Let us agree: Our democracy is badly broken by money. Big money donors basically own our government, and the majority of our citizens are essentially powerless, which is not how democracy should work. This article will not be to argue those basic facts (pol-facts.com), it will be to discuss how the problem gets fixed.
The way to make America democratic again is for us to go back to the past, in a way. But we have to go back to a past when the rules of politics were less corrupted, before our democracy began eroding.
The country’s campaign finance hasn’t always been this screwed up. We used to have campaign finance rules that we would envy today.
We had better campaign laws in 1974. This was due to the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 and the Watergate Amendments in 1974. The law forced candidates to disclose where all their money came from. It limited candidates' campaign spending. PACs could spend no more than $5,000 separate from candidates, and individuals could not contribute more than $1,000. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) was the independent enforcement agency. There was a sanity to that. It worked.
By the way, I think our highest priority with this should be to strengthen the shrinking middle class, and I don't think many middle-class people can donate $1,000. So if it were up to me, I would limit the individual donations to $500, and eliminate PACS altogether. But any reasonable limits would be better than what we have.
But then the Supreme Court decided that limits on campaign spending violated free speech. It did so in largely party-line votes led by the Republican-appointed justices. Republican filibusters and other maneuvers killed repeated attempts to bring back campaign limits. The Democrats did not push this as they should have. Eventually, the outrageous cost of winning an election made it necessary for every candidate to cater to big money.
We can return to a time when campaigns were more honest, and less decided by the wealthy. We can make our democracy great again. A sane system wouldn't be hard to set up, we just need the political will to do it. Hopefully with enough people presenting facts loudly and often enough, that can happen.
The thorny question, of course, is, "How we can possibly get there from here?" Politicians who got elected won the battle for the big donors. Therefore, once elected, their selfish interests argue against changing this system.
If income inequality and the corrupting influence of big money on our government continues to amplify as it has, then I see three possible results.
1) The worst option: Nothing else is done, and eventually, whether it takes 40 years or a hundred, we would see sporadic rioting and violence that would become more frequent, intense and broad-based. That would get worse until something radically changes, but that route would probably be bloody and destructive. The costs to our nation would be high.
2) Second worst: Someone, probably not in the government, rises to enough prominence to call an effective nation-wide strike. The only way to get the top 1% to voluntarily let loose of their stranglehold on our government is probably to hit them in the pocketbook. If the rest of us stop working for them, their pocketbooks suffer. A progressive strike could be effective with the least amount of damage. For example, it could start with people refusing to work every other Friday, then moving after two months to every Friday, then every Friday and Monday, etc. It could gradually progress until we get real campaign finance reform.
If the government saw the first couple of steps take effect, they would know they have to do something and we might get reform. But it would have to be real reform. The last time our government felt enough pressure about this to make them uncomfortable, they passed fake reform to pacify us. It looked like campaign finance reform enough to get the public off their backs. However, it left plenty of back doors for their big money donors to come in. Ultimately, it did not change things at all. The first thing the politicians would try to do would be the same sort of thing again. So this strike leader would have to be strong enough to hold out until the reform was real or it would all be a waste.
3) Best case: Before we get too far gone to be salvageable without option 1, a political leader emerges who can put his or her self-interest and economic class aside for the interests of the common man. This would be in the model of George Washington or Teddy Roosevelt. And then by remarkable series of coincidences and strokes of luck, all the stars align and somehow our broken Congress allows these reforms to become the law of the land. And that will be the day that I will finally know for certain that prayers are answered and that there is a God. Because given how thoroughly broken, self-serving and corrupt our current system is, it would be a miracle 😊.