big money works with regard to capturing formerly democratic institutions. Someone wanting a source volume for persuasive conversational tidbits will find Nation on the Take worth owning.

That said, I doubt that the authors’ enthusiastic suggestions for reform are workable. Potter and Penniman seem to overlook the reality that successfully organizing against (and evicting) plutocrats requires the very votes that the oligarchs’ money goes toward preventing or capturing.

It is difficult to reverse a system whose means to access change have been either locked away or, if still marginally accessible, are routinely blocked by Big Money’s power to brainwash the people who could change them.

I am going to skip a tedious replay of the authors’ Big Money in Control examples

Nation on the Take covers the spectrum very well for the uninitiated.

Instead, I want to address a couple of the volume’s arguable flaws. I tackle them because they illustrate Rah-Rah Liberalism’s penchant for unpersuasively loose reasoning.

In doing this, I do not mean to undermine the book’s respect-worthy value. Most of it is devoted to illustrating the corruption problem. The rest, the part I am taking issue with, is a well-intended and courageous look at what we might do to reform our Plutocrat-owned society.

Let’s start my critique with the authors’ questionably defined or unfortunately unworkable recommendations for reform.

Do not be misled by the negativity in what follows. This is still a very good book.

Authors’ recommendations — for wresting institutional control back from Big Money

Potter and Penniman suggest that we should be clear that our reform goal is to obtain an effective democracy:

[M]aintaining a functioning democracy — which must always include limiting the undue influence of money over politics and policy making — should be seen as a routine function of civil society.

Viewing democracy in such a light . . . helps gauge expectations about what progress means . . . .

How about a 100-percent-efficient and meritocratic economy, in which everyone is justly rewarded for their work and only the best-run businesses flourish?

Problems with this formulation leap out:

How do we define efficiency?

What does merit mean, and how we select for a meritocratic economy?

What is, after all, economy’s purpose in a democracy?

And once we agree on that, how do we detect and support its “best run businesses”?

These are precisely the issues that everyone fights about all the time. We cannot agree that these are good goals, without also hashing out their definitions and the institutional ways with which to achieve them.

Who gets what, and why?

This is no less than the primary question that underlies all forms of government. Potter and Penniman treat this issue as if our goals are already agreed upon. They are emphatically not, which is a major part of the reason that our plutocracy took shape.

Instead of clearing this “initial terms” mess up — the authors go on to compound it with overly vague pie in the sky methods-setting

They suggest that we should reform the Supreme Court, as well as legislative processes.

Judicial reform, they say, has three prongs:

The first prong . . . is focused on clarifying aspects of the Citizens United decision that are demonstrably ill-informed. The most obvious example is . . . that independent spending is not at all corrupting of candidates and public officials . . . .

The second prong . . . is to reassert that Congress has the right — and duty to make laws preventing corruption or the appearance of corruption.

The third prong . . . is the nominating of judges and Supreme Court justices whose positions on democracy and money in politics are in line with those of the vast majority of the American public.

And, they continue, legislative reform has four elements — my explanations of what the authors actually meant these to be, according to their own subsequent text, are contained within brackets:

Broadly speaking, [these fixes] . . . embody the principles of a high-functioning democracy:

(1) everyone participates [meaning all elections are “citizen funded”],

(2) everyone knows [what is going on and where the money comes from]

(3) everyone plays by the same commonsense rules [meaning lobbyists should be regulated],

and

(4) everyone is held accountable [meaning that the Federal Election Commission should be adequately funded and staffed to do its job].

The above suggestions are a semantic mush, masquerading as reasonability

Judicially, it is not that the Supreme Court does not know that it is full of anti-democratic anal flow. It is that the Court historically has been an almost uninterrupted bastion of retrograde, Robber Baron thinking.

Second, Congress already knows that it has the right to govern. But it disregards its arguable duty to avoid corruption simply because it cannot get elected, without being simultaneously corrupt.

Third, nominating justices who are in synch with the public’s thinking would procedurally require that both the President and the Senate be in agreeable synch with the people’s thinking (whatever that means). But their being out of synch — both with the people and usually each other — is exactly the institutional problem that the authors have no practicable plan for overcoming.

Legislatively, the authors’ four suggestions are even more sloppily thought out. Conceptual looseness shows up right away in the above “everyone participates” element. What Potter and Penniman actually mean is that all campaigns should be “citizen funded”. Which is their nearly meaningless redefinition of “public campaign financing.”

And, for its part, the “everyone knows” element is an unnecessarily broad term for transparency in government.

Again, the book’s following pages provide not an iota of how this is to be accomplished in the real world. Reality is where everyone (and their sister’s evil uncle) is intentionally trying to hide under the cover of a bilious fog, so as to mask evil or selfish doings.

It is that everyone does this masking and manipulating that poses a major challenge in designing and implementing sound structures of governance. The obstacle to good government is not that only a few people are greedy, sometimes malevolent, and always sly. It is that virtually all us are.

“Everyone plays by the same commonsense” rules is an obtuse way of saying that lobbyists need to be controlled.

But how? Not a clue from the authors, other than to suggest that lobbyists be called (in law and practice) exactly that, rather than some other euphemistic term. Yet again, this solution forgets to define the mechanics with which to make the reform stick.

“Everyone is held accountable” — presumably means via a more effective, better funded Federal Election Commission. This formula for reform ignores the obvious question of how to break political gridlock in the Commission, as well as in a House of Representatives that emphatically does not want to properly fund it so as to allow the FEC do its job well.

The authors point to California’s Fair Political Practices Commission as a role model, evidently forgetting that California is virtually unique among the American states in having a public that generally wants government to regulate potentially wallet-robbing industries. California is a grossly inapplicable pattern for most of the United States.

Incompleteness in the authors’ thinking is characteristic of this book

Their solutions essentially redefine the corruption problem, but without dealing directly and persuasively with the Machiavellian societal and institutional mechanisms that have slime-rotted our system of governance.

If government structurally and Constitutionally will not now allow commoners to grab its steering wheel, recommendations that we be allowed to reach for it are meaningless.

Another sign of the authors’ too optimistically “liberal” way of thinking about reform

Potter and Penniman begin the their book by quoting the Declaration of Independence and Massachusetts’ constitution, as if both have the force of law in the United States at large.

Why quote the Declaration, which has only persuasive historical authority, or the Massachusetts’ constitution, which affects only one state among fifty?

Law critically matters, when addressing government structure and governance. Going outside the legal arena with documents like these immediately hints at weak subsequent rationales.

The authors’ intention, of course, is to remind us that we get to choose the government we want and to reform it, when it no longer works to our satisfaction. Ergo, from the Declaration of Independence:

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government . . . .

[And from Massachusetts:]

Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for the profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity and happiness require it.

© 2016 Wendell Potter and Nick Penniman,Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts our Democracy and What We Can Do about It (Bloomsbury Press, 2016) (at pages 3-4) (quoting the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Part I, Article VII)

The authors address the Massachusetts document again (on page 192) in support of their statement that, “Democracy requires reinvention and constant vigilance.”

That is certainly true, but — when the institutions of democracy themselves have been intentionally gummed up against intervention by commoners, the above quotations serve more rationally as invitations to revolution, than they do as motivators to budge an already unworkably ruined democratic system.

There is a still more fundamental practical problem with the book’s reasoning

Potter and Penniman seem to assume that the American public is on roughly the same page, when it wants to get money out of politics. They have the polling results to prove that limited point. But they overlook the major practical problem that our public disagrees among itself about virtually everything else. Which means that we do not agree about what government should do, or whom it should benefit or leave alone.

American oligarchs use these disagreements — especially over poorly thought out social and politicized issues like abortion, gay marriage, immigration, affirmative action, killer cops, the South Shall Rise Again, and Abuela Maudino’s Anti-Castro Cuban Pie — to divert us from getting together to consider reasons for effective change.

“Poorly thought out” is the key phrase. We Americans are too ignorant even to begin to talk about reforming government in ways that would (a) remove money from politics and (b) aim our democracy in a way to benefit whatever we define a better society to be.

Our streams of limited consciousness puff from our hind ends. Because our windy butts point in different directions, the Potter-Penniman formula for goal-setting seems to fail right out of its starting blocks. When easily diverted folk disagree about the meanings of terms that they do not even understand, we are going nowhere reformative.

Take 2016’s Senator Bernie Sanders (for President) as an example. He has inexplicably branded himself a socialist, despite the fact that he is not and virtually no one in the United States knows what a socialist is anyway. (A reasonably good definition is here.)

Senator Sanders is, in fact, an old fashioned New Deal Democrat. He does not even rise to the level of Europe’s Nordic Model (“Nordic capitalism” or “Nordic socialism”) — all of which Wikipedia correctly defines this way:

This includes a combination of free market capitalism with a comprehensive welfare state and collective bargaining at the national level.^[4][5]

Although there are significant differences among the Nordic countries, they all share some common traits. These include support for a "universalist" welfare state aimed specifically at enhancing individual autonomy and promoting social mobility; a corporatist system involving a tripartite arrangement where representatives of labor and employers negotiate wages and labor market policy mediated by the government;^[6] and a commitment to widespread private ownership, free markets and free trade.^[7]

Sanders’ inaccurate socialist label works to scare away discussion about what American democracy is, both politically and economically, because we all think we know that socialists are like Russian, Chinese and Cuban communists. But not quite so totalitarian.

In our American eyes, socialists are nuke-less Swedes and Danes. Whom we well know — for sure, man! — pamper the worthless, bridle the talented, and steal everyone’s money.

Americans’ ignorance about the varieties of political systematics is bottomless. Even when it comes to being marginally familiar with our own ideologically very mixed political and economic structures.

In sum, we have two problems:

(i) a system of governance that is structurally designed to actively resist achieving uncorrupted democracy

and

(ii) a brainwashed and unthinking public that is too unmotivated to participate in our corrupted system actively enough to carry Potter and Penniman’s poorly reasoned pro-democracy reforms out — even if we did understand and agree upon what the two authors wanted us to do.

I reiterate:

Americans are too ignorant and too intellectually sluggardly even to begin to talk about reforming government in ways that would (a) remove money from politics and (b) aim our democracy in a way to achieve a supposedly better society.

This combination of inertia and not wanting to know or think anything much — combine to defeat even Potter and Penniman’s mechanistically poorly described reforms.

Last, an occasionally irritating writing style

Apparently in harmony with their mechanistically tenuous reasoning, the authors’ writing style poorly organizes their own arguments.

As you may have inferred from the above quotations, the pair is not very good at constructing meaningful topic and transition sentences. Nor do they seem to anticipate the confusion that might result from their use of unnecessarily vague terms.

Potter and Penniman are pleasant and agreeable writers, but certainly not tightly cogent ones. People yearning for striking precision in thought and language will be disappointed.

The moral? — The authors’ dream of anti-corruption reform gets chopped up in Reality’s manure-digesting fan

If we reject the practicality of a Constitutional rewrite, as the authors seem to do, we are stuck trying to operate within the weaknesses of the existing one — whose institutional structure and procedural weightings (checks and balances) directly lead to unseating any semblance of effective democracy.

If we no longer can effectively access the levers of governance because our votes and our opinions have no clout at all, how is peacefully organizing ourselves about these issues going to help?

Why would money-captured institutions turn to listen to penniless people, who:

(i) cannot agree on anything firmly enough not to be subsequently divided and manipulated (brainwashed)

and

(ii) who so obviously lack the monetary power to turn the Mechanics of State against our Plutonomy’s money-extracting grain?

In this regard, the authors’ emphasis on Teddy Roosevelt’s progressive reforms (at the beginning of the Twentieth Century) is structurally misplaced. Money’s ability to control democratic institutions at that time did not come close to what it can do now.

The Robber Barons had not yet learned how to control everything. Our politicians were not yet enslaved by the need for financing absurdly expensive campaigns in an era where technology and media agglomerations make manipulating public thinking so ridiculously easy. No one had yet gerrymandered all hope of change out of election districts. And so on.

From my pessimistic perspective (and contrary to Potter and Penniman), if I want a hitman not to kill me, I probably will have to kill him (armed revolution) or buy him off (American democracy).

I could be wrong. And even if I am cynically correct about the book’s two reform chapters, Nation on the Take is a worthy book. Even with its occasionally, irritatingly loose thought construction. This book will make receptive readers think. That’s an unusual thing these days.

PeteFree.com

Wendell Potter and Nick Penniman, Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts our Democracy and What We Can Do about It (2016) — a Book Review